San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Getting away from it all — camping in Marin
When the world goes mad with fear and panic, there is only one thing to do: Escape.
Four friends and I did just that last week. We drove over the Golden Gate Bridge and, after 19 miles of mostly winding roads, went camping for two days under the stars at Steep Ravine Environmental Campground in Marin County. We left the coronavirus crisis, the stock market collapse, the Democratic primary, the worries about a drought, scandals in City Hall. All that disappeared in the rearview mirror.
We didn’t work at home. We didn’t work at all. Instead, we had two glorious nights at one of the most beautiful places in the world. “Quarantined at Steep Ravine,” said Kit Stycket, who had organized the trip weeks ago, well before the virus outbreak.
The Steep Ravine camp is one of those truly special little-known places in the Bay Area. It is on Highway 1, on the cliffs just a mile south of Stinson Beach. Steep Ravine is part of Mount Tamalpais State Park and has 10 rustic cabins and eight campsites with picnic tables and fire rings. The cabins and the campsites are close to the cliffs, so you can camp on the edge of the continent. The cabins were all taken so we had a campsite.
The views are spectacular. The ocean is at your feet, and to the south you can see San Francisco across the Golden Gate, and down the San Mateo County coast to Point San Pedro. We were able to pick out the Cliff House in San Francisco, less than 8 miles distant as the seabird flies but a world away.
The view to the north sweeps past Stinson Beach and Bolinas to Duxbury Point.
I have hiked all over Marin since I was a little kid, and I thought I knew every creek and hidden gulch in Tamalpais country, but this place was new to me.
Kit Stycket filled us in on history. She had stayed there years ago, when the cabins were privately owned by the family of William Kent, a congressman who donated Muir Woods to the government to form one of the county’s first national monuments. Muir Woods gets over a million visitors a year, but Steep Ravine is almost a secret.
Kent bought the ravine and its small beach in 1902, and allowed public use. But during the Great Depression, a group of what the Marin History Museum called “homeless transients” built shacks on the beach. In 1938, William Kent Jr., the congressman’s son, had them evicted, and built 13 rustic cabins and leased them to his friends. One of them was Dorothea Lange, the photographer, who with her friend Margaretta Mitchell, wrote a book, a small classic called “To a Cabin.”
Lange wrote, “I began to wonder what it was that made us feel the minute we went over that hill, a certain sense of — not peace particularly or enjoyment — but freedom.”
The state park system acquired the site in 1974 and wanted to tear down the cabins, but the California Coastal Commission intervened, and the cabins were rebuilt and opened to the public. “The Coastal Commission is the hero in this,” Stycket said.
“You go there and you drop everything from your life — business, the phone calls,” Mitchell told the San Jose Mercury News years later.
And that’s the way it was. Cell phone service is spotty. We had come to an unspoken agreement not to check news sites. My friends were all connected to the San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park in some way, so we talked about ships. Sea stories are much better when told around a campfire beside the ocean.
One of the most lively discussions was about which of the lights on the horizon was Southeast Farallon Island and which was the beacon on North Farallon, which is essentially a rock.
Because I am a bit of a news junkie, I would occasionally point my phone at San Francisco and get a snippet of news.
“They’ve closed the Catholic schools in San Francisco,” I announced at dinner one night. “What about the public schools?” someone asked, “I don’t know,” I said. Long pause.
“Is there any mayonnaise?” someone asked. “Nope,” said Richard Everett, who was cooking, “I think the raccoons got into it last night.”
The raccoons were the biggest problem we had. The first night, they got into a closed food box and ate the potato chips and seasoned them with mayonnaise. The second night they knocked over a box during a 2 a.m. raid, but got no food.
We had to leave, of course, after two nights. Camp reservations are devilishly hard to get and our time was up. We packed up, and in just over an hour we were back in San Francisco, where the news was worse than ever. Our escape was over.