Muir Woods hiking trail reopens after $1.8 million ‘historic style' restoration

San Francisco Chronicle​

26-04-2025

Near the top of a newly constructed switchback trail in Muir Woods is an enormous log bench carved from a salvaged ancient redwood trunk. It's there so hikers in the primeval Marin County forest can take a break from the hilly trek amid trees as old as 1,500 years.
It's also there for contemplation as to how a bench weighing nearly a ton found its way onto a steep, slippery mountainside.
The answer: It came down a 700-foot long zip line from a staging area — one of the many low-tech engineering miracles performed by a National Park Service crew on the 1.5-mile Ben Johnson Trail in Muir Woods National Monument.
'Muir Woods is a place for walkers and a place for hikers, and the Ben Johnson Trail is critical to the hiking experience,'' said Mia Monroe, who retired after 50 years as a park ranger there. 'It offers a link from Muir Woods to Mount Tamalpais. It is way out there. It is quiet and it is isolated, a place where people can have a redwood experience all to themselves.'
The Ben Johnson Trail is named for the groundskeeper employed by William Kent, the businessman and philanthropist who donated the land to the government more than a century ago to protect it from logging. It rises 1,000 feet from the valley floor to Deer Park Ridge near the Pantoll Ranger Station in the adjacent Tamalpais State Park, which then offers access points to the Dipsea Trail to Stinson Beach, Steep Ravine, Bootjack and a network of trails and loops above Mill Valley. The bench can be reached by trail from either end.
Johnson originally carved the canyon trail in 1904. It was rebuilt in the 1930s by the Civilian Conservation Corps, the federal agency that built the visitor amenities in Muir Woods while providing work during the Great Depression. In recent decades, the trail had been deteriorating to the point that 'only the hardiest of hikers could navigate it,' said Rudy Gustafson, the trail crew chief.
It has never been heavily traveled because just to reach it requires either a 2-mile hike up the Bohemian Grove Trail or the Dipsea Trail from the parking lot at the Muir Woods Visitor Center, or a 1-mile hike down either Stapelveldt Trail or the Old Mine Trail from the parking lot at Pantoll.
The rebuild cost $1.8 million, derived from visitor fees at Muir Woods, and it took as many as 20 park service trail crew members to construct.
'No pack mules were involved. Just humans,' said Gustafson, whose crew used hand tools to rebuild wooden steps and rock retaining walls up the hillside, as well as replacing a footbridge over a creek. 'We had a requirement to build in a historic style.'
It was a slow process, made slower by the Northern spotted owl. The crew could only work from August through January over four years to protect the nesting season of the threatened species.
In all, 200 old-growth redwood logs salvaged from Kent Lake, a reservoir in western Marin, were donated by the Marin Municipal Water District and used in the project to line the trails, prevent hillside erosion and create steps.
Most prominent among them is the log used for the marquee wooden bench on the switchback, which weighs 1,800 pounds and is estimated to be 800 years old. After it was selected, it was trucked across the Golden Gate Bridge to the park service woodshop located behind the VA hospital in the Outer Richmond District of San Francisco, where Gustafson carved the bench himself. It was lowered into place in February.
'That was the finishing touch,'' Gustafson said, 'the cherry on top' of the whole project for him.
The ribbon cutting on March 25 was held in the staging area at the top of the trail. The main attraction was that bench, which seats four. Monroe made the hike down just to sit on it and watch other people zigzag down and up the switchbacks beneath it.
'I had a lump in my throat and didn't want to go any further,' she said. 'The bench represents a place to pause and think about the beauty of the forest and all of the people who have cared for it.'
Monroe sat on the bench for 45 minutes and would have stayed longer, but she wanted to give others the chance. She has since been back many times, reaching it from both directions.
'You are sitting among the old growth forest and looking down the layers of the canopy into the canyon,' she said. 'You are among the tops of the trees and feel an unusual sense of solitude. From there it is hard to believe that there are thousands of people down on the valley floor at that moment.'