Muir Woods National Monument

The  way the Scottish  pronounce the last name of the man who would "rather be in the mountains thinking of God than in church thinking about the mountains"  sounds like  mute or mule:  myUUr.

The Muir Woods National Monument memorializes one of John Muir’s more parroted thoughts: “The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness.”

Created  as a national monument for coast redwoods by President Theodore Roosevelt by the powers of the Antiquities Act on January 9, 1908, the former coast redwoods canyon was specified by the donor William Kent to be named after the noted conservationist John Muir. The Antiquities Act signed into law by President Teddy Bear establishes legal protection of cultural and natural resources in the US.

John Muir who referred to the coast redwoods as Tamalpais sequoias exclaimed that the park being named after him was “the best tree-lovers monument that could possibly be found in all the forests of the world”.  The monument is located at 1 Muir Woods Rd., Mill Valley,  California close to Mount Tamalpais State Park.

Coast redwoods are the tallest living trees  on earth. If you can imagine looking up to a 23-story building in the middle of the forest, that would be how tall coast redwoods are.  The tallest coast redwoods on record is at the Redwood National Park in Crescent City, CA. Coast redwoods thrive best and grow taller than any other sequoias  in moderately temperate foggy coastal areas.

The oldest known coast redwood is older than Jesus, Mary and Joseph and may well could be the mother of God.  Coast redwood trees are also known as living fossils because of their ages. At 2,200 years of age, the oldest coast redwood

had given burl to a million saplings that may today be half as old as Jesus. The average age of the coast redwoods at the MWNM is between 500 to 800 years old. A ranger Nellie and I asked at the park however told us that there's no way anyone can tell the age of a certain tree until it's cut.  It is a common knowledgethat a tree’s age in years is recorded in a set of rings beneath its bark. 

Burls are a bunch of dormant buds that develop into saplings from the lower trunk or near the roots and around the base of a mature coast redwood tree. The most preferred way of reproduction for coast redwoods is by immaculate conception. A coast redwood tree who “who looks at God all day and lifts her leafy arms to pray upon whose bosom a snow has lain who intimately lives with rain” is too frigid to have sex with anyone but looks like she is eternally pregnant.  Saplings or baby redwoods continuously   pop up from the burls of a mother coast redwood like the motherfucker never even got out.

 As Alfred Joyce Kilmer said  in his famous poem, "only God can make a tree".  Portrayed as suckers “whose hungry mouth is prest against the earth’s flowing breast”, coast redwoods are nurtured by mother nature from its needles and leaves down to its roots. 

Jasmine Renhart spoke of coast redwoods as a close- knit and well grounded community that nurture its own just like the Coast Miwok,  the Natives who inhabited the area and nurtured  its natural resources.  The older coast redwood trees that survived floods, fires and  intense logging provided shlelter and nutrients for younger saplings and other plants. Coast redwood trees growing its roots up to 13 feet deep and spreading  nearly 100 feet  sustain on a soil enriched by rotting logs and thick undergrowth. 

For hundreds of years, the forest that has become the MWNM has been a specialized habitat for many animals and plants. The Redwood Creek that periodically gets flooded periodically from snowfall melts addds to the diversity of life to the forest by providing habitat for aquatic life like the steelhead trout and coho salmon that are endemic to the area.

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately to front only the essential facts of life. And see if I could not learn what it had to teach and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived."

Last word is from Henry David Thoreau.