Muir Woods National Monument is one of the only remaining examples of an old-growth Coastal Redwood forest in the San Francisco Bay area. Located just across the Golden Gate Bridge, Muir Woods is less than 30 minutes from most San Francisco hotels! Incredible Adventures offers two ways to enjoy the beauty of Muir Woods.
Our Muir Woods and Wine Country Tour is a very popular day tour from San Francisco where you spend the morning walking among the tallest trees in the world and the afternoon tasting fine California wines in the world famous Sonoma Wine Country. This full-day tour is the perfect balance of nature and culture.
If you are limited by time, we also offer a half-day Muir Woods and Sausalito Tour, which focuses on the natural beauty of Muir Woods in the Golden Gate National Recreation Area and then heads out to the quaint seaside town of Sausalito. You may take the tour as a full-loop, or step off in Sausalito and take the ferry back across the bay!
Incredible Adventures can also custom design a Private Muir Woods Charter in one of our Biodiesel Mini-coaches to accommodate your family, group of friends, or organization.
Muir Woods National Monument is part of the Golden Gate Recreation Area and is a unit of the National Park Service which protects 554 acres of Coastal Redwood forest. The coastal redwood is the tallest tree species in the world, reaching up to 379 feet. These trees only thrive in Northern California and southern Oregon due to the thick fog that blankets the west coast in the summer months.
Muir Woods contains one of the few remaining old-growth redwood stands in the San Francisco Bay Area, these trees are between 600-800 years old, but can live up to 2200 years! Back in the day, there were an estimated 2 million acres of old-growth forest, but by the early 1900's, most of these forests had been cut down by the logging industry. Where Muir Woods stands today (known as Redwood Canyon then) was actually very hard to reach so it remained untouched.
In 1905, Senator William Kent bought 611 acres of this land with the goal of protecting these redwoods. When the land was threatened again, this time by a water company planning to dam Redwood Creek and flood the area, the Kents donated it to the federal government, and on January 9th, 1908, President Theodore Roosevelt declared it a National Monument, protecting the land permanently. President Roosevelt wanted to name the Monument after Kent, but Kent insisted that it be named after John Muir, his good friend in the conservation movement who had helped establish the National Park System. And so, Muir Woods National Monument was born.
When the Golden Gate Bridge was completed in 1937, the number of visitors to the Woods tripled that year. Now it is one of the major tourist attractions of the San Francisco Bay Area with over a million visitors per year. It is located about 12 miles north of San Francisco in Marin County, down a fairly winding road skirting the edge of Mount Tamalpais.
While the redwood trees are what draw everyone into the Monument, there is more to the story of an old-growth forest. It is a home for numerous species of flora and fauna, unique to this ecosystem and it is part of what makes Northern California such a special place to visit.