Muir Woods

Muir Woods National Monument preserves a rare grove of old-growth coast redwoods tucked into a fog-fed canyon on Mount Tamalpais, just north of San Francisco across the Golden Gate. Its towering trees - some more than 250 feet tall and over a thousand years old - are among the last uncut stands of the ancient redwood forest that once blanketed much of the Northern California coast.

The grove was bought by a conservationist couple and donated to the federal government, which protected it in 1908 and, at the donors' request, named it for the naturalist John Muir. Its accessibility from a major city has made it one of the most visited redwood groves in the world, a quiet cathedral of giant trees that introduces millions of people to the scale of the ancient forest and the early American conservation movement.