as Palo Alto and soon they extended to San Jose. By 1900, a string of suburban towns had grown up along the railroad, which shaped the growth of the Peninsula until the coming of the automobile.
The Santa Clara Valley orchards survived until the middle years of the 20th century, when people poured into the Peninsula after World War II. Industry expanded in the valley, and orchard after orchard gave way to housing tracts. Towns grew until their borders touched to form the present unbroken urban band along the Bay.
Although houses had been built on the gentler slopes of the eastern foothills, the steeper hillsides, where road building was too difficult, remained wild. By the mid1950s there were still many undeveloped hillsides, forested slopes, and canyons in a relatively natural state. As the concept of public open space evolved, the precipitous canyons and oak-covered hills were seen as welcome breaks between subdivisions. These are the lands that have become parks and open space preserves where miles of trails beckon hikers, equestrians, and bicyclists today. By the 1980s many forests and ranchlands west of the Skyline were acquired for parks and preserves.
In the 1990s and early in this century on the Coastside, the Peninsula Open Space Trust purchased farm lands and resold them to farmers who signed conservation easements that permanently reserved the land for agriculture. POST bought the 5638-acre Cloverdale Coastal Ranch in the late ‘90s and later gave 905 acres to enlarge Butano State Park. Also on the Coastside, Sempervirens Fund purchased an undivided one-half interest in 1800 forested acres along Gazos Creek south of Butano State Park. In 2004 the State of California park system bought some of these acres to add to Butano State Park.
In addition, several private citizens gave sizeable properties to POST, one of which, the Thysen Bald Knob piece, is now part of Purisima Creek Redwoods Open Space Preserve. More recently, the Mike and Margaret O’Neill family gave 482 acres adjacent to Rancho Corral de Tierra’s southern boundary. Eventually this property will provide an exceptional link to the already vast public lands in the northwest corner of San Mateo County.
San Francisco Watershed Lands
The vast city of San Francisco Watershed lands in the heart of San Mateo County have remained relatively wild since early logging ceased here, their hills spared from development and their reservoirs forming a sparkling chain of lakes. Its 23,000 acres lie between the wooded northern Santa Cruz Mountains and the lower hills to the east. It drains into upper San Mateo Creek, which was dammed in the 1890s. The resultant Crystal Springs Lakes and San Andreas Lake to the north are now water-supply reservoirs for San Francisco and much of the Peninsula.
When San Francisco needed more water than local wells could supply, the city’s Spring Valley Water Company began buying up lands in the Watershed and building reservoirs. In 1862 they dammed Pilarcitos Lake in the northwest part of the Watershed, bringing water by gravity to San Francisco along a 32-mile wooden flume. Next they built the San Andreas Dam and the two Crystal Springs dams. The last of these dams, built across the gorge of San Mateo Creek, was completed in 1896, the engineering feat of its time. Although it is only 1200 feet from the San Andreas Fault rupture of 1906, it withstood the earthquake. Today a road and a trail cross this dam.
When San Francisco’s needs were again outpacing its water supply, the city acquired the private Spring Valley Water Company and started the ambitious project of bringing water from the Sierra Nevada. In 1934 the O'Shaughnessy Dam at Hetch Hetchy was completed and a pipeline was built across the San Joaquin Valley. Sierra waters flowed into the Crystal Springs lakes through the Pulgas Water Temple, built to celebrate this event. This large water system now provides water to San Francisco, and parts of San Mateo, Santa Clara, and Alameda counties.
Trail Planning
History
As the Peninsula became more urban, opportunities for walking, riding, and picnicking diminished. Then NO TRESPASSING signs and houses appeared where once you could climb a fence to walk or picnic. The counties began to recognize the recreational value of some of the steep canyons, hillsides, and once-cut-over lands.
In 1924 Santa Clara County acquired lower Stevens Creek Canyon, its first county park, which has been a favorite place for hiking and riding ever since. Also in 1924 the Spring Valley Water Company laid out 10 miles of equestrian trails near Lake Merced adjacent to northern San Mateo County, probably the earliest formal trails built on the Peninsula. According to a bulletin of the Spring Valley Water Company, “These trails were planned to give riders as great a diversity of scenery as possible while at the same time minimizing the danger of trespassing on Lake Merced, the golf courses and vegetable gardens.” To this day these concerns remain for trail planners as they seek routes through the countryside that will not conflict with the interests of farmers and property owners.
San Mateo County in the mid-1930s began requiring dedication of riding-trail easements as a part of land subdivisions to prevent loss of pre-existing trail links when land was subdivided.
The continued interest in trails, particularly for riding, was manifested in the late 1940s and early 1950s in a grand plan for a statewide California Riding and Hiking Trail system. In San Mateo County, with the support of horsemen’s associations and hikers and with some funding by the state, trails were laid out over easements through private property along the Skyline ridge, through the San Francisco and Bear Gulch watersheds, and along the right-of-way of Skyline Boulevard and Cañada Road. The California Riding and Hiking Trail was marked by posts with gold symbols of horseshoes and hiking boots. Regrettably, in time, a number of easements through private property lapsed and freeway building obliterated parts of the trail. But many miles of the trail survived, and San Mateo County’s trail from north of San Andreas Lake to Wunderlich Park and SkyLonda uses much of this same route.
The 1940s saw the acquisition of Huddart Park and the development of riding and hiking trails there. San Mateo County, with trail-club cooperation, laid out still more hiking and riding trails on road rights-of-way along Cañada, Whiskey Hill, and Portola roads through the present-day towns of Woodside and Portola Valley.
In a burst of trail-planning activity in the 1950s and 1960s, San Mateo County mapped over 400 miles of trails in the City/County Regional Plan for Parks and Open Space, adopted in 1968. Unfortunately, at that time neither the funding nor the support for trails was sufficient to bring these trails into being.
However, with funding from a federal pilot project to encourage trails in urban areas, three important trails were built in 1969—the Waterdog Lake and Sheep Camp trails from Belmont to Cañada Road and the Alpine Road Hiking, Riding and Bicycle Trail.
In the 1970s, with renewed appreciation for the remarkable potential for hiking and riding trails in the Peninsula mountains and foothills, conservation, hiking, and riding organizations pressed for specific programs and funding for trails. Voters in San Mateo County adopted a Charter for Parks establishing a special tax for park purposes, and Santa Clara County voters passed a park bond issue. In 1974 a gift of Wunderlich Park’s 942 acres of conifer forest and meadows provided hikers with many more miles of trails. The city of Palo Alto bought 1400 acres of hillside woodland, which have become the much prized Foothills Park. Other cities reserved canyons, streamsides, and hillsides for public use.
But the citizens of the Peninsula, still concerned with the rapid disappearance of open space and the slow pace of park acquisition, proposed by initiative a Midpeninsula Regional Park District. Northern Santa Clara County voters formed this district in 1972 and were joined by voters in southern San Mateo County in 1976, after which the name was changed to Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District (MROSD).
The District’s major purpose is to acquire and preserve foothill and Bayland open space to protect it from development, and to open it to public use consistent with protection
