Only from the air does it become apparent that this is indeed a large mountain, with two parallel ridges that extend diagonally across the San Francisco Peninsula for nearly five miles, and canyons that drain toward both the bay and the ocean. It is the only large open space amid unrelieved urban development, and from the aerial perspective it is clearly besieged on all sides, as industrial buildings crowd it at the base and houses march up its slopes in scattered clumps and tidy rows. Then again, if you soften your focus, you can almost imagine you’re looking down on an island, and the landscape around it is composed of shells and pebbles tossed up along its shores. That would, from a long-range perspective, be almost accurate, for a few million years ago San Bruno Mountain was, in fact, an island.

Today from the 1,314-foot summit you can see how the entire Bay Area landscape fits together. There is Mt. Tamalpais to the north, Mt. Diablo to the east, Montara Mountain to the southwest, and the Santa Cruz range extending southward. You can also clearly see that the mountain meets the ocean at Lake Merced, in San Francisco. In 1769, when the Portolá expedition discovered California’s largest bay, its waters still lapped at the base of this mountain.

That watery perimeter and associated salt marshes are long gone, victims of a defunct way of thinking. In the early part of the 20th century, the marsh became the repository for San Francisco’s garbage. The transformation of the bay shore to the northeast was completed when in the 1950s a foothill was cut down to build Candlestick Point and the saltmarsh was completely filled.

This part of the San Francisco Peninsula became the place to put things nobody wanted to see: a slaughterhouse (near the Cow Palace), garbage dumps, dirty and toxic industries, cemeteries. Not surprisingly, residents in the surrounding towns—Daly City, Colma, South San Francisco, Brisbane—tend to be people of modest means. In the midst of all this, however, San Bruno Mountain remained—a beautiful city’s backyard mountain, a place where secrets can survive in the open, behind a screen of neglect and blight.

Hidden in Plain Sight

David Schooley, a poet who grew up and went to university in Berkeley, was living in San Francisco in the early 1970s, working as a dispatcher of tow trucks to stranded motorists. He too had passed San Bruno Mountain many times without seeing it—until one Sunday when he set out, by Greyhound bus, in search of a quiet place to go on weekends to clear his mind of urgent two-way radio voices. Just beyond the Cow Palace exit off Highway 101 he glimpsed a small town tucked up against a large hill. When the bus pulled off into that town, Brisbane, he decided to check it out.

It took him only a few minutes to find a path up the hill. He walked right into an oak forest, then down a canyon with a running creek shaded by buckeyes. On the canyon’s other side was a wind-sheltered meadow where he saw broken shells on the ground: a shellmound, something he knew about. He also recognized yerba buena and other plants that he knew were natives, growing together as though nothing had changed for more than two hundred years. “I just couldn’t believe it,” he later wrote. “Why had I been given this miracle?”

Schooley soon moved to Brisbane to continue his explorations. He found more canyons, creeks and even waterfalls, meadows that bloomed in colorful profusion, trees and boulders that spoke of the ways people had lived here before the Europeans arrived. He found three more shellmounds—only one of them was on the official archeological maps at San Francisco State University. He wrote:

It felt like a vital open secret, hidden just below visibility in our cultural focus. No Yosemite, no looming Tamalpais. No redwoods. Not even a Bishop pine. It was mercifully the neglected stone. Lapis Exilis. I thought of it as the stone cast away by the builders which, in Jesus’s parable, it is said we must find and make our cornerstone as an altogether different kind of builders. If we could learn to see and involve ourselves carefully with its quiet life, there might be more than hope for the planet and ourselves on it.

Walking Back in Time

Ever since the day he first walked on San Bruno Mountain, Schooley’s life has been intertwined with its “quiet life.” He has continued to learn about it, to defend it against multiple attempted assaults, and to work tirelessly to enable as many people as possible to know and appreciate it. Understanding that what he has come to love so dearly can survive only if it is loved and cared for by those who come after, he has taken countless school groups up the mountain and introduced them to its secrets. Virtually every Saturday morning for more than two decades he has also led walks for anyone who wanted to go. These walks are especially popular in spring wildflower season. More and more people have come and marveled at this last intact remnant of the landscape as it was before there was a San Francisco, a Daly City, a Brisbane—or a California.

One early spring day, nine people, including five children, gathered at 10 a.m. at the San Bruno Mountain Watch headquarters in Brisbane for a hike to Buckeye and Owl Canyons and a visit to the crystal cave in Devil’s Arroyo. We drove to Crocker Industrial Park, crossed the quarry road and entered another time and place.

The meadow before us was lush, dotted with blossoms of varied colors. Our eyes swept uphill toward oaks that glowed gold as the sun illuminated their bright tips of spring growth. All urban sounds had disappeared; instead, a red-shafted flicker’s song filled the air. Against a south-facing rock outcrop a cluster of blue lupine was in bloom. Schooley stopped beside it, squatted, and the children clustered around him.

“This is the home of the mission blue butterfly,” he explained. “It’s one of the first lupines to bloom, because this is a warm spot. The butterfly puts its eggs on this plant. . . . In spring, out comes a little caterpillar. Look.” He has brought some photographs, for it’s still early for caterpillars to be out. There’s an ant on the back of the one in the picture. “The ant clears and protects the caterpillar from parasites as it gathers the sugar that forms on him. So it’s two little creatures helping each other. This butterfly is rare and endangered. It needs to put its eggs on this plant. If the plant isn’t here, it dies.”

We walk up a ways, then stop next to a deep brown and yellow flower: “Here’s Johnny jumpup, home to the silverspot butterfly, which is cocooned right now in the roots of this plant. Soon it will come out. Most caterpillars come out by day, in the morning. These come out at night. No one had taken a photograph of that until a little girl from Hunters Point did. She came here and waited until she saw it. She was 11 years old.”

The trail winds upward on the slope between Owl and Buckeye Canyons, past clusters of willow and coyote bush entangled with cow parsnip, yarrow, and poison oak. Schooley passes around a jar of fragrant seeds for all to smell. “Poison oak, shiny and sweet,” he says. “Best to know it rather than just be afraid.”

Next stop: osoberry bush, a favorite of the grizzly bear: “Spaniards wrote of killing a grizzly bear in Daly City. There are no stories of fear or horror. I suspect they had their territories. In 1860, 10 people with 10 guns came out here to kill grizzlies. They had killed a cow, laid out meat, and sat in the bushes to wait. Seventeen grizzlies came. The men only had 10 guns so they snuck away.” So goes the story.

Here’s Monradella mint, tiny and very aromatic. Wild cucumber. And the endangered San Francisco wallflower—first sight of it for some of us. At a grassy spot sheltered by bushes, goldfields, coast rock cress, and buttercup are blooming. “Fifteen years ago this place was covered by French broom,” Schooley says. “We’ve been pulling it every year. This year, for the first time, I don’t see any in the canyon. And look, the natives have come back.” It’s a large island of successful restoration—but not secure: the next week Schooley would spot a sprig of broom near here and would come back later to take it out.

Restoration requires much weeding. Among several alien invaders the most visible, when in bloom, is gorse. We saw it on the lower reaches of this trail. Mountain Watch has regular workdays when volunteers pull it out. But it keeps coming back, from seeds carried by birds and blown by the wind to new places. We see a golden mass of it to the west, on the saddle.

An environmental consultant working for San Mateo County has been trying for 18 years to eradicate it on the saddle, and has tried herbicides, burning, and other methods. Yet there it still was, blooming bright and dense. Meanwhile, rattlesnake grass, velvet grass, and Italian ryegrass are spreading, as is fennel. Pampas grass, eucalyptus, German ivy—there are battles under way against all of them on different parts of the mountain. If these exotics take over, they can destroy the integrity of native plant communities.

For truly, this wild place can survive only with the help of patient gardeners. Also needed is fire, carefully managed, to restore some of the grassland now being choked out by bushes. There has been no fire for a long time here, and land management agencies are talking of its necessity now.

We stop to smell mugwort, to examine a hazelnut (“tasty if you get it before the raccoons do”). So many fragrances, so much that can be gathered as food, spices, and medicine. Native delphinium is still in bud. Ferns and snowberries grow along the path, which is narrow to minimize human intrusion: “When I made this trail, I saw a rabbit dropping. A week later I came back and saw part of a rabbit’s foot. A fox had gotten him. He had his secret little path and I had opened it up.” Even with the best intentions it is so easy to upset natural balances.

Toyon, Christmas berry. Beeplant, home of the checkerspot butterfly. Everything around us is native. Here’s sedum, dark green florets with white centers, vital to the endangered elfin butterfly that now exists only on this mountain, as far as is known. “Caterpillar eats the dead sedum leaves and turns red,” says Schooley. “Why? On the yellow flower it’s totally visible. The only thing I can figure out is that when it goes to bed at night on the red leaves it’s invisible.”

The secrets of the mountain keep unfolding. We stop in the shade of a huge oak, branches reaching along the ground, and sit down to hear about the hermit who lived on the mountain. He was a music teacher at a local school until one day something happened—the last straw—and he walked out of the classroom and onto the mountain. He built a shelter on the south side and lived there for seven years. The park ranger knew but saw he was picking up trash, weeding out alien plants, and causing no harm. Teachers began to bring groups of children up to see him. But eventually a local councilman found out and demanded: Get this guy out, he’s disturbing nature. The hermit was evicted, but he built another shelter on another part of the mountain. A teacher who had brought half her class to his old place pleaded to be allowed to bring the rest of her students to his new home. He agreed, for just that one time. The teacher and the hermit fell in love. They now live in a house not far away, on the coast. In their garden they grow native plants from the mountain. Schooley knows the two of them well.

Eventually we came to the cave the children had wanted to see. Each found crystals. We wound our way down again, and reluctantly returned to our cars. Schooley had shared the magic he had found. There was no telling what everyone carried away and what would stay with the children as they grew.

Thanks to Long Struggle

Only because many people, particularly those living nearby, fought long and hard to save the mountain has this precious native California landscape survived to this day. Schooley had barely gotten acquainted with it when he heard of plans to destroy it.

The mountain remained relatively undisturbed into the 1970s, in large part because it had been in single ownership since the 1880s when Charles Crocker acquired 3,997 acres along the bayshore. When his estate was distributed in 1891, the lands went to the Crocker Land Company. In the 1950s a proposal that now seems mad was considered: to cut down the mountain to use as fill for expansion of San Francisco Airport into the bay. But that came to naught, and no other big proposals materialized until 1974.

By this time the Crocker Land Company’s owner was Foremost McKesson, Inc., and it had come up with a plan that was almost as appalling as the first. In a joint venture with Visitacion Associates, it proposed to build high-rise residential towers, office buildings, single-home subdivisions, a shopping center, and a skating rink on the mountain. Some 30,000 people would live, work, and play in the new development, which would cover shellmounds, pave over meadows, and cut off the free flow of creeks.

Schooley was not the only one who was horrified. Among outraged local residents was Bette Higgins, a feisty lady who, with a neighbor, confronted the president of Foremost McKesson: “He gave us an appointment. And we went up and he said, ‘What can I do for you ladies?’ And I said, ‘You can give us San Bruno Mountain.’ . . . And he said, well, he really couldn’t do that. . . . And I said, ‘There’s just no way it’s going to happen. Let’s all save ourselves a lot of time and trouble. . . . We are in the north end of the county and we have no open space. And we deserve a park. . . . We pay taxes. Where’s our park?”

Higgins put a sign in her front window, “Save the Mountain,” and Schooley spotted it. He knocked on her door. Together they founded a citizens group that led the way to the defeat of the Visitacion Associates development and the creation of a state and county park, which now encompasses 1,950 of the mountain’s 3,600 acres. That effort took years, and many marches, protests, and hearings. The battle focused mainly on keeping open space, although some people were aware that the mountain was the last intact remnant of what had been here before the arrival of Europeans.

To Elizabeth McClintock, at the California Academy of Sciences, who in 1968 had published A Flora of the San Bruno Mountains, the place was “a botanical treasure.” James Roof had started the California native plant garden in Berkeley’s Tilden Park and, inspired by childhood explorations of the mountain, had included a section devoted specifically to San Bruno Mountain plants. Both were major allies in the fight for the park and the struggle still ahead.

“We didn’t know there were rare and endangered species here till after” the park was created, said Schooley. That news came some months later when, on a site targeted for residential development, the endangered mission blue butterfly was found. Futher investigation turned up 22 rare and endangered plants and animals, including two more butterflies.

The discovery of the mission blue butterfly on the northeast ridge put a temporary stop to development, but the ensuing controversy about property rights versus species survival rights led to a split in the original citizens group, then called Save San Bruno Mountain.

One of the original members and five others who had recently joined, including local officials, argued that property rights required compromise. Most of the original members, said Schooley, held that “compromise is great for politics, but you can’t compromise life.” The pro-compromise faction proceeded to meet with developers and public officials and worked out a plan, the HCP. Because the splinter group was using the name Committee to Save San Bruno Mountain, Schooley and his allies changed their name to Bay Area Land Watch, and later San Bruno Mountain Watch.

The San Bruno Mountain HCP—the first HCP in the nation—was completed in 1983. It was cited as the model for a 1983 amendment to the Endangered Species Act that permits some “taking” (i.e., killing) of endangered species by habitat destruction on private land, provided that landowners set aside a “preserve” for the species and create a funding mechanism for its maintenance. As a result of this HCP, prime butterfly habitat on the northeast ridge of San Bruno Mountain was developed, while the moister, cooler—and less prime, for both butterflies and humans—saddle, within the park, was designated for restoration as habitat. In addition, developers were to offer to dedicate some acreage as open space. In theory, the HCP provides a net benefit for the species while allowing for the exercise of property rights. How that worked out on San Bruno Mountain remains highly controversial even now, more than 18 years later (see The First-Ever HCP).

Over the years, thanks to long and hard work by citizens, three shellmounds have been protected, and more habitat land has been secured, piece by piece. Although the HCP allowed development at Buckeye and Owl Canyons, the elderly owner of this land, with whom Schooley was friendly, told him he would sell for a reasonable price if the land would be conserved. A door-to-door campaign to include the purchase in Proposition 70 brought an outpouring of support. The two canyons were acquired, and are now a preserve managed by the Department of Fish and Game. Another of the four shellmounds was saved last year as part of a settlement of a San Bruno Mountain Watch suit against the Army Corps of Engineers and Myers, Inc., involving a development in South San Francisco. The City of Brisbane is currently working to acquire as many lots as possible from willing sellers in an obsolete 105-lot subdivision from the 1920s to protect habitat and open space. It plans to use an old rail corridor for a linear park at the base of the mountain.

More and more people who have discovered San Francisco’s secret mountain are now working to preserve its unique ecosystems. Friends of San Bruno Mountain is trying to create a native plant botanical garden at the entrance to the State and County Park, on Guadalupe Canyon Road. The San Bruno Mountain Stewardship Project, launched this year by the California Native Plant Society, is tearing out invasive German ivy and other alien plants at the headwaters of Colma Creek every Saturday. After concentrating its restoration work between Owl and Buckeye Canyons, San Bruno Mountain Watch is now moving into other critical habitat areas. A grant from the Coastal Conservancy enabled it to hire a restoration crew. All these groups are working toward the same goal: to keep large connected areas of native habitat intact.

With most of the mountain now in parks and preserves, the threat of development has diminished, though it will never disappear. These days, the major threat that people are struggling against is that of invasive alien plants. Whatever the challenge, the mountain’s future depends on having enough people to care and willingly work for it. Intimate personal knowledge is an essential first step for such commitment. Many have become mountain advocates after taking a hike with David Schooley.

Finding the Home Place

Later this spring, when the huge buds of cow parsnip had opened into white sprays and the hills were bright with golden poppies and blue iris, a young couple from Brisbane would come for the walk. They live at the foot of the mountain and want to plant a native garden. The week after, when the lupine we had first seen was nearly done blooming but lupine growing in cooler places higher up was just beginning, a group of Sierra Club hikers came out. They stopped for lunch in a high meadow and listened as Schooley told of the time he became discouraged in the course of one of the many legal battles for the mountain and flew off to Italy to get away.

On the map he spotted “Serra San Bruno.” He figured he might as well go there and took the bus south. When he got off in the piazza of a small town, a man standing there asked in English whether he was headed for the monastery. Schooley said yes. This man, it turned out, had been born in Half Moon Bay, only a few miles from San Bruno Mountain. His parents were killed in a car crash on Highway 1, and he had come to Italy to live with his grandparents and stayed. The next morning the man took Schooley to Certosa Serra San Bruno, founded by Saint Stefano e Bruno, who was known for having asked the pope: Can you put our monasteries in nature, close to God? The pope agreed, and Saint Stefano established many monasteries, all in nature. The monks prayed by walking in the wilderness, especially along creeks.

In the peaceful monastery he visited, Schooley saw a drawing of the patron saint kneeling in a creek. The message he found here was the same one he had found on San Bruno Mountain: if you center in one place and become deeply connected with it, the whole planet is affected. As he was leaving, one of the monks told him there was another American in the monastery, one of the men who had dropped an atomic bomb over Hiroshima. The monks promised to pray for San Bruno Mountain.

Click here for a sample of David Schooley’s writings.

Click here for a map of the San Bruno Mountain area
showing the various areas mentioned in the story.

For more information about San Bruno Mountain, contact the following organizations:

San Bruno Mountain Watch
http://www.geocities.com/rainforest/canopy/4417/

San Bruno Habitat Conservation Plan (HCP):
http://www.thecity.sfsu.edu/users/HCP/index.html