About the parks

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Pescadero Creek may be the peninsula’s most underappreciated park. Despite its attractive forests and an excellent, well-maintained network of trails, hardly anyone comes here. Even on a nice summer weekend you may not meet a single hiker on the trail.

Redwoods grow in the park’s lush canyon bottoms, while higher up the hillsides are mixed forests and open grasslands. There are scattered dismal areas of logged redwooods, with lots of big stumps and a dense growth of small trees, but much of the park doesn’t show any sign of logging except, perhaps, for a lack of fallen trees. As a whole, the park is more attractive and enjoyable than some old-growth redwood parks.

Pescadero might lack visitors because it hasn’t been developed: there’s no ranger station or visitor center, only two primitive trail camps, and no facilities. Plans to develop the park — which included a proposal to generate income for the county by logging its forests — were defeated by local residents concerned about traffic. So you can’t even drive into the center of the park; you have to hike in from a neighboring park or from the Tarwater trailhead, a remote dirt lot accessed by a single-lane road.

Surrounded by a seemingly endless expanse of conifer-clad hills, the park has a wild, remote feel and is strikingly quiet and peaceful, with a complete lack of traffic noise. What’s more, the park is close to the ocean and usually has refreshingly crisp and cool air in the summer, yet rarely gets the depressing all-day fog that cloaks the immediate coastline.

Homestead Flat, Memorial County Park

Two smaller neighboring parks, Memorial Park and Sam McDonald Park, are more developed than Pescadero Creek, with extensive camping facilities and some nice trails. Memorial County Park has a large and very popular campground set in an old-growth redwood grove. Sam McDonald County Park has a series of group campgrounds located in second-growth redwoods; there’s also a horse camp and a hikers’ cabin. A fourth park, Heritage Grove, is a tiny and attractive redwood grove located on Alpine Road. Together, the four county parks are known as the Pescadero Creek Complex.

The only staffed location in the Pescadero Creek Complex is the Memorial County Park entrance kiosk.

Forest Loop Trail, Sam McDonald County Park

Links

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• A printed map of Portola and Pescadero parks is available from Redwood Hikes Press. The printed map is similar to the maps on this website, but without the greyed-out trails.
• The official websites for Pescadero, Memorial, and Sam McDonald parks include information on camping reservations.
• Jane Huber’s extensive Bay Area Hiker website has pages describing hikes in Memorial and Sam McDonald parks.
• The ridiculously popular Duarte’s Tavern (pronounced “do arts” ) is the traditional post-hike hangout for Pescadero Park. The bread, artichoke soup, and pies are all outstanding, but the entrees aren’t as exciting and are somewhat pricey.