How Big Basin Became California's First State Park
Big Basin became California's first state park in 1902. The fight to get there started two years earlier, in May 1900, when a group of citizens formed right in the basin to keep the last big stands of old-growth redwood away from the saw. They called themselves the Sempervirens Club. Their two-year campaign ended in a purchase that created California Redwood Park, which the Sempervirens Fund describes as "the first park established in California in the current state park system." All of it began up Highway 236 from Boulder Creek. And it began with a photographer who wouldn't hand over his negatives.
The basin before the park
People were part of this forest long before the preservation fight. California State Parks notes that humans lived in or near Big Basin for at least 10,000 years, and it identifies the Cotoni and Quiroste peoples, part of the broader Ohlone culture of the San Francisco and Monterey Bay areas, as the tribes of this landscape. They harvested seeds and acorns, wove baskets, and hunted elk and deer in these canyons.
That history isn't past tense. The Amah Mutsun Tribal Band, made up of the surviving descendant families of Indigenous people taken into Mission Santa Cruz (Awaswas speakers) and Mission San Juan Bautista (Mutsun speakers), works today through the Amah Mutsun Land Trust to restore Indigenous stewardship across ancestral lands that run from Ano Nuevo through these mountains to Monterey Bay. State Parks adds that descendants of the basin's tribes are working toward federal recognition.
By the late 1800s, the same forest was coming down fast. Sawmills worked the San Lorenzo Valley below. Boulder Creek was shipping lumber out by rail. The old growth in the basin was privately owned timberland with a short life expectancy.
A photographer refuses to hand over his negatives
The usual telling starts with Andrew P. Hill, a San Jose photographer. According to State Parks' cultural history, Hill photographed redwoods at Welch's Grove in the Santa Cruz Mountains, and the grove's owner accused him of trespassing and demanded his negatives. Hill refused. He went a step further, vowing to himself to save the trees for future generations. The run-in came in 1899 or 1900, depending on the account; the Sempervirens Fund dates the start of his campaign to 1899.
Either way, Hill went home to San Jose and started organizing. A meeting at Stanford University in May 1900 pulled together journalists, politicians, artists, business owners, and scholars, and the group headed into the mountains to see the threatened forest for themselves. That excursion started here: the party set out from Henry Middleton's Commercial Hotel in Boulder Creek and traveled thirteen miles to its camp in the basin, and on the evening of 15 May 1900 it named itself the Sempervirens inside the burned-out hollow of a large redwood. That account comes from historian Traci Bliss's park history, Big Basin Redwood Forest: California's Oldest State Park (The History Press, 2021), ebook pp. 66 to 67, PDF pp. 67 to 68.
Bliss tells the founding differently, and the difference is worth stating rather than smoothing over. She dates the Stanford meeting to 1 May 1900 with sixteen people present, has them form a Committee to Save the Redwoods with William T. Jeter elected president and Stanford botanist William Dudley as secretary, and has Hill attending the excursion as the San Jose board of trade's photographer rather than leading the campaign (ebook pp. 63 to 64, PDF pp. 64 to 65). We have kept the Hill-centered telling above because it is what State Parks and the Sempervirens Fund both publish.
Thirty-two dollars and a two-year campaign
What happened next is commemorated by a bronze plaque inside the park. California Historical Landmark 827 records that "a group of conservationists led by Andrew P. Hill camped at the base of Slippery Rock on May 15, 1900 and formed the Sempervirens Club to preserve the redwoods of Big Basin." The Sempervirens Fund's own history puts the founding gathering on May 18, along Sempervirens Creek, so accounts differ by a few days. On the substance they agree. A small group camped in the basin, decided the forest had to be saved, passed a hat, and collected 32 dollars to finance the effort.
Club member Carrie Stevens Walter put the goal plainly in 1901, writing of preserving "this magnificent domain of redwood forests," a line State Parks still quotes on the park's page. The club spent more than two years lobbying Sacramento.
The club kept the pressure local as well as legislative. In August 1901 a Sempervirens caravan rolled out of Boulder Creek for the basin with ten days of supplies and camped in the basin; and Traci Bliss's park history has Father Robert Kenna giving the Boulder Creek paper his verdict after a solo inspection, calling the forest grand beyond description. Bliss neither names the paper nor dates the visit.
The legislature passed the enabling bill and Governor Henry Gage signed it on March 16, 1901, appropriating 250,000 dollars over five years. It was a cut-down version: the original proposal had asked for twice the money and twice the land. Then came a standoff of nearly a year and a half before the park commissioners finally voted the purchase through at San Francisco's Palace Hotel on September 24, 1902. The bill's money had been priced as 2,500 acres at a hundred dollars an acre, and the state came away with about 3,800 acres for the same 250,000 dollars. How it got the extra ground is not settled. Bliss describes an unannounced gift of cut-over land from two Boulder Creek landowners. The San Francisco Call of 5 October 1902, under the headline "Thirteen Hundred Acres Are Added", says instead that the state gained 1,300 acres more than the timber men had first offered for the money, at less than a hundred dollars an acre. The Call was claiming the credit for that, so read it accordingly, but a price concession and a donation are different things and the deed would settle it. The landmark plaque dates the deeding to that September and calls it the beginning of the California State Park System. Even then the gates stayed shut: California Redwood Park did not open to the public until June 1, 1904.
The purchase came the year after the bill. The San Jose Mercury-news of 25 September 1902 reported that the commission, meeting at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco, had voted the previous afternoon to buy about 3,800 acres for $250,000, to be paid in five yearly instalments, and six other papers carried it within three days. Bliss puts the vote four days earlier, on 20 September (ebook p. 96, PDF p. 97); the contemporary reporting agrees on the 24th. The park was bought in 1902, but it did not open to the public until June 1904 (Bliss, ebook p. 103, PDF p. 104).
From California Redwood Park to Big Basin Redwoods
The new park was called California Redwood Park, and it grew from there. State Parks records that the park was renamed Big Basin Redwoods in 1927 and says 3,901 acres were acquired from the Big Basin Lumber Company in 1906. That conflicts with contemporary reports of an approximately 3,800-acre purchase approved in 1902, and the deeds or commission minutes are needed to settle whether the figures describe different transactions, survey totals, or dates. Today the park preserves more than 18,000 acres, including the largest continuous stand of ancient coast redwoods south of San Francisco, with trees between 1,000 and 1,800 years old.
The 1930s gave the park the look longtime visitors remember. Civilian Conservation Corps crews built the redwood Nature Lodge and Park Headquarters, a campfire center, a footbridge, cabins, and much of the trail network.
The club that started it all kept going too. After helping establish Castle Rock State Park in the late 1960s, the organization renamed itself the Sempervirens Fund in 1968, and it's still buying and protecting redwood forest in these mountains today.
The fire that changed everything
On August 18, 2020, the CZU Lightning Complex fire swept through 97 percent of the park's property, according to State Parks. Every historic structure was lost, including the CCC-era headquarters and lodge. The Sempervirens Fund calls the CZU fire, which burned more than 86,000 acres across the Santa Cruz Mountains, the most devastating fire ever recorded in the region.
The trees told a different story than the buildings. State Parks reports that most of the old-growth redwoods survived, and new growth has been coming back across the burned landscape ever since. Coast redwoods have lived through fire for a very long time. The visitor infrastructure hadn't.
What Big Basin looks like now
The park partially reopened in July 2022 and has been recovering in stages since. The park's official page lists day use from 8 a.m. to sunset and strongly recommends parking reservations because spaces are limited. Camping in the main park remains closed, though the Rancho del Oso campground on the coast side has reopened with five walk-in sites by reservation and one shared bike-in site.
Individual trails open and close as work continues, so check current conditions on parks.ca.gov before you drive up. This article can't promise what will be open on any given day. The Rancho del Oso side, off Highway 1 north of Santa Cruz, is open with no entrance fee.
The long-term rebuild runs through Reimagining Big Basin, State Parks' multi-year planning effort. A public visioning process wrapped up in summer 2022, and the project has since produced a Facilities Management Plan, a General Plan Amendment, and an environmental impact report, with a State Park and Recreation Commission hearing on the plans held July 2, 2026. The stated goal is to reestablish facilities that support visitors while protecting the forest that made the park worth fighting for in the first place.
Boulder Creek, the gateway then and now
Boulder Creek's own history is tangled up in this story. The town shipped the lumber that came out of these mountains, and when the logging economy faded in the early twentieth century, it leaned into visitors headed for the park instead. The Big Basin Road out of town opened in 1906, and for a while visitors kept riding the stagecoach into the park anyway, for the novelty of it. That first road was not today's Highway 236: the park's own place-names file describes it as the Old Park Road, built by a Watsonville contractor, and says it stayed the only road route into the park until the present highway opened in 1916. Rail historian Derek Whaley's Santa Cruz Trains research describes Boulder Creek transitioning "from a lumber town to a tourist town" built around attractions like Big Basin.
The geography hasn't changed. The park's official directions start here: from Highway 9 in downtown Boulder Creek, turn north onto Highway 236, and follow it to the entrance kiosk. If you're headed to the park, town is the last stop for gas, food, and supplies, the same role it's played for well over a century. Our directory of Boulder Creek businesses is a good place to see what's open before you start up Highway 236.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Big Basin open right now?
Partially. The park is open for day use from 8 a.m. to sunset, parking reservations are strongly recommended, and camping in the main park is closed while rebuilding continues, though Rancho del Oso on the coast side has a handful of walk-in and bike-in sites. Trail openings change as recovery work progresses, so check parks.ca.gov before you go.
Did the old-growth redwoods survive the 2020 fire?
Most did, according to State Parks. The CZU fire burned through 97 percent of the park and destroyed every historic building, but coast redwoods are adapted to fire, and the surviving giants have been putting out new growth since. The forest looks different than it did before 2020, and it's still recovering.
What does "California's first state park" mean?
Big Basin, established in 1902 as California Redwood Park, was the first park in what became the current California state park system. The state historical landmark at Slippery Rock marks the 1902 land transfer as the beginning of the California State Park System, and State Parks calls Big Basin its oldest park.
How do I get to Big Basin from Boulder Creek?
Take Highway 236 north from Highway 9 in downtown Boulder Creek; the road climbs to the park entrance kiosk. It is narrow and winding, so allow more time than a map suggests, and confirm current access before you go.
Who lived in Big Basin before it was a park?
State Parks identifies the Cotoni and Quiroste peoples, part of the Ohlone culture, and notes that people lived in or near the basin for at least 10,000 years. The Amah Mutsun Tribal Band, descended from Indigenous people taken into the Santa Cruz and San Juan Bautista missions, stewards ancestral lands in these mountains today through the Amah Mutsun Land Trust.
State Parks and Sempervirens accounts disagree, and the surviving public pages do not reconcile them. The Sempervirens Fund dates Hill's run-in over the negatives to 1899 and the club's formation to 18 May 1900 beside Sempervirens Creek; State Parks dates the photographs to 1900 and has the club formed after a three-day excursion. On the land, the Fund says the state acquired 3,800 acres in 1902 and State Parks says the commission acquired 3,901 acres in 1906.
Big Basin's story plays out up Highway 236, but it starts in Boulder Creek. If a redwood day is on your list, see what else is happening in town first on our Boulder Creek events calendar.
Sources
- California State Parks, Big Basin cultural history
- California State Parks, history of the State Park System
- California Historical Landmark 827
- Sempervirens Fund, our story
- San Jose Mercury-news, 25 September 1902
- Traci Bliss, Big Basin Redwood Forest: California's Oldest State Park (The History Press, 2021), ebook pp. 63 to 64, 66 to 67, 96 and 103 (PDF pp. 64 to 65, 67 to 68, 97 and 104).
Links checked 16 August 2026.
