Redwood Creek running through the grove — one of the last Bay Area streams where endangered coho salmon and steelhead still spawn, and why the whole forest depends on it.
That water you've been hearing is Redwood Creek, and it's easy to walk right past it as just a pretty stream. Don't. This creek is one of the rarest things in the whole San Francisco Bay Area — a wild salmon stream that still works.
Every winter, when the rains come and raise the water, coho salmon push in from the Pacific, fight their way up under these very bridges, and spawn in the gravel right here where they themselves were born. Steelhead trout do the same. The coho that use this creek belong to a population so reduced it's protected under the Endangered Species Act — most of the streams they once filled around this bay were dammed, buried in pipe, or paved over a century ago. This little creek, running through this little canyon, is one of the last places on the whole central coast where you can still watch it happen. If you come back after a good December storm and stand quietly on a bridge, you might just see a dark torpedo of a fish holding in the current below you.
And the salmon aren't only passing through — they feed the forest. Bears and birds and the soil itself take up nutrients from fish that swim in from the ocean and die here after spawning. Nitrogen from the deep Pacific ends up, quite literally, inside these redwoods. The tallest trees on Earth are fed in part by fish. So the creek and the trees aren't two separate wonders — they're one. Keep it on your left and keep walking up.
Photo: Nagarjun · CC BY 2.0
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