Forest of Nisene Marks State Park

The Forest of Nisene Marks isn’t your cathedral-of-the-ancients redwood park-no thousand-year-old titans with bark thicker than a bank vault door. No, Nisene is something else: a forest of resilience, a living case study in what happens when nature is left to heal on her own terms.

From 1883 to 1923, this canyon echoed with the shriek of saws, the groan of oxen, and the clatter of a narrow-gauge railway. The Loma Prieta Lumber Company cut almost every redwood in sight, turning them into beams, shingles, and railroad ties. Logging camps like China Camp swelled with hundreds of workers, and trestles spanned the ravines. By the time the last log rolled out, the place was so chewed up it probably looked like a battlefield.

And yet-step into the forest today and you’ll see the miracle of regeneration. Tall, straight second-growth redwoods now shade Aptos Creek. Ferns and sorrel carpet the ground. Madrone, bay laurel, and alder squeeze in, too. The scars are still there if you know where to look, but the land has softened them with green. It’s not the hushed cathedral of Big Basin or Humboldt, but there’s beauty in the comeback story.

We hikers have the Marks family to thank. Prominent Salinas Valley farmers, they bought this battered land in the 1950s. And in 1963, the three Marks children donated it to the state, with one condition: no golf courses, no snack bars, no tramways-just let the forest recover. Their mother, Nisene, lent her name to the park.

Loma Prieta Grade Trail is the best way to feel the park’s past and present in one walk. It follows the old railroad bed that once carried logs down the canyon. You’ll see where trestles collapsed, where skid roads clawed at the slopes, and eventually reach Hoffman’s Historic Site (formerly China Camp), where a few sagging wooden buildings hint at the 300 loggers who once called it home.

This is not the showiest hike in the Santa Cruz Mountains. It doesn’t have the primeval majesty of Big Basin or the old-growth hush of Henry Cowell. What it has is honesty. These are working redwoods, scrappy and persistent, rising to reclaim the hillsides. To walk here is to bear witness to California’s cycle of cut, recover, and-if we’re wise-protect.