Richard Mahler
Writer, Editor, Stress Reduction Teacher, and Media Consultant

Richard writes often about natural history, nature-based travel, and the environment. Two of his best-selling travel books—about Belize and Guatemala—took an ecotourism approach. A long-time contributor to the public radio programs Living on Earthand Earth Notes, he also writes commentaries, features, and news items for various print and on-line publications.

Below is an excerpt from an article profiling one of his favorite northern California parks.

• "Redwoods and Ruins at Mount Madonna," published in Bay Nature, July-September 2007:

Of all the choice locales among his 1.8-million acre empire, the most powerful landowner in 19th-century California picked a green peak above Gilroy—now Mount Madonna County Park—as the place he called “home.” Henry Miller, an ambitious Gold Rush-era immigrant whose fortune grew from a few dollars to $40 million during a remarkable 70-year career, is credited with almost single-handedly creating the West’s cattle and sheep industry by consolidating huge tracts of pasture, building irrigation canals, and stringing fences. At one point Miller’s company was among the nation’s top five private landowners. Given his wealth, you might come here expecting San Simeon, but the marks this tireless entrepreneur left on his mountaintop home are surprisingly light.

“The old Miller estate is the heart of our park,” declares John Heenan, senior ranger of Mount Madonna. The estate straddles an undulating ridge between the Coyote Creek Valley on the east and the Pajaro Valley to the west. “Although he died long before it was created, [the park] possibly wouldn’t exist if not for this man.” From his aerie Miller looked down on a landscape stretching from San Francisco Bay to the Pacific and which he controlled almost in its entirety.

The park remains home to those expansive views and to a stunning array of habitats, from damp redwood forests to dry blue oak woodlands. But signs of Miller’s half-century on Mount Madonna—purportedly named by the Italian stonecutters Miller brought in to help build his family compound—have faded considerably during the nine decades since the owner’s death. Rock walls and cement walkways at the overgrown home site only hint at the bold character of an imposing man now largely forgotten.

“People nowadays confuse our guy with the writer of the same name,” concedes Heenan, referring to the 20th-century novelist whose Big Sur cabin is now a library.The other Henry Miller was a rancher who oversaw so much real estate that it was said he could travel by horseback from the Mexican border to Washington state and stay at one of his own properties each night. Yet when it was time to relax, the multi-millionaire headed for the secluded forest surrounding what is, at 1,857 feet, the highest point of the southernmost Santa Cruz Mountains.

“Miller called Mount Madonna home ... because it was not connected with business,” suggests Patricia Snar Simon in Henry Miller: His Life and Times, published by the Gilroy Historical Society. He “came to enjoy a change of climate and the cool breezes from the Pacific side.” Family barbecues at the compound were a weekend tradition for Miller and invited relatives and friends. “No matter where he was [on weekdays],” wrote Edward F. Treadwell in The Cattle King, Miller “would aim to get home [to Mount Madonna] for Sunday.”

The scope of the estate remains impressive. Occupying a gentle slope lined with a procession of planted evergreens, multiple foundation footings and masonry partitions outline the five structures built between 1890 and 1902. Stone and timber were gathered from the property for their construction. Miller and his family occupied three dwellings; the others were a foreman’s home and a guesthouse. The main residence, boasting seven bedrooms and a 3,600-square-foot ballroom, was built for $250,000 in 1901. This mansion and a bungalow next to it burned down after Miller’s death; a third house was moved to Watsonville.

Over the years, the county has taken various approaches to the remaining foundations and steps. “We once were content to let nature eat up [the ruins],” Heenan told me. “Then, there was talk of restoring the buildings to what they once looked like, but now we are committed only to maintaining the estate as it is.”

I sat among the relics—penetrated by tanoaks, buckeyes, and big-leaf maples—while contemplating the rags-to-riches story of Henry Miller. Heinrich Alfred Kreiser arrived in San Francisco at age 23 in 1850. The new arrival adopted an Anglicized name and used his meat-cutting skills to start a Jackson Street butcher shop.

By 1860 Miller was buying and leasing land with fellow German (and one-time rival) Charles Lux in a partnership that ultimately controlled over a million cattle and 100,000 sheep on nearly two million acres throughout the West. Much of the Santa Clara and San Joaquin valleys came under the pair’s dominion in the 1860s and 1870s.

The empire did not survive long after Miller’s death in 1916; much of it was sold off for smaller cattle ranches, orchards, and housing developments. A small part of his vast holdings continue to be managed by his descendants today as ranches and farms near Bakersfield and Los Banos. Mount Madonna may be the only piece that became parkland, though Miller also earned a few conservation points by protecting what were believed to be California’s last herd of tule elk, from which all of California’s living tule elk descend.

“Miller’s heirs were not inclined to vacation on Mount Madonna,” says Heenan, “so they abandoned it.” According to historian Patricia Simon, the homes “became a haven for rum runners.” In 1927 the state—at the family’s urging—began purchasing and protecting parts of the property. In the 1930s, workers from the Civilian Conservation Corps put in campsites and trails,. The property officially became a Santa Clara County park in 1952 and families from nearby have been coming here in droves ever since. “Local folks love the place,” says Heenan.

No doubt this is true, yet the mountain is far from overrun. During my weekday hikes I encountered not a soul on any of the trails. Leaving the Miller ruins during my first visit, I followed a one-mile path that continues on an overgrown access road past a once-elegant concrete foundation, then through remnants of the Miller vineyard and into what was once a prune and apple orchard. Now unrecognizable as such, these agricultural endeavors were part of an enterprise that included a sheep pasture and a quarry rock was cut for Gilroy’s city hall. Below is a catchment (still used by the park) from which water was once pumped uphill via a steam engine to the Miller homes.

Hiking routes tend to follow grades carved by loggers in the 1850’s and Miller’s construction crews in the 1890s. While Pole Line Road anchors the park’s central developed area. Mount Madonna’s upper reaches have longer trails and less-disturbed forest, As part of the Bay Area Ridge Trail network, Madonna is a link for trekking—no bikes are allowed here—to Uvas Canyon and the Forest of Nisene Marks.

Retracing my route through Miller’s overgrown sanctuary, I found the moss-covered remains eerily reminiscent—on a less lavish scale—of newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst’s castle-like San Simeon retreat further south. The refrain grew louder when I came upon a large pen holding white fallow deer descended from two pair that Hearst donated to the park in 1935. Native to Mediterranean Europe and Asia Minor, the shaggy, cream-colored ungulates were a popular import among well-heeled landowners a century ago. “There were 53 when I started working at the park [15 years ago],” says Heenan. “Now only 19—four males and 15 females—are left. They don’t reproduce well because they’re so inbred.”

I wondered how members of the resident black-tailed deer herd regard these interlopers. I spooked enough of the former, almost tame in their nonchalance, to justify the ample warning signs posted here for mountain lions. Although rarely seen on Mount Madonna, one such cat jumped an 8-foot-high fence to kill several of the fallow deer in 2005. Barbed wire and electrification now discourage attacks. Park rangers believe the offending cat was killed last year when a marksman took out a lion that had been killing neighborhood dogs.

Redwoods are dominant at the core of the park but most old-growth specimens were removed in the decades before Miller began acquiring land here in 1859. Many of the trees today form irregular “fairy rings” around the massive stumps, chinked at intervals where wedges were inserted. These held “springboards” that lumberjacks stood on to maneuver two-man saws. Some bear scars from fires that burned piles of slash. The Giant Twins trail, near Madonna’s southern border, leads to two of only four known old-growth redwoods remaining in the park. (The other two are off-trail and unmarked.) Struck and hollowed by lightning years ago, the Twins mirror each other in a splendid stand.

The last timbering occurred here after the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, to supply lumber for rebuilding the city. Madonna lies roughly 10 miles from the epicenter of the devastating 1989 Loma Prieta quake, but there are no visible signs of either major seismic event.

Temblors are not the only reminders that this is, geologically speaking, a young and restless terrain. Wedged between the active San Andreas and smaller Sargent fault zones, the park’s dynamic geology is an important contributor to its unusual mélange of plants and animals. Vegetation types covering the slopes of Mount Madonna change in a matter of yards from redwood forest to mixed oak woodland to grassy meadow to chaparral thicket. Overall, the enclave showcases seven habitat types as well as overlapping “ecotones” where distinct habitats intersect.

“Differences in moisture and sun exposure certainly contribute to the plant diversity found here,” Heenan allows, “but varied geological composition is probably a bigger factor.” The ranger notes that Madonna is a part of a “transpression” zone where movement and pressure along irregularities in underlying faults have pushed up the Santa Cruz and other coastal ranges over the past X million years—and continue to do so. Uplifts of mainly sedimentary rock are evident here in the occasional crumbling shale cliff face, hardy sandstone boulders, or pebbled conglomerate outcrops. Deposits of older limestone, formed by organisms that once thrived in a long-gone sea, are also evident.

“The Santa Cruz Mountains are very young, geologically speaking,” says Phil Stoffer, a geologist with the U.S. Geological Survey. “As little as four million years ago they were under the ocean. Looking closely, a lucky visitor may find fossils betraying this marine history.”

According to Stoffer, the park’s sandstone and conglomerate-laden soils encourage an abundance of redwoods and Douglas firs. “They thrive in sandy topsoil,” he says. Beneath this canopy are California bay laurels, madrones, tanoaks, sycamores, and big-leaf maples. As in other regional parks, tanoaks at Mount Madonna are monitored closely for signs of the sudden oak death pathogen. Acorn-laden trees were examined last fall and all appeared healthy.

Stoffer points out that serpentinite, our state rock that contains an unusual mix of minerals, often occurs at tectonic plate boundaries, and that is the case here as well. This yields soils particularly favored by bigberry manzanita, chamise, and birchleaf mountain mahogany.

While geological events shape topography, Stoffer says, rainfall and the way it drains and erodes the landscape play a crucial role in the creation of the park’s multiple microclimates: shady canyons, sunny crags, and grassy savannas. Such factors combine in this park to yield such oddities as blue oaks occurring in close proximity to moisture loving redwoods and Pacific yews. Drought-tolerant blue oaks, which generally occur in savanna or chaparral habitats that receive no more than 20 to 30 inches of rain annually, are unexpected here, where rainfall runs about 50 to 60 inches each year.

All this botanical variety translates into a good bit of wildlife diversity as well: California red-legged frogs and ensatina salamander thrive in the damp redwood forests and creek, while the chaparral and oak woodlands host western rattlesnakes and fence lizards, along with brush rabbits and coyotes.

“When I first drove up the winding road to Mount Madonna, I was amazed at the variety of habitats I passed through,” recalls ranger Heenan. “The diversity still blows me away, many years later.” All this, and the faint traces of a rich man’s hideaway, await visitors mid-way between Monterey Bay and Silicon Valley.

• GETTING THERE:
  From the north or east, take Highway 101 to Gilroy, exit following Highway 152 West. About 10 miles west of the Highway 101 exit, turn right at the Sprig Lake sign. The park may be reached from the Watsonville (west) side by following Highway 152 to the Hecker Pass summit. The main route through the facility is Pole Line Road. Admission is $5 per car. There is no public transportation to the park. Madonna is closed at night to non-campers. Learn more at www.sccgov.org or (408)842-2341.