A Dramatic History
The peaceful redwood groves of the Forest of Nisene Marks State Park conceal a history of cataclysmic forces that shaped and re-shaped the landscape. Names such as Big Slide, the Epicenter, the Mill Site, and Big Stump Gulch offer a hint of the floods, earthquakes, wildfires and logging that influenced the park's history.

The Ohlone Indians ventured into the Aptos Canyon to gather autumn acorns, but chose to live on the sunny, open terrace along the coast. The steep, heavily forested canyons also offered little to the early Spanish and Mexican residents who sought the grassy coastal terrace for their livestock.

A Logging Haven
Loggers began to work in the lower Aptos Canyon in the 1850s, cutting some of the smaller redwoods for shakes and lumber, but the large stands of redwoods in the upper canyons remained beyond the their technological and financial reach until the early 1880s. In 1883, backed by the huge financial and technical resources of the Southern Pacific Railroad Company, the Loma Prieta Lumber Company unlocked the treasure trove of redwoods growing in the upper Aptos Canyon. Chinese railroad workers carved huge cuts and fills up the canyon, and by 1884 a standard gauge railroad was chugging along grades and across trestles high above Aptos Creek. A huge mill was built three miles above Aptos and a town beside it grew to a population of over 400 men and their families. For the next forty years, a succession of logging operations took out over 140,000,000 board feet of redwood.

Forest Recovery
By the mid-1920s, the loggers were finished, and most of the buildings and railroad lines were dismantled. The Loma Prieta Lumber Company offered the property for sale, but it was too rugged even for the most optimistic developers. Over the next thirty years the stumps resprouted and a second-growth forest helped heal the jagged scars left by the loggers.

Eventually, the rugged property caught the attention of a Salinas Valley farming family that included Nisene Marks and her adult children. Between 1951 and 1954 the Marks family purchased not only the holdings of the Loma Prieta Lumber Company but also a number of adjacent parcels until they owned approximately 9000 acres. Following the death of Nisene Marks in 1955, her children decided to establish a state park as a living memorial. The result was the Forest of Nisene Marks State Park, founded in 1963.

Since 1963, more than 1000 acres have been added to the park through the efforts of the Save the Redwoods League, the Sempervirens Fund and direct gifts. Though the forest no longer echoes with the sound of loggers and their equipment, it continues to be sculpted by natural forces such as the huge floods of January 1982. The epicenter of the October 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake was in the Aptos Canyon, and crevices and landslides are still visible on the canyon walls.

Even today the steep canyons continue to protect the forest, surrendering their secrets to only the most persistent hikers and cyclists.