Coast redwoods once covered roughly two million acres of the California coast. Fewer than five percent of that old growth survives. Muir Woods holds 240 acres of it, spared because the canyon that shelters it was too steep and too awkward for nineteenth-century logging crews to reach profitably. The grove owes its survival to William Kent, a Marin congressman who bought Redwood Canyon in 1905 for $45,000. When a water company moved to condemn the land for a reservoir, Kent handed the tract to the federal government. President Theodore Roosevelt declared it a national monument on January 9, 1908, using the Antiquities Act. Roosevelt proposed naming it for Kent. Kent refused, and asked that it carry the name of John Muir instead. Muir, learning of it, called the gesture the finest act of forest conservation he knew. That founding decision explains why a muir woods sausalito ferry tour today reaches an intact grove rather than a replanted one — the trees here were never cut. What stands in Redwood Creek canyon is a functioning ecosystem, not a display. The tallest tree measures about 258 feet; the oldest is estimated at 1,200 years. Sequoia sempervirens draws up to a third of its moisture directly from summer fog, condensing it on needles held far above the forest floor. Bark grows a foot thick and carries tannins that resist fire and insects alike. The shallow root systems interlock, so the trees brace one another against wind. Coho salmon and steelhead trout still spawn in Redwood Creek, one of the last populations south of the Golden Gate. Muir Woods carries UNESCO recognition as part of the Golden Gate Biosphere Reserve. It received a further designation in 2019, when the National Park Service certified the grove as a Quiet Park — sound levels here register among the lowest of any accessible woodland in the region, and rangers ask visitors to speak softly. Cathedral Grove enforces silence outright. The mixed itinerary that pairs redwoods with the Marin waterfront has its own logic: Sausalito began as a shipbuilding town, and its Marinship yard launched 93 vessels during the Second World War. The contrast between working harbor and unlogged canyon compresses two Californias into a single afternoon, which is why San Francisco redwood forest tours so often bind them together. Small-group excursions and the Alcatraz combination itineraries listed on this page each frame that pairing differently, and any muir woods sausalito ferry tour tickets purchased here follow the same 12-mile road over the Marin Headlands that Kent's contemporaries once traveled by stagecoach.