In 1905, William Kent paid $45,000 for 611 acres of Redwood Canyon, a sum his wife, Elizabeth Thacher Kent, thought reckless. Three years later a water company moved to dam the creek and flood the grove. Kent's answer was to give the land away. On January 9, 1908, Theodore Roosevelt invoked the Antiquities Act and proclaimed the monument. Kent declined the honor of his own name, asking that the place be called for John Muir instead. The corridor that Muir Woods & Sausalito Half Day Tour tours still trace — over the coastal ridge, down to Richardson Bay — was nearly lost before it was ever widely visited. The trees predate the argument by centuries. Coast redwoods here, Sequoia sempervirens, commonly reach 600 to 800 years, and the tallest measured specimen in Cathedral Grove stands near 258 feet. They live on fog drip, pulling moisture from the marine layer that spills over Mount Tamalpais through the dry summer months. Redwood Creek runs beneath them, one of the few streams left in central California where coho salmon still return to spawn each winter. The grove survives largely because the canyon was too steep and too far from a rail line to log profitably in the 1800s; a Muir Woods redwood tour from San Francisco now reaches it in under an hour. Sausalito's history runs on saltwater rather than sap. The name descends from the Spanish sauzalito, little willow grove; the Rancho Saucelito land grant of 1838 went to the English mariner William Richardson, who ran ships out of the cove. During the Second World War, the Marinship yard on the northern waterfront built 93 vessels in three and a half years, then shut down almost overnight. Surplus hulls, barges and ferry carcasses left behind became the foundation of the houseboat colony still moored off Waldo Point. Together with the grove, the town forms the classic Sausalito and redwoods day trip north of the Golden Gate Bridge. Cathedral Grove carries a quieter footnote. In May 1945, delegates to the founding conference of the United Nations left San Francisco and gathered among the redwoods for a memorial to Franklin Roosevelt, dead a month earlier; the trees were chosen because they suggested permanence to men drafting a charter. Eighty-one years on, the pairing of monument and waterfront town remains one of the most-travelled Bay Area landmarks routes in Marin County. Travelers who reserve Muir Woods & Sausalito Half Day Tour tickets are crossing between two readings of a single coastline: one kept in growth rings, the other in tide lines and shipways.