MILL CREEK REDWOOD PRESERVE

Map of Big Sur, CA US

The District has recently received a use permit from the Monterey County Planning Commission allowing for limited public access to Mill Creek. The permit allows for the issuance of 8 permits per day, with a maximum of 5 individuals per permit. Permits will be issued via the District's on-line permit system. To apply for a permit, click on the link to the right.

There is a single trail at Mill Creek that is 2.5 miles in length, one-way. The trail is of moderate difficulty, covering a total elevation change of less than 250 feet.

Mill Creek History

The first known inhabitants of the upper Bixby Creek watershed were Esselen. There is very little known about them as their cultural life ended abruptly with the arrival of San Carlos and Soledad missions in 1772.

The region remained basically empty and unpopulated for almost 100 years until Charles Bixby arrived in 1868. From his homestead, at the mouth of what is now Bixby Creek, and which extended for 1100 acres up to Bixby Mountain, he grazed cattle and cut tanbark oaks and redwoods. The preserve was spared any logging.

In 1906, with his timber depleted, Bixby sold his land to the Monterey Lime Co. which built a 3-mile aerial tram to haul limestone from Long Ridge to Bixby Landing, a small community at the mouth of Bixby Creek. Lime from this area was shipped north to help rebuild San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake. Exhaustion of local fuel wood and high operating costs closed the kilns in 1910.

Activity picked-up in 1917 when Pacific Grove’s T. A. Work and A. W. Furlong built and operated a mill, Japanese labor quarters, and several steam-donkeys in what now is the preserve. After cutting most of the marketable timber, the mill was closed in 1935. Logging was renewed in 1946 when Charles Vander Ploeg built a mill in Beartrap Canyon (also in what is now the preserve). This mill was short-lived when a human-caused fire in 1949 destroyed the mill and killed two loggers.

There was limited cutting of redwoods in Turner Creek in the early 1960’s. Then in 1987, the Humboldt County based Philo Lumber Co. obtained a logging permit from the state to cut over a million board feet of redwood.

The logging plans failed and the property was purchased through a joint effort by the Big Sur Land Trust and Montery Peninsula Regional Park District in 1988.