Au Naturel

For years, this largest of the San Francisco Bay islands, lying northeast of the Golden Gate Bridge, has offered a tree-shaded escape to thousands of city dwellers who hike or bicycle along its quiet paths.

Not so this summer.

In what state officials call their most ambitious effort to restore a state park’s natural landscape, commercial loggers have been allowed to virtually denude the island of its blue gum eucalyptus trees, sweet-smelling giants that plant biologists say were well on their way to crowding out native plants before the logging began.

Since November, 64 acres of eucalyptus have been cut down, chopped up and floated away on a barge to a paper mill that has reduced the trees to pulp and sold it to Japan to be made into paper. In all, more than 25,000 tons of eucalyptus have been cleared. More than 12,000 trees, many of them towering more than 100 feet, have been downed, and hundreds more will go before the project is finished this fall.

On the 760-acre island’s south side, the tree-cutting has so devastated some of the park’s most visited trails and campsites that they “look like a bomb was dropped,” said park Ranger Jim Burke.

Startled hikers find themselves scrambling out of the way of massive lumber trucks or being warned off certain paths altogether. Campers, barred from some sites, end up pitching their tents on bare patches of earth once shaded by the trees.

“I don’t like it,” complained a young girl, one of many callers who expressed outrage when a local radio talk show devoted an afternoon to the logging project. “There is a hole on the island.”

David Boyd, the resource ecologist overseeing the clear-cutting, readily acknowledges that some parts of the island are, for the moment, a mess. But Boyd says what visitors are seeing now is needed before the island can be restored to something approaching its look of 200 years ago. It was then that Europeans discovered the island and began drastically altering its landscape.

“This will be a little piece of California’s prehistoric landscape,” Boyd said. “Something preserved forever as our natural heritage.”

In a few years, Boyd said, “no one will even know that eucalyptus trees grew in these places.”

Within three years, he said, native grasses, wildflowers and shrubs will have filled in the bare spots and created space for native trees to reassert themselves. That landscape may be less dramatic than the stately groves of eucalyptus, but more hospitable to native birds and mammals, he said.

Felling the stands of trees also has opened panoramic views of the bay--with the nearby Golden Gate Bridge, Alcatraz and the San Francisco skyline--that were hidden for decades.

The effort to turn back time on Angel Island began in November, after years of sometimes bitter debate between those who insisted that the drastic step of clear-cut logging was the only way to save the island and those who argued that no tree should ever be cut.

Among those applauding the project was the California Native Plant Society, which noted that eucalyptus, imported to California from Australia in the 1870s, has no natural enemies here. Because of that, the 24 acres of trees planted by soldiers on Angel Island in the 1920s and ‘30s had increased to 90 acres by 1990.

Without the eradication effort, the island would eventually become “a biological wasteland, dreary, monotonous and uninviting to human beings,” said Jacob Sigg, chairman of the California Native Plant Society’s Invasive Exotics Committee.

But Boyd and some of the park’s rangers said they nevertheless received letters accusing them of being “tree Nazis” and of practicing “plant racism” by declaring the eucalyptus an alien species and eradicating it.

“I know that there are people who are emotional about cutting down trees,” said Burke, who added that the department’s public relations problems were compounded by logging setbacks that made the cutting coincide with the summer tourist season.

After receiving dozens of complaints and worried questions from visitors, Burke said, rangers are preparing detailed signs to explain why the trees are being cut and how their removal will make way for a renewal of the island’s native grasslands and wildflowers.

“Next year, people are going to forget what they had to put up with this year,” Burke said.

Since 1984, when voters passed a statewide bond measure to fund the restoration and preservation of state parks, the department has spent millions of dollars uprooting, burning and chopping down exotic plants that were threatening native species throughout the state, said David Schaub, director of natural heritage for the department.

The Angel Island project is considered among the most ambitious efforts, Schaub said, because the impact of removing such a large amount of trees from so small and compact a park is enormous. Almost all the triangular-shaped island’s eucalyptus, planted by soldiers to shade roads, barracks and other buildings, were in easy-to-spot locations on the south side of the island, including the perimeter road that most visitors stroll.

Walking down the perimeter road now, visitors see hundreds of trees lying where they were cut, and large swaths of bare slopes surrounding them. “It’s a logged area, there is no way around that,” Boyd said. “This is the ugly part.”

Initially, the Parks and Recreation Department had expected to pay nothing for the project because the logging firm was allowed to sell the felled trees commercially. But the department has ended up paying the firm $250,000 to subsidize unanticipated costs of loading the giant logs onto a barge and floating them to the pulp mill, said Boyd.

The island, which became a state park in 1962, boasts not only miles of hiking trails, but also remnants of more than 100 years of the bay’s colorful history. Among them are three decaying Army forts (some dating to the Civil War), an immigration station that processed most of the Chinese who arrived in the United States between 1910 and 1940, and a small museum detailing the island’s past.

Visitors arrive by ferry and can hike, ride bikes or take a tram along the island’s perimeter road.

When the logging is completed, 80 acres will have been cleared of eucalyptus. In 1990, 16 acres were logged to test the clear-cut system, and rangers like to point out that native grasses quickly filled in those areas.

When the effort ends, the only eucalyptus left will be in 10 acres planted around Civil War-era and other historic buildings clustered on the island. Those trees are being spared, Boyd said, because they are part of the island’s “historic landscape,” areas already so altered that they could never be fully restored to their natural state.

Despite this summer’s chaos, ferry boats carrying tourists, Scout troops and day campers from Marin County and San Francisco still dock at the island several times a day. Last year, the island welcomed more than 235,000 visitors, and Parks and Recreation officials say the rate is holding steady this year.

Mountain biking recently through one of the areas strewn with felled eucalyptus, 19-year-old Silamith Quirin, from the Marin County port town of Tiburon, said she understood the need to eliminate the trees.

“It’s all right by me,” Quirin said. “I’m enjoying the views, and I know this is being done to restore the island to its natural state.”