Where are the Blossom Rock Trees?
Coast redwoods are tall! 380 feet is the height of the tallest known tree in the world, a redwood named Hyperion growing in Humboldt County. Before logging started in the mid-1800s, the East Bay had a redwood forest with huge trees. Ship captains sailing near the Golden Gate wrote about two redwoods at the top of a ridge in the Oakland hills that towered over others. Captains used these distant landmarks to navigate around the treacherous Blossom Rock, hidden just beneath the surface of the Bay between Alcatraz and Yerba Buena Islands.
Where were these trees? In the 1980s, John Nicoles (now-retired EBRPD vegetation manager), Paul Miller (now-retired interpretive parklands unit manager), and Martin Materrese (now-retired City of Oakland parkland resources supervisor) all went onto boats near the Golden Gate to try to duplicate what the ship captains did to avoid Blossom Rock, based on descriptions of where the distant trees were located. Unfortunately, there was too much variability in the positions of the boats historically to figure out the location of the trees by that method.
There were no photos of the Blossom Rock Trees that we know of, so could the second-growth forest in the East Bay hills give some clues? Nicoles and Materrese theorized that if the Blossom Rock Trees towered above others on the top of a ridge, then their second-growth sprouts might also tower above other trees (redwoods resprout after falling or being logged). In Robert’s Regional Recreation Area, there is a tree that does indeed tower above surrounding trees, and its location fits the general description provided by the ship captains! With convincing evidence, in 1986 the site became the Blossom Rock Navigation Trees California Historical Landmark.
What about the other Blossom Rock Tree? In 1977, the Daughters of the American Revolution installed a plaque in Oakland’s Joaquin Miller Park implying it is the area where the Blossom Rock Trees lived. The location, however, is not on the top of a ridge, nor does it coincide with the general location described by ship captains; but the plaque is inside a partial circle of redwoods that is huge, sprouts that grew outside of the original tree!
Maybe we will never discover the location of the other Blossom Rock Tree, which adds some mystery to our knowledge of the beautiful East Bay redwood forests.
