The Forest of Nisene Marks State Park
Click Here for a Map to the Park

The park offers 10,000 acres of rugged semi-wilderness, rising from sea level to steep coastal mountains of more than 2,600 feet. Once the site of logging operations until the 1920s, visitors can still find evidence of logging operations, mill sites and trestles in the park. The land was donated to the state by the Marks family in 1963.

With over 30 miles of trails, hiking, jogging and biking are some of the activities to be enjoyed here. Picnic tables and barbecue pits are available. A trail camp is located six miles from the nearest parking lot.

Dogs are allowed only along the entrance road and in the picnic areas and must be on a leash no longer than six feet at all times.

First General Plan Workshop - Sunday - March 11, 2001
  Soquel High School Auditorium
  401 Old San Jose Road, Soquel, CA
Informal Open House: 2:00pm to 4:00pm
Formal Presentation on the Park and General Plan begins at 4:00pm, followed by a public comment period.

Location - Directions
The park is four miles north of Aptos on Aptos Creek Road.

Seasons - Climate - Recommended clothing
The weather can be changeable; layered clothing is recommended.

A Brief history of the Forest of Nisene Marks
The peaceful redwood groves of the Forest of Nisene Marks State Park conceal a history of cataclysmic forces that have shaped and re-shaped the landscape. Place names such as Big Slide, the Epicenter, China Ridge, Big Stump and the Mill Site echo the floods, earth-quakes, wildfires and logging that punctuate the park’s history. Since the creation of the state park in 1963, the biggest events have been natural ones, most notably the flood of January 1982 and the Loma Prieta Earthquake of October 1989.

The steep, heavily forested canyons had little value for the Spanish and Mexican inhabitants who settled in the Monterey Bay Region in 1770. When the land was finally granted to Rafael Castro and his sister Martina beginning in 1833, it was the coastal terraces they sought for their livestock, not the dark, brooding forests to the north. The forested land passed to their descendants relatively untouched, and it was not until the early 1850s that loggers tentatively began to enter the Aptos Canyon to cut some of the smaller redwoods for shakes and lumber. When Claus Spreckels purchased most of Rafael Castro’s Aptos Rancho in the early 1870s, he increased the logging tempo in the more accessible forests in the lower Aptos canyon.

The upper Aptos Canyon was unlocked in 1883 by the technical and financial resources of the Loma Prieta Lumber Company, a corporation backed by the Southern Pacific Railroad. Chinese railroad workers carved huge cuts and fills up the canyon, and by 1884 a standard gauge railroad was chugging along grades and across trestles high above Aptos Creek. A huge mill was built three miles up the canyon and beside it a town that eventually boasted a population of three hundred men and their families. For the next forty years, a succession of logging operations took over 140,000,000 board feet of redwood out of the Aptos Canyon and upper Soquel watershed. In the mid-1920s, most of the buildings were dismantled, the rails pulled up, and the clear-cut forest-lands slowly began to heal. The Loma Prieta Lumber Company offered the property for sale, but it was too rugged even for the most optimistic developers.

Finally, the property caught the attention of a Salinas Valley farming family that included Nisene Marks and her adult children. Between 1951 and 1954 the Marks purchased not only the holdings of the Loma Prieta Lumber Company but also a number of adjacent parcels until they owned approximately 9,000 acres. After determining that there were no major oil deposits on the property, the Marks children proceeded to establish a memorial to their mother, Nisene, who died in 1955. The result was the Forest of Nisene Marks State Park, founded in 1963.

When the loggers left the Aptos Canyon, the forest began to heal itself and now the scars grow fainter with each passing year. The Forest of Nisene Marks is a monument to forest regeneration and the future - it is a forest in the state of becoming.

The core of the present-day state park is the land previously owned by the Marks family. However, since 1963 upwards of 1,000 acres have been added to the state park through the efforts of the Save the Redwoods League, Sempervirens Fund, and direct gifts. Most of the new properties are located north of the town of Aptos along Aptos Creek.

Information Courtesy California State Parks