The main entrance to Muir Woods, which features the Muir Woods Visitor Center, is on Muir Woods Road — a winding road down to the valley floor from Panoramic Highway above. While you do need a Muir Woods parking reservation if you want to park your car in the lot at the entrance, you don't need a reservation to actually enter Muir Woods.

Nicki Phelps, Vice President of Visitor Programs and Services at the Parks Conservancy, was the recepient of the 2022 James V. Murfin Award for Cooperating Associations and Partnerships which recognizes individuals who have made significant and lasting contributions to improve and strengthen the 100-year partnership between the National Park Service and cooperating associations.

A task force commissioned by Gov. Newsom has unveiled a new online tool that it says will provide a first-of-its-kind map showing all forest and fire prevention work completed in California. “The dashboard that the task force has developed is very much in line with the types of tools we’ve been developing regionally to support cross-jurisdictional and landscape-level projects,” Danny Franco, senior project manager with the Parks Conservancy, said.

“We’ve made every effort to be sustainable,” says Shelagh Fritz, Program Manager of Alcatraz Gardens. Scraps and cuttings are collected for compost, never hauled away. Over on the other side of the island, near the rose garden, she proudly shows me Alcatraz’s award-winning compost, lifting up a tarp to reveal a shoulder-high collection of steaming organic matter, complete with plump, writhing worms.

Sutro Lands End Partners, LLC has been awarded a 20-year lease for the former Cliff House restaurant space, which is inside Golden Gate National Recreation Area. The partners will revive the space as well as the café inside the Lands End Visitors Center operated by the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy.