Camp Taylor Memories

Late last night I got to thinking about Camp Taylor. Well, officially it is Samuel P. Taylor State Park and it is in Marin County, California. I grew up not far away in Corte Madera.

Camp Taylor was a family favorite for picnics and day trips. I remember many mornings, being bundled into the car while it was still not quite light. There would be lots of things to carry to the car, coolers, baskets, the camp stove. Then we would all pile into the car, and it was a pile. There were usually at least six of us and often more.

I remember being bundled into the car early in the morning. It would be quite cool, as Bay Area mornings can be, and once you got in among the Redwoods dawn could seem to take a long time, especially on the west side of the coastal range. We would drive out Sir Francis Drake Blvd. It goes out and into the mountains and through the little town of Lagunitus, and then out into the big trees. There is one huge hill on the way, I remember riding out once on my bicycle.

We’d pile out and setup on a wooden park picnic table and my dad would set to work getting the Coleman stone started up.

Now, you have to understand that this was not a fancy propane stove, this was one of the old stoves that ran on Coleman Fuel, the kind with a red tank that had to be pressurized. My dad would sit there and pump away at that stove for what seemed like hours. Sometimes one of us would help, but the job required a bit of a special knack, because the pump was a piston, and you have to hold your finger over a hole in the knob at the end of the piston, but only during the push in. You needed to release your finger as you pulled out, so that air could go into the piston, then close the hole and push in to force the air into the tank. My dad could do it easily, but I could never quite learn the technique.

It was because of this that when I bought my first camp stove, it was propane.

Once the stove was started, my mom would start on the Hot Chocolate. I was raised in the Mormon Church, and coffee was not on the menu. For camping mornings like this, my mother would make up a concentrated cocoa mix…from scratch, and mix it with milk to make Hot Chocolate. My earliest memories are back in the days before Swiss Miss and Hot Chocolate Mix in pouches…or at least before they had reached our stores.

My mom would get the cocoa good and hot. Now, she had a friend who liked hot beverages at a temperature slightly higher than the average human tongue can endure. In my family, this temperature is known by the moniker Bobbie-hot, named after that friend. We would each get our cup of Bobbie-hot cocoa, and after no more than an hour, it would be ready to drink.

Camp Taylor was a wonderful place as a child. There was one particular place that we loved to play. Only years later did I recognize that is was the stump of a truly enormous Redwood. It is hard for me to try to say exactly how large it was, but it seems to me that it must have been nearly twenty feet across. It had been cut some four to six feet off the ground, and generations of children climbing up on top of it had hollowed out the inside a little bit. To us it was like a castle tower and we would have mock battles in and around it. We would climb the tower and hide behind the parapet, even having what amounted to embrasures to shoot out of. Sometimes now, I feel a little sad to imagine the majestic tree that had stood there, but mostly, if I could, I would tell that tree about all the fun I had playing on what it left behind.

There was also a stream that wound its way through the park. I could not in good conscious call it a river. We built boats, and hunted for crawdads and generally splashed about a bit in the water. It wasn't really deep enough for swimming, though I seem to remember a few pools where you could get all wet if you wanted to.

Camp Taylor is not far, as the crow flies from Muir Woods. Both are full of majestic Redwoods, and yet my memories of those two places are totally different. From Muir Woods, I remember the dim light beneath the closely packed trees, the subtle damp, and the quiet. Muir Woods always seemed a little otherworldly and mystical, as if an elf or a fairy might come out from behind a tree.

It is mostly bright sunlight that I remember from Camp Taylor. Muir Woods was someplace you visited. Camp Taylor was a place where you played. To be honest I haven't been there in more than 30 years, but I remember it well. Maybe one day I will get to visit it again.

Oh, and only just last night, more than 30 years later, I found out why it was called Camp Taylor and not Samuel P. Taylor State Park.

Samuel Penfield Taylor struck gold during the California Gold Rush, and with his money, he bought the land that is now the park and went into logging. He built the first paper mill on the Pacific Coast on the property. In the 1870s the North Pacific Coast Railroad was built going by the property. Taylor built a hotel near the tracks and called it the Camp Taylor Resort. California took possession of the property in 1945 for back taxes and later turned it into a State Park.