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Trail will Retrace Spanish Explorers’ ‘Discovery’ of SF Bay

The Ohlone-Portolá Heritage Trail will run the length of San Mateo County and include Indigenous representation, which some tribal leaders feel is an afterthought.

By Naomi Friedland

Nov. 1, 2023—A 90-mile trail in San Mateo County will trace the steps of Spanish explorers' journey to the “discovery” of the San Francisco Bay, which at the time was home to a thriving and diverse network of Indigenous tribes.

Don Gaspar de Portolá, governor of the Spanish colonial province in what is now Baja California, led an expedition in 1769 to find Monterey Bay. The expedition overshot its destination, and its members became the first Europeans to see the San Francisco Bay. The continuous trail, which will open over the course of about 20 years, will start in Año Nuevo State Park, traverse up the coast to Sweeney Ridge in Pacifica, where the explorers first witnessed the San Francisco Bay, and down to San Francisquito Creek in Palo Alto where the trek ended.

Since the feasibility study was established in 2019, more than 60 agencies were involved in building and designing sections of the trail, acquiring land, and re-establishing historical landmarks to include Indigenous perspectives. About 90 percent of the trail will be on public land and the remaining private land is being acquired by Peninsula Open Space Trust. Half of the trail is on pre-existing trails, with 50 miles running along the coast, filling in gaps on the California Coastal Trail. The other 40 miles of trail crosses over to the Bay side of the Peninsula. There will be ADA-compliant trails, as well as trails for cyclists, hikers, and equestrians and a potential automobile trail so that people can complete the route in one day.

Attempts to Include the Indigenous Story

Originally named the Portolá Heritage Trail, the planning committee, made up of San Mateo County, California State Parks and local public land agencies, decided to incorporate the Indigenous side of the story early on, renaming the route the Ohlone-Portolá Heritage Trail after the group of tribes native to the Bay Area. However, local Indigenous groups and tribal leaders were initially opposed to the trail.

“From my perspective as a Native person and expert on Spanish colonialism in California, the Portolá expedition was a colonizing expedition that accomplished the conquest of Alta California and founded the mission system,” says Jonathan Cordero, the chair of the Ramaytush Ohlone peoples and Assistant Professor of Sociology at California Lutheran University. “As far as I am aware, Native opposition to the trail was minimal [only] because the project was not well known.”

Coming to terms with the project, The Association of Ramaytush Ohlone accepted the planning committee’s invitation to collaborate.

“While we were reluctant to participate, we felt it necessary to make certain that information used along the trail and in supporting documents the Ramaytush Ohlone was accurate and appropriate,” Cordero says.

Samuel Herzberg, a senior planner with San Mateo County Parks Department, developed a statement of historical significance with Cordero and Mitch Postel from the San Mateo County Historical Society. “[It] became the basis for rewriting all of the state historic landmarks in San Mateo County related to the Portolá expeditions,” Herzberg says.

The historical landmarks honoring the Portolá expedition now include—or will eventually include—interpretive signs that tell both sides of the story from the Spanish explorers’ and Indigenous perspectives.

The California Historic Resources Commission revised nine proposed monuments in August 2021 and five existing monuments in April 2023, Herzberg says.

A Deeply Historical Trail

The planners are using historical accounts of the expedition to carve out the route and curate interpretive signs. Providing context to the motivation behind the project, California State Parks archaeologist Mark Hylkema says the story starts in 1602. A mariner from Spain named Sebastian Vizcaino was looking for ports on the California coast to trade with China. In this journey Vizcanio discovers “the Bay of the Pine Tree,” which is later named Monterey Bay.

“When word of the discovery gets back to Mexico and then to Spain, nothing happens because there is other competition in the Pacific,” Hylkema says. More than a century and a half later, “Spain decides its time to check out upper California, which spurs the Portolá Expedition of 1769,” he says.

There are three diaries from the expedition with Father Juan Crespí keeping the most detailed record. Using the diaries and Native oral accounts, the trail planners are able to create a historically accurate trail with educational signs along the way.

While the explorers’ journey began in Baja California, the Ohlone-Portolá Heritage Trail is only within the San Mateo County boundaries, marking the last 90-mile stretch of the trail. In what is now Año Nuevo State Park, where the trail begins, Spanish explorers found the Quiroste tribe’s big house or dance hall, according to Hylkema. The local tribe fed them, housed them, and guided the Spanish explorers to the next village where they could be taken care of by other tribelets. They traveled about fifty miles up the coast, village to village, eventually landing in Pacifica, hoping to have found the supply ship. Instead, when they climbed Sweeney Ridge, named the Discovery Site until 1987, they saw the Bay and a series of what they called “smokes,” which were villages all down the Bay.

The explorers surveyed areas around the Bay, following Native paths, which the explorers called roads, staying with different tribelets in the watersheds that often demarcated their territories. Indigenous tribes used the roads for trade. “They were a larger community on the Peninsula,” Herzberg says.

“They hiked all the way down through Woodside, they hung a left and they followed the smokes, to what today we call Palo Alto,” Herzberg says. The last village visited is on the Menlo Park side of San Francisquito Creek.” The explorers then headed back along the same trail through San Mateo County and back down the coast to Baja to return to Spain.

“Nobody lost any members. So they were well fed, well cared for by this first interaction with the Native Americans. This was not the story that came later.”

Seven years later, facing competition from Russian colonizers, settled in Fort Bragg, the Spanish jumped at the opportunity to seize what is now Northern California. The Spanish colonized California with a series of missions and presidios. “Native Americans from San Mateo County were rounded up and placed into the San Francisco mission,” Herzberg says.

“There was only one woman who survived from that period, who had four daughters, and those are the descendants of the Ramaytush Ohlone Tribe,” he says. The removal of Indigenous populations from California only continued. “When the state of California was created, they openly declared genocide against every man, woman, and child who was Native American in California.”

RELATED ARTICLE

Some tribal leaders say that the current trail proposal still underplays the Indigenous perspective. Read Indigenous Activists Urge Removal of Reminders of Genocide to learn more.

RELATED HIKE

Visit the Portolá 'Discovery' Site on Sweeney Ridge.

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