Olive “Ollie” Mayer asked herself that question while visiting Denmark. The only answer was that nobody had made it possible yet. She took it upon herself to try to do so. Many years later, in 1977, the Hikers Hut was opened to the public on a ridge in San Mateo County. Built by Sierra Club volunteers, it has been managed by the Loma Prieta Chapter and enjoyed by more than 28,000 people, including many school groups, in the past 26 years. It was meant to be the first of several such cottages along a trail network linking San Francisco to Santa Cruz through the beautiful coastal landscape. So far, however, it remains unique.

“I would like to see at least one more built,” Ollie Mayer said on a recent spring afternoon. “The smart thing would be to raise the money for six, of course, but at least one. I have one all picked out in Denmark. The manufacturer will ship it—it’s in boxes, all ready to assemble—and send carpenters to put it together. We need a place to put it.”

We were sitting in the Mayer family living room on a hilltop west of Woodside. I had come to hear the story of the hut, as well as the bigger story of Ollie Mayer, who has been a leader and catalyst for coastal conservation for more than 50 years, and has inspired many others to defend the natural places they love. That story helps to explain why this coastline, so easily accessible from the San Francisco and San Jose metropolitan areas, has remained open and green to this day. She can tell, with zest and humor, how hiking and friendship turned women and children into activists and built a movement that defeated a proposed six-lane freeway over Montara Mountain, stopped a housing development for up to 160,000 new residents, and shaped a very different future. At age 85, Ollie Mayer continues to be deeply engaged in conservation issues.

Coast & Ocean: What launched you on this trajectory?

Olive Mayer: Back in the 1960s, I decided that I was going to spend part of my time doing something constructive, and part of my time fighting against the bastards who were destructive. I’m a mechanical engineer. I had worked in engineering at least 25 years and I had had my fill. So I retired from the business I had, making science materials for schools, and I went walking.

I explored the county from one end to the other, on foot. I just walked everywhere, and I had a wonderful time. There weren’t many trails in those days, there were farm roads, old logging roads, and animal trails. After I had learned the county pretty well, I hiked with two Stanford students, and we mapped all the trails existing at the time. Then I went to a high school and said: “Why do you have these kids on the asphalt playing basketball all summer long when they’ve got this beautiful county? Let’s take them out hiking!”

Several playground leaders thought that was a great idea and took it to the school system, which said: “Absolutely not. We don’t have the insurance for that, you can’t take them out in private cars, we would need insurance on buses, and it just isn’t practical.”

So I said, “Ok, too bad,” and went to the Girl Scouts and said: “I’ll show your leaders where the trails are if you’ll promise you’ll take the kids on the trails.” They said: “Wonderful!” Four Girl Scout leaders appeared on a Thursday morning and we went for a hike. We all liked each other, and they wanted to do it again. The next week they brought some friends, and as time went on, the group expanded. We hiked almost every week from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., so parents could get kids to school and out of school. And soon we had three groups and then four—I didn’t want the groups larger than 15 or 20 people—and we all became friends. I didn’t know them all after a while, there were so many.

C&O: All Girl Scout leaders?

OM: I don’t know who they were. They were mostly women, and they were supposed to take the kids out—and they did. We went to the coast, we went to the mountains, and we explored the county. In those days you didn’t have to get permission to go everywhere, so we just went. We’d run into ranchers and farmers and they’d stop and chat, and they’d tell us to go this way or that way. They didn’t say “Get off my property.” Eventually we decided we had to get insurance, so we became an official Sierra Club group.

C&O: There were big development plans for most of San Mateo County at that time.

OM: Sure were. But I didn’t get into planning until something was going to happen on a piece of property that we hiked on and loved. In the ’70s I realized that to save this area you had to get into politics. When we found out a place was going to be logged we’d all get together—it was very informal, no real organization. We’d talk, and those who wanted to would go on a hike to see where they were going to log. Then we’d go after they logged, and we’d say: “Oh my God, what’s happening here?” So we began to look at the plans the county had. When we learned Purissima Canyon was going to be logged—a beautiful canyon with big trees—we put up quite a big battle; but it was slaughtered. Now—more than 20 years later—there’s regrowth and it has become a county park. People think it’s just wonderful, but I remember the big trees that were there.

C&O: How did you try to save them?

OM: By attending a thousand and one meetings, making calls on the county supervisors, and a letter-writing campaign, and all the things you know we do. We measured the size of the trees they had cut and of course a lot of it was illegal. We took pictures of logging debris that had washed into the streams and made a terrible mess. Terrible erosion.

I’ve been following that forest and others since then, it’s the most discouraging thing I’ve done in my life. I mapped landslides, I read all the laws, appeared before a million government bodies, organized women to go to hearings. And I appeared before the State Forestry Board with some of my hikers and our pictures and stories. At one hearing—I’ll never forget it, the representatives of the Department of Forestry, with their uniforms, were sitting at the back of the room, and we were up at the front and I was speaking and they laughed at me. They just laughed at me. They didn’t care about anything I said. The representatives from forestry department . . . I showed photos of all this debris pushed into the stream . . . they couldn’t care less. This land should be protected for parks, for exercise and health. You get people out in the open air, they become new people.

C&O: You had that vision; other people didn’t. Where did you grow up?

OM: In the suburbs of New York City, Maplewood New Jersey. When I was at Swarthmore College [1939], I was president of the Outing Club and we used to go on weekend trips. I hiked the length of the long trail in Vermont. In the fall, outing clubs from various colleges would gather in the Adirondacks for college week. We would hike in to different shelters. We’d put six to ten people in a shelter.

C&O: So that was where it all started?

OM: Well, when I was a child I used to go out with a little friend of mine named Bugs Miller and we’d collect insects and bugs. My bedroom was filled with cocoons and chrysalises and things that I found. In high school I was pretty much a loner, and I’d go out walking on these trips by myself. I just loved being out of doors.

C&O: And then, after Swarthmore, you married and had children and moved out here?

OM: I did my graduate work at the University of Michigan. After I got my license as a mechanical engineer I found a job with the Sperry Gyroscope Company in Brooklyn—and the war came along. The head of the company said that if I wanted a vacation I had to take one immediately. Where to go? Some draftsmen suggested Colorado. So I took a plane to Colorado, telephoned the Colorado Mountain Club, and they suggested Bear Lake. I went to Bear Lake Lodge, and the next morning at six o’clock I was up, in my patched blue jeans—I was very proud of all my patches—and asked the guy at the desk where a good place to hike was. He said, “I don’t know of any good place to hike around here.”

Two young men were sitting in the lobby. One of them came up to me and said, “We’ll tell you.” I followed their advice, and when I returned, one of them was waiting for me in the lobby. And that was the man I married [1942]. For our honeymoon we climbed the highest peak in the Tetons.

C&O: What a great story!

Olive and Henry, who was then doing a residency at Lenox Hospital in New York as internist, moved to Seattle because of the mountains, then to California for job-related reasons. They hiked together, shared many other interests, and had two children—a son who is now an architect, and a daughter who became a lawyer. They have four grandchildren.

OM: I loved all the women who came hiking with me. We’d have lunch in the woods and talk. Some became good birders, some became interested in wildflowers. Some fought for a piece of land, some fought for the beach.

C&O: All this grew out of those walks.

OM: I ran the Sierra Club hiking trips for teenagers for seven summers. We took them out to explore our county. We’d always end up at my house in Woodside. We’d have a picnic, we’d make ice cream, the kids would throw their leaders into the swimming pool—all had a great time. These were the children of the women who hiked.

C&O: I bet some of them are activists now?

OM: Yes they are. They all showed up at one hearing, I think it was when Caltrans was trying to put in the six-lane freeway down the coast—all the way from San Francisco to Santa Cruz.

C&O: Hard to imagine now. What else was in store for this area?

OM: A city with a population of 110,000–160,000. Westinghouse Corporation and Dean and Dean, developers, owned more than 10 square miles in and around Montara, El Granada, and Half Moon Bay.
I want to show you some of the stuff I have over here.

Ollie Mayer walks to the dining room table, where several thick albums are stacked, each documenting a chapter of a long struggle. She opens a big black one, prepared for the chairman of the board of directors of Westinghouse Corporation. Page by page, clearly and succinctly, it presents several good business reasons for abandoning development plans.

The album opens with a dramatic photograph of eroding ocean bluffs, seen from offshore, then moves to an open landscape with no built structures in sight, and a snapshot of three teenagers with backpacks walking up a dirt road. Next come large aerial photographs overlaid with hand-drawn, numbered parcel maps and, below each, a sentence or two about the land use constraints. “Is the board of directors aware that much of their land is very steep, with severe erosion hazards, geological and seismic problems?” asks the book.

Parcel by parcel, the hazards are pointed out. Some parcels are developable but most pose natural, legal, economic, and political problems. Much research went into this book. There are documents and newspaper clippings, to be scanned quickly or read carefully. The conclusion: “This makes the coast a poor place for Westinghouse to try to build a new community. . . . Perhaps you understand this situation all too well and intend to extricate Westinghouse from this tangle. . . . Would you consider that it might be good business to donate your land for preservation?”

The proposal for the Coast Range Hike & Hut Trail is enclosed. In the final pages, we see surf, the beach, and the three teenagers, arms around each other’s shoulders, on a hilltop.

Ollie Mayer chuckles as she recalls how she took the album to Westinghouse offices in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and presented it to the chairman of the board. “He and his wife took me out to dinner,” she says. “He didn’t say anything, but the next day he allowed me to talk to some of his staff. Then I listened for 45 minutes to Westinghouse plans. A short time later the company started selling off its properties.”

C&O: Fighting off that one took years—and the freeway bypass over Montara Mountain took more than a decade.

OM: It’s not over yet. The other side is dying off slowly. They’re trying to make a comeback now.

C&O: Did you manage to split your time the way you decided you would—part to fight the bastards, as you said, part for what you loved?

OM: Yes I did. You can’t be against something all the time. People want to be for something. We wanted to have a hike and hut trail to connect Point Reyes to Santa Cruz with forest and coast trails, a total of 120 miles. We mapped the Peninsula network, went to Sacramento, brought State Parks people down to hike part of it, and they said it was a wonderful idea, they made maps, so we went for $500,000 from the State and we got it. It wasn’t going to be too difficult to accomplish, connecting these bits of trail, mostly on public land. We figured that $500,000 would buy the easements or land we needed on private property. It was a Sierra Club project.

As we were leaving the state offices [after one meeting] we were just so thrilled. But a couple of men from Parks and Recreation looked at us in a sour way and I knew there was going to be trouble. I didn’t realize what kind of trouble until suddenly the State, instead of proceeding with the trail, decided to turn it over to the County. The County didn’t want it. So instead of buying land for the trail network, they spent almost all the money on paving a dirt road along Crystal Springs Lake and called it a trail. We never did get the real trails connected.

We had raised $15,000 for the hike and hut trail, so we decided to spend it on a hikers hut. The county parks director liked the idea, and we got permission to build one at Sam MacDonald Park. We never would have accomplished it without a wonderful man named Bob Coppock.

One day there was a knock on my door, and there stood Bob Coppock. He said: “I understand that you want to build a youth hostel up in the hills for kids to stay in when they’re hiking.” I said: “I sure do.” And he said: “Well, I’m retiring (he was director of recreation in San Bruno), and so is my wife (she was a teacher). We’d love to help you.”

I’d been to Denmark—they have beautiful huts. So I picked one out of a catalog, a prefab summer cottage, and placed an order. The American system of building a thing like this just isn’t practical. Many different trades are involved. You have to make a million and one trips out of the forest for this and that. The Danish cottage came in boxes, complete, everything marked and ready, even the plumbing and the furniture. We found volunteers and support from the Sierra Club, and with Bob Coppock’s leadership, we went to work. He got along with everybody, knew how to get people to do things. He was a fine loving man, very intelligent, and he had a lot of skills.

Bill Croy had a tractor, and hauled the boxes up to a storage shed near the site. But we couldn’t read the blueprints! They were in Danish! Luckily a Sierra Club member spoke Danish, and he was a contractor. We laid out the base, arranged for the concrete to come in, built the forms. We poured the foundation and luckily we did it right.

We put in a water line to the horse camp a half-mile away. Horsemen had political contacts, so the county had put water in for them and we pumped it uphill from there. We put Danish composting toilets outside. They worked fine in summer, but as soon as it got cold they didn’t. In Scandinavia they’re inside the house and work very well. So we have flush toilets, running water, and electricity, but still it’s a sufficiently simple, great little place. It accomodates 15.

Two Danish carpenters came and put up the cottage in three weeks. When they were done, Bob Coppock took them on a tour all over the country. And later some of our volunteers went to Denmark.

C&O: So as with your hikes, one thing led to another, and always to something bigger, and new connections evolved.

OM: That’s right. The man who manufactures these buildings came to California and Bob Coppock took him around. They stayed in the homes of Sierra Clubbers. Everything just sort of happened. I’ve never believed in telling people what to do. They decide what they want to do. It’s amazing how the hut functions.

C&O: Your vision was for a trail along the whole coast, with a chain of huts?

OM: Right. And also loops. You come down here and stay at this one, then go down the coast, come back, hit the main trail again.

C&O: There are some hostels along the coast now, and an official Coastal Trail Plan exists.

OM: It doesn’t include the loops, it doesn’t go up in the hills, but that’s marvelous.

The only thing I don’t want is automobiles coming to any of these huts, or near any of these trails. No way.

C&O: Does a trailside hut have less impact on the land than camping?

OM: Absolutely! Campgrounds turn into a mass of dust in the summer. And people run all over with their pots of water, and getting firewood, and there’s the garbage, the toilets—all this has to be taken care of. In our little hut, people who come to stay just do what has to be done. There are explicit rules and instructions, but there’s no caretaker. If the hut is not left in perfect condition, the visitors will never be allowed to return. That is the system, and it works.

C&O: Maybe one day we’ll have a government that will take this on.

OM: I don’t trust the government. The government will take it on and build a nice house for 100 people to stay overnight, and a paved trail to it for cars. I don’t think it’s good to put more than 15 people together. In a trailside hut they get to know one another, they cook meals together and sit around outside, enjoy their meals and make friends. For the children it’s wonderful. You can have a good time with very little. They sleep on the floor in their own sleeping bags. Did you see our mattresses? We have good mattresses. We stack them in the corner and you can put them in the loft or on the deck for sleeping, wherever you want, then put them back.

Building a hut also builds people, it builds friendships, it builds community, it’s just the way to go. I’d be glad to contribute enough money to build another hut. In fact, when I was in Denmark I picked out another hut. They send these out all over the world, and they send their carpenters to construct them now.

C&O: Other Sierra Club chapters haven’t picked up this idea?

OM: No. We could put a hut up on Montara Mountain.

C&O: Some people would object.

OM: There are always people who object. Not until automobiles don’t have any gasoline will they change their minds.

C&O: You always made sure young people were along.

OM: Right. If you get the young people along, you get to their mothers and fathers. Our hike groups had their picnics here at the Mayer home, and the mothers and fathers would come to pick up their kids. And they’d get to know one another.

The Hikers Hut is available for youth activities. I want to get the kids out on the trails so they learn something about their environment, about where they live. They don’t know anything about the geography of their county. They don’t know the names of the streams or the hills or the trees. Since the [Mid-Peninsula] Open Space District is acquiring land, it’s very important that we acquaint people with it and show them how to care for it and use it, or they’ll want to drive in it and continue to do the things they do at home.

C&O: Some projects take more than a generation. That fight at Devil’s Slide, [against a freeway bypass and for a tunnel through Montara Mountain] began in 1970, and by the mid-1990s people were getting old and tired, they were running out of health and money—and then lo and behold! Young people stepped in and put through a countywide initiative that requires a tunnel through the mountain, instead of a coastal freeway. It passed overwhelmingly.

OM: Wasn’t it great? I was pretty tired, I couldn’t hold out much longer, and they came. And they’re wonderful.

Hikers Hut Information

For information on the Hikers Hut in Sam MacDonald Park, see http://lomaprieta.sierraclub.org or call (650) 390-8411 (ext. 8 for reservations). Fees are $10 per person per night for Sierra Club members, $15 for non-members, free for children under age 10. There is a one-time $5 fee per car for parking.