San Bruno Mountain State & County Park

Stop — park at the summit lot for a 360° panorama of the city, bay, and ocean, on the mountain developers wanted to dump into the bay, saved by the first Habitat Conservation Plan in the country and a small blue butterfly.

Key facts

A 1965 plan proposed leveling the mountain to fill 27 square miles of the bay
The mission blue butterfly was listed as federally endangered in 1976
The 1983 San Bruno Mountain HCP was the first Habitat Conservation Plan in the U.S.
Now one of the largest tracts of undeveloped land in the urban Bay Area

Narration transcript

Pull into the lot here and get out — this is San Bruno Mountain, and it's the one place on this whole drive where you can stand still and take it all in. From up here on a clear day the city, the bay, the peninsula, and the ocean all open up around you. And the remarkable thing is that this mountain is here almost by accident. By rights it should be gone.

In the 1960s, developers looked at this mountain and saw two things they wanted: the dirt it was made of, and the bay they could put it in. The plan was breathtaking — level the top of San Bruno Mountain and use the spoil to fill in twenty-seven square miles of San Francisco Bay for new real estate. Save the Bay and local residents fought it off by 1967, but the pressure to build on the mountain itself never let up.

What finally protected it was something very small. Up in this grassland lives the mission blue butterfly — a species listed as federally endangered in 1976. You cannot bulldoze the last home of an endangered species, so the developers and the government had to invent a new tool: a deal that let some building go ahead in exchange for permanently protecting the butterfly's habitat. That deal, signed in 1983, was the first Habitat Conservation Plan in the entire United States. Every one of the thousands of such plans across the country since traces back to this hillside and this butterfly.

So the mountain nobody could quite manage to destroy — too contested to level, too endangered to pave — became, by default, the largest piece of open wild land left in the built-up Bay Area. Take your time with the view; this is the one stop built for it. Then, when you're ready, back in the car and drop down toward a very large barn.