Mount Sutro

Mount Sutro is distinguished by its dense, towering canopy of blue gum eucalyptus trees, which create a cool, damp microclimate that persists even on the city's hottest days. Rising nine hundred and nine feet near the center of San Francisco, this hill was once an open landscape of coastal scrub and grass before the German immigrant and former city mayor Adolph Sutro purchased the land in eighteen fifty. He spent decades planting thousands of trees across the slopes, transforming the terrain into the shadowed, forested environment that defines it today.