Corona virus
shutters
Camp Mather
City’s historic outpost closes
for first time in 95 years
By Tom Graham
It’s a San Francisco institution that’s been around longer than the 49ers and Giants. It’s older than the Golden Gate and Bay bridges. Ironically, it’s not in the City and County of San Francisco, but it boasts of having the oldest city-owned building on its property.
And thousands of city residents have made the 180-mile pilgrimage there each year for the past 95 years. Normally, many of them would be preparing to pack the car today and head up to their favorite vacation spot.
But not this year.
Last April, the San Francisco Recreation and Park Department announced that Camp Mather, the City's family recreation camp, will not open for the 2020 season out of concern over the Corona virus.
“Mather is a social experience more than anything else, and you can’t do that from six feet apart, ” said Camp Manager Larry McNesby.
It’s not the first time that San Francisco’s camp has been forced to close. Operated as a summer facility, it was forced to evacuate three previous times in recent years, but only temporarily. It had to end its season early in 2018 due to the Ferguson Fire. And in 2018 and 2011 it also sent campers packing temporarily due to virus outbreaks. But this is the first time in its history that it has had to cancel an entire season.
The Recreation and Parks Department runs hundreds of other parks, playgrounds and recreation centers in the city, but its farthest outpost (180 miles away) occupies a unique niche.
If Golden Gate Park is the jewel of the city’s park system, then Camp Mather is surely its diamond in the rough.
Located near Hetch Hetchy, the City’s water supply, and surrounded by Stanislaus National Forest and Yosemite National Park, Camp Mather has been a treasured tradition for generations of San Francisco residents.
San Francisco officially opened Camp Mather on July 5, 1924 as a municipally run family recreation camp. But this summer, for the first time in its 95-year history, it will not re-open because of the threat of the Coronavirus.
Beloved for its rustic simplicity – and proximity to Hetch Hetchy (the City’s water source) – the Camp commemorated its 95th anniversary last summer the day after Independence Day in front of its dining hall, where dozens gathered to hear speakers recall its colorful history.
Most places change over the years. Not Camp Mather. It is a place frozen in time, where nerve-shaken citizens go to reconnect with nature. Where cell phones don’t work. And there’s no Internet, TV or radio.
And now, this year, for the first time in its history, there will be no visitors there this summer either.
But the camp is not permanently closing. It’s just taking a well-deserved haitus. Other things change, but when visitors return next year, it will appear the same. The smell of centuries-old Ponderosa pine will mix with the same fresh mountain air breathed by generations before. And the memories will come flooding back.
Simpler amenities abound, though. It's a place where city kids can learn to walk, ride their bikes, and swim. Where they can roam free, undistracted by electronic devices. Where they can wander over to the general store’s old-fashioned fountain for an ice cream cone.
“Camp Mather provides youth with the benefits of outdoor recreation including improved cognitive development, motor skills, self-esteem, and ability to make friends, while developing a sense of stewardship and love for nature,” says former Camp Manager Greg Perieff.
“In a world undergoing the effects of climate change, where we are more disconnected from nature than at any time in our history, providing an affordable nature-based vacation for families could not be more important.”
Over the years, thousands of the City’s teenagers have been employed there. For many, it was their first job. Others met their wives and husbands there. Some have vacationed at Mather all of their lives.
Michelle and Nate Collins met at Mather’s ball field in 1988, while Michelle was a guest and Nate was a breakfast cook in the kitchen. The couple got married in ’95. Nate has work at Mather for 30 seasons, Michelle for 24. Their 12-year-old son, Dean, has spent every summer of his life at Camp. And Michelle’s parents also met there.
“We keep coming back because we love the place,” says Nate. “Once it’s in your blood it’s hard to get it out.”
Ninety-three-year-old Neil Fahy, Rec and Parks’ oldest employee, got his first job at Camp in 1944 when he was 17. He worked there three seasons after the war as a naturalist and was hired back last season by Rec and Park.
“The pay is a little better,” he deadpans, “but it is a dead end job.”
Seventy-five years after his first summer in the Sierra, Neil still leads hikes in Yosemite and gives talks about its natural and cultural history. (Prior to becoming employed again, Neil volunteered as a naturalist at camp for nine seasons for the Friends of Camp Mather).
The kids flock to him like a benevolent grandfather. His favorite part of the job, he says, is the Junior Ranger Program and showing children the wonders of nature.
“That,” he says with a smile, “and eating strawberry ice cream on the deck of the General Store.”
The thing that makes Camp Mather so special is that its one of the few places where you can escape the rat race and relax. Where you get therapy for nature deficit disorder.
You don't have to shop. You don't have to clean. There's no traffic. It's quiet at night. Campers are up there to have a good time, so everyone is friendly. And everyone has been coming up for years, so they all know each other.
Once a week each year it's like the “Big Chill” for them.
Claudia Reinhart has worked at camp for 26 summers – including four as General Store manager and 12 as former camp manager.
“Mather gets in your blood,” she says. ”Coming up here makes me feel good. I keep coming back because I feel joyful up here.
“I’ve been to other camps and none of them compare,” she says. “We have the best location, infrastructure and staff.”
Mather's 100 cabins and 20 campsites can accommodate a maximum of 500 people a week. A staff of about 50 runs the place.
Located on a flat ledge above the Tuolumne River canyon, a mile from Yosemite National Park and nine miles from Hetch Hetchy reservoir (the City’s water source), Camp facilities include a swimming pool, lake and lagoon; softball field; tennis, volleyball, badminton and basketball courts; Ping-Pong tables; horseback riding stables; miniature golf, a challenging ropes course and hiking trails.
Camp activities feature volleyball, basketball and softball tournaments, campfire programs, evening talent shows, movie and bingo nights, and daytime arts and crafts.
The 11-week season usually runs from June through mid August. After the regular season, two weeks are set-aside for seniors and teens.
The camp first opened its cabin doors to city residents on July 5, 1924. Prior to that the area was a sheep ranch and logging camp known as Hog Ranch. The site also served as a transportation hub for supplying construction materials to O’Shaughnessy Dam. When the dam was completed in 1923, the camp became surplus property.
It didn’t take long for the city to figure out what to do with the 328-acre site. In 1923, San Francisco’s first female county supervisor, Margaret Mary Morgan proposed transforming it into a family recreation camp like the ones she heard about in Oakland and Berkeley.
The following year, Camp Mather’s first visitors arrived by train after an arduous 15-hour trip from the City, through the Central Valley and up through the foothills.
At the time, the camp featured a lake, cabins nestled among the pines and a rustic dining hall. Mayor “Sunny” Jim Rolph welcomed guests to camp on opening day.
Owned and operated by the City’s Recreation and Parks Department, the camp’s history actually predates its use as a logging mill and urban recreation playground. The Plains and Sierra Miwok Indians spent summers there as recently as 150 years ago. Traces of their presence, though, date back thousands of years. Approximately two-dozen bedrock grinding hole sites within camp mark the spots where they had gathered and camped.
Fast forward 100 years to 1919, when the sheep grazing area known as Hog Ranch was renamed Mather Railway Station, in honor of Stephen T. Mather, the first director of the National Park Service. The name stuck.
A large boulder in front of the dining hall supports a brass plaque that honors the camp’s namesake. It’s the same one you see in all of the national parks.
It reads, in part: “There shall never come an end to the good that he has done.”
Yosemite’s Mather District rangers remind camp visitors that both Stephen T. Mather and the camp share more than a name. They share a rich and colorful history together.
For years, people did not connect the name of the camp with the man for whom it was named. And many still mispronounce the name.
Neil points out the irony. “Some people still pronounce the camp’s name “May-ther,” which is incorrect. The man’s name was ‘Math-er,’” he explains. “Like ‘I’d rather be at Math-er.”’”
Tom Graham, a former editor and writer for The San Francisco Chronicle, has worked as a naturalist at Camp Mather for more than a decade.
