Muir Woods

May 2025

This was my third visit to Muir Woods, but the first in my increasingly last-in-first-out photo processing queue. My longest Muir Woods walk by far, as we hiked up to Cardiac Hill via the Dipsea Trail and back down Stapelveldt and Ben Johnson (trail guide).

It is not, in reality, anything like as dark as this under the canopy of the redwoods on a bright May day, but I was wearing dark and red-tinted sunglasses and was keen to recreate the experience by underexposing my photos too.

It’s called Cardiac Hill, because, obviously. We shared it with people running the Stinson Beach marathon:

View from Cardiac Hill

If you ascend Dipsea and then go down Stapelveldt / Ben Johnson as we did, you have to do the ascent mostly in the sun, but then you get to do the return in the shade:

Moss, Muir Woods Sunlit redwoods, Muir Woods Redwood canopy, Muir Woods Fern uncoiling Forest floor, Muir Woods Sunlight, Redwood Creek, Muir Woods

All photos.

My photography on Wikipedia

Originally posted on hachyderm.io, posted here with minor edits.

I release a lot of my photos under the Creative Commons Attribution licence. It’s fun to see which of them have popped up on Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, although it doesn’t line up with my favourites among my own photographs.

Wikipedia: Crown Sydney and a few variants in other languages make heavy use of photographs I took of the Crown Sydney construction site, or at least of its surroundings. (Most of them are cropped down to the construction site by the editors.)

Construction at Barangaroo Barangaroo towers Barangaroo construction at sunset

This photograph of the Eastern Suburbs viaduct is used in two articles related to it, Wikipedia: Eastern Suburbs & Illawarra Line and Wikipedia: Eastern Suburbs railway line:

Eastern suburbs rail line, from Sydney Tower

This, cropped and brightened by a Commons editor, is used on the Wikipedia: New South Wales Rural Fire Service article. Not discussed in the article: that truck is delivering Fire Santa, who visits kids at farm gates in the leadup to Christmas.

Fire Santa cometh!

The next two are I think the only two I have inserted myself, and appear in Wikipedia: Raging Waters Sydney. At the time I took them, the only Commons photographs of Raging Waters (then Wet ‘n’ Wild) were during construction, so I took a camera there to photograph the completed rides for Wikipedia. The first of the two also appears in Wikipedia: 2013 in amusement parks.

Tower 1, Wet'n'Wild Sydney: Bomborra and Tantrum Wet'n'Wild Sydney: H2Go Racers

This photograph is used on the Ukrainian language article about Bay Area Rapid Transit (Wikipedia: Метрополітен Затоки Сан-Франциско):

BART arriving

I extensively photographed the University of Sydney jacaranda a few years before it blew over, and this one appears on both the English and German articles about the tree (Wikipedia: Jacaranda, University of Sydney). It’s something of an exception to the “my faves don’t appear on Wikipedia” experience, I do like this series.

Jacaranda carpet, Sydney University

A cropped version of this photograph from a plane is used in both Wikipedia: Sierra Point (Brisbane) and Wikipedia: Dakin Building, neither of which I could have told you anything about when I saw them from a window seat in 2016.

Bay Area from above

Finally, it is honestly quite an honour to have this used in Wikipedia: Sydney Harbour Bridge, in both the English and Spanish articles:

Aboriginal and Australian flags above Sydney Harbour Bridge

Quite a few other photos of mine have been uploaded to Wikimedia Commons, although not used in articles. All of my Creative Commons licenced photography (around 4000 photographs) can be found via this Flickr search.