The many names of Mount Sutro

San Francisco, as we all know, is densely populated. So the possibility of finding any open space for a new, and substantial, “wilderness trail” is next to impossible. Yet, that’s exactly what has happened. The Interior Greenbelt Park opened in the heart of the city earlier this month, on San Francisco’s Mount Sutro. 

Much of the physical rehabilitation of this 12-acre project involved a community group known as the Sutro Stewards. One of those stewards has been doing more than clearing trails. He has also been clearing up some long-standing confusion about the location’s name. KALW’s Steven Short spoke with him, for this edition of The Source.

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STEVEN SHORT: Let’s do something different for a change. This time, let’s start at the end: Mount Sutro is named for mining mogul, mayor, and money-man, Adolph Sutro. You knew that, right?

But let’s go back to the very beginning of our story. Back before Adolph Sutro ever imagined coming to America. Back a couple of years before Adolph Sutro was even born! Back to the time when British Navy Captain William Beechey was sailing the Seven Seas.

DAN SCHNEIDER: Yeah, it was around 1826 to 1827.

That’s Dan Schneider.

SCHNEIDER: I’m with the Sutro Stewards, and an amateur historian.

He says that while Captain Beechey’s ship provided support for other British explorers of that era, he was also a geographer and a mapmaker.

SCHNEIDER: And his job was just to go out and wait and be there. And when not in action, he was to go in and continue exploring the coastline. And on his second visit in 1827, he got permission to actually scour the hills and chart the area.

Two books resulted from these visits…

SCHNEIDER: One was on the plant life of the area, and the other was on the bird life of the area.

But the most important thing he did – at least for our purposes here – was to give a name to something. And with classic English understatement, the name he gave was Blue Mountain. But … why? There’s nothing blue about it – then, or now!

SCHNEIDER: Well it could have been a number of things. In looking back in history, it seems that "Blue" was a very popular color to name things at the time: Blue Canyon, Blue Lake.

Maybe it was popular – or maybe Beechey just lacked imagination. This is the same man, after all, who replaced the lyrical Spanish name of another mountain – Pico y Cerro de Reyes – and called it simply Table Mountain. That peak became Mount Tamalpais less than 20 years later.

Whatever the motivation – or lack thereof – Beechey’s choice of “Blue Mountain” first appeared on maps starting in 1833. And that’s what it was called when Adolph Sutro bought it a generation or so later. He never tried to officially change the name, but according to Schneider….

SCHNEIDER: Adolph Sutro actually had his own pet name for the mountain, and that was Mount Parnassus.

That name, from the home of the goddesses of creativity in ancient Greece, fit Sutro’s noble plans to open much of his land to the public, for inspiration and recreation. It’s also the source of the name of San Francisco's Parnassus Avenue. But that’s another story...

Now, you’d think that two names – one plain, one inspiring – would be enough for this unassuming peak. And it was – until the Sierra Club took a hike.

SCHNEIDER: The Sierra Club did a hike in 1910, and they wanted to christen two peaks.

One would be Mount Davidson, for George Davidson, a geographer who had worked on the hill for the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey. And the other one – the one already named Blue Mountain – would be changed to Sutro Crest. Now, according to Schneider…

SCHNEIDER: They filed for that name with the USGS Board of Geodetic Names and upon hearing it, Emma Sutro decided it wasn’t indicative of the place, or befitting enough for her father.

Of the six Sutro children, Emma was the one most responsible for her father’s estate.

SCHNEIDER: And so, she actually got with the Sierra Club and requested that it be changed to Mount Sutro.

Which it was, in 1911. All this naming and renaming became confusing. Newspapers around this time published stories about the wonderful adventures one could have, hiking the hills of San Francisco.

SCHNEIDER: The problem with the stories is they begin to misname the mountains, and they actually refer to current-day Mount Davidson as the original Blue Mountain. 

Lazy journalists!

SCHNEIDER: And this begins to propagate, at least locally, a misunderstanding of the peak names. So I began digging around and found another place-names book printed in, I think, the late 1990s, that again mentioned that both Mount Sutro and Mount Davidson may have been called Blue Mountain at one time.

Schneider knew this was a mistake and really hoped to correct this misunderstanding.

SCHNEIDER: And so I called the Board of Geodetic Names. It took a while to figure out what and where they were, but when I got a hold of them, they were able to send me the original documentation from Emma Sutro and George McCaddy of the Sierra Club that basically described and explained this crazy naming of the mountains that we’ve been discussing.

Now, I wasn’t going to bring this up, but since Schneider mentions “this crazy naming of the mountains"...

SHORT: Well now, here’s a question. You’re not going to be able to answer this necessarily, but “Mount Sutro” is only 908 feet high. (laughs) Now according to dictionary.com, a mountain is usually “greater than 2,000 feet." So “Mount” Sutro isn’t even half – isn’t even half a mountain.

SCHNEIDER: It pays to name your mountains early, before they come up with more definitive guidelines.

And maybe that explains Captain Beechey’s original uninspired designation. He named it Blue Mountain ... because he could.

On San Francisco’s Mount Sutro, I’m Steven Short for Crosscurrents.

This story originally aired on June 1, 2010.