Foresters have been clearing out the eucalyptus trees from the hillside above my apartment. They've been working for months and aren't done yet. These are some especially-tough eucalyptus trees. Late in the 1800s, the entrepeneur Adolf Sutro planted eucalyptus trees, hoping to build wooden things out of them. But Sutro planted the wrong kind of eucalyptus trees, accidentally importing a tough and gnarly kind that was difficult to cut.
![[photo: hillside with some scattered trees among the debris of some felled trees]](https://lahosken.san-francisco.ca.us/importable/2023/eucalyptus-down-many.jpg "hillside with some scattered trees among the debris of some felled trees")
![[photo: the trunk of one felled tree]](https://lahosken.san-francisco.ca.us/importable/2023/eucalyptus-down-one.jpg "one felled tree")
Sutro built many things in San Francisco (not using those trees). A lot of them are falling apart. E.g., Sutro Baths was a grand building enclosing some swimming pools down by the ocean. But now it's exposed pools, the ocean waves wearing it down bit by bit.
If you went walking among the eucalyptus trees you'd see that they shed a lot of bark, like sheets of thick paper. Not many plants around here are strong enough to grow under that bark; thus the forest was on track to self-perpetuate. It seemed that Sutro's Forest would outlast his buildings, an enduring monument to his mistake, a cautionary tale about an entrepeneur who got lucky at mining and convinced himself he knew which kind of trees to import. Maybe someday there will be some local California scrub growing on that hillside instead. Maybe someday. It's taking a while to clear out the eucalyptus. It's really tough.
