The ruins of an old sanitarium

Over the past few years, I've become intimately familiar with the mountain bike trails of Tilden and Wildcat Canyon Regional Parks, two vast open spaces in the Berkeley hills. I had always found one area particularly curious: in the middle of one cow pasture, a couple of majestic palm trees sprout seemingly from nowhere near the Belgum Trail (others have noticed and photographed this curiosity). When you reach the end of the Belgum Trail, a paved road to nowhere appears -- it looks like a road that was used for car traffic at some point, but there are no signs of it now. This area, situated on the far west side of Wildcat Canyon Regional Park, always had an unusual feel whenever I rode through it -- the otherwordly palm tree, the road to nowhere. It's strange to feel such a strong sense of place when you are crossing no obvious boundaries into anywhere. On a recent mountain bike trip, I discovered that I had been missing something in my earlier trips -- I was in fact crossing into something. This area with the weird vibe had been the site of a sanitarium in the early 1900s -- the Grande Vista Sanitarium, sometimes referred to as the "Belgum Sanitarium," after the Dr. Belgum who ran the hospital. Somehow, I had missed a small information kiosk in my earlier visits that explained the story. When I returned from my trip, Google searches didn't turn up much information about the old sanitarium, so I used the photos I took of the kiosk to reconstruct the story of the Belgum Sanitarium here for online posterity.

In the following pages, you'll find the text of the information I found on the information kiosk (with a few photos on Flickr).

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[Note: A post on a geocaching site did have something to say about the roads: "I saw someone asking about the ghostly paved roads up there. I believe the government laid those to truck missiles up to that site back in the 50's or 60's. That makes sense as the roads are as big as a freeway in some spots."]