Pelican Bay Wilderness Area
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Pelican Bay Wilderness Area
Trevor Paglen and Matt Wittman

Pelican Bay State Prison (est. 1989) is infamous for being the nation’s first “super-max” prison. Located near the Oregon border north of Crescent City, it sits on 275 acres in one of the poorest and remotest corners of the state.

The site is in the midst of a grove of California’s famous coastal redwoods with a climate approaching that of a temperate rainforest. Massive tree stumps, indicating that the region was once home to a forest of truly gigantic redwoods, punctuate the area around the prison. The area is now characterized by a second-growth forest, much younger than the one it is quickly replacing. Because of the large amount of annual rainfall coupled with the relative lack of human development, nature constantly threatens to overtake the human infrastructures at Pelican Bay.

The Pelican Bay Wilderness Area is a proposal to allow the young redwood forest to reclaim the super-max prison. Only minor modifications to the current infrastructure are required: the prison’s 5,000-volt electrical fence is de-installed and all heavy doors and windows are removed. After a very short time, plants and animals will adopt the prisons infrastructure as their own. Bats would find ready-made homes in the cavernous Security Housing Units, former solitary-confinement units built largely underground. Endangered birds would find safe nesting areas in abandoned guards towers. After several years, prolific vegetation would literally tear the remains of the former prison to the ground reducing the former prison to a soft footprint on the thriving forest floor.