After attending the funeral of George H. Cardinet Jr. on Jan. 26, his longtime friend Hulet Hornbeck found a quote that he believed summed up the leadership ability of the man that many call the Father of the California’s Trail System.
The quote is from Antoine de Saint-Euxpery, the French writer and aviator perhaps best known as author of The Little Prince. It reads:
“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.”
That, Hewlet says, is “exactly what George did for trails.”
Several hundred people turned out to honor George at his funeral at St. Bonaventure’s Church in the Bay Area town of Clayton. Cardinet, 97, died on Jan. 19 while vacationing in Mexico City with his friends Nancy DuPont and Jennifer Jelich.
Before the trip, George, in his characteristic way, had studied about the Mexican pyramids, which he had hoped to visit. “He never did see the pyramids,” Nancy says, “but he had learned more about them than most people.”
He was like that, she says. “George was a planner,” she says. “On our 10-day rides, he would spend an entire year studying the maps of a wilderness area, then go in and pre-ride every step before he took a soul on it.”
And he was a “pusher – he kept going until he got results.”
He is survived by a brother, Walter M. Cardinet of Auburn; a son, Dr. George H. Cardinet II and daughter-in-law Claudia Cardinet of Winters; and daughters Maureen Casteel and Michele “Pinky” Tomasulo and sons-in-law Gary Casteel and Anthony Tomasulo, all of Concord. His wife, Margaret, died in 1992. There are 13 grandchildren and 16 great-grandchildren.
At the funeral service, speakers told of George’s love of horses and his tireless efforts to ensure that there were places available in which to ride them.

Pack String Beginnings
George H. Cardinet Jr. was born in San Francisco on April 8, 1909 to George and Mary de Sales (Morgan) Cardinet. He was raised in Oakland, and his interest in horses was awakened when he spent summers as a teenager working on a pack string in the Sierra Nevada.
After graduating from St. Mary’s High School, George earned his living working for the Cardinet Candy Company, which had been co-founded by his father. He succeeded his father as president and ran the company until he sold it in the 1970s.
But his life’s work was his crusade to preserve places for horseback riding in a world in which suburban development was paving over farmland and open spaces at an alarming rate.
In 1939, when George bought a ranch in Concord and moved his family to Contra Costa County, fewer than 80,000 people lived in the County, which was known for its orchards, and just 4,400 lived in Concord. The county now has a population of more than one million.
In the decades that followed his move, George, with the help of his many friends, forged many of the trails on Mount Diablo. The National Park Service credits him with having mapped and routed more than 200 miles of trails throughout the greater East Bay region.
Hulet, who met George in 1957, formed an alliance with George during Hulet’s two decades working for the East Bay Regional Park District. In the late 1960s and early ’70s, George’s persistent lobbying helped to persuade the California legislature to grant the park district the power of eminent domain in order to dedicate land in Alameda and Contra Costa counties for trails, Hewlet says.
That power, he says, was instrumental in developing trail links between the East Bay parks and Mount Diablo State Park.

Inspiring Leader
George was a founding member of the California State Horsemen’s Association, the Concord-Mount Diablo Trail Ride Association, the Heritage Trails Fund and the Amigos de Anza, a group that supports the Juan Bautista de Anza Historic Trail, which was designated a national historic trail in 1990.
The Anza trail, which follows the route that Anza took in 1775 and 1776 while leading 198 immigrants and 1,000 head of livestock from Sonora, Mexico, to settle in the Bay Area, held a special place in his heart. He told writer Doni Hubbard of Los Altos Hills that riding a white horse along the trail from Mexico to San Francisco in 1976 while wearing full Spanish regalia was the “best time of my life.”
She also recalls one time when she begged George, on short notice, to help her lobby the Los Altos Hills council on a trail issue. She asked him to show up at 6 for a 7:30 p.m. meeting in order to discuss the issues ahead of time. To her shock, he arrived on her doorstep at 6 a.m. that day to help her shape the presentation – but was unable to stay for the meeting because he already had a speaking engagement for that night.
Doni Hubbard says she learned important lessons from George about trail activism: “Care enough to be involved or risk losing what you enjoy -- and don’t just care about your sport, have a community interest.”

Drills & Trail Thrills
George also enjoyed mounted drill teams, He served as drill master for the Concord Flying Horsemen, a junior drill team that won the California State Horsemen’s Association Drill Team Championship in 1950. More recently, just five years ago, he helped organize the Amigos de Anza drill team, a team now led by his daughter Michele.
The drill team members in their period Spanish costumes provided a color guard at George’s funeral.
George also led countless trail rides throughout wilderness areas in California, and particularly in the back country of Yosemite National Park, which he loved, and continued to ride until he was in his early 90s.
Nancy recalls one Yosemite ride that George, who was then 85, led from the Huntington Lake area to Jack Ass Meadow. The rain was torrential, and some members of the party became lost for a while before George rescued them. Then part of the trail was blocked, forcing the reunited group to take an alternate route that George had not previously ridden.
The steep and challenging trail was eroded in places, making the ride a harrowing experience. When the group finally arrived in camp, one rider complained to the others that they should tell George that it was the worst piece of trail she had ever seen in her life, Nancy recalls.
When the complaint made its way to George, he replied, “Tell her she should see the one we didn’t take!”
After the ride, George responded in typical fashion by working to improve the trail. He joined with Nancy and Doni Hubbard to work with the U.S. Forest Service, organizing a group of volunteers and teaching them how to pack into the wilderness and repair the route.
“Whenever George went out in the wilderness, he left it better for his visit,” Nancy says.
Indeed.
Donations can be sent to the George H. Cardinet Jr. Memorial Trails Fund, P.O. Box 612, Clayton, CA 94517. For more information about the Anza trail, visit www.nps.gov/juba/.