The University of California, Santa Cruz (also known as UC Santa Cruz or UCSC), is a public research university and one of 10 campuses in the University of California system.

Located 75 miles (120 km) south of San Francisco at the edge of the coastal community of Santa Cruz, the campus lies on of rolling, forested hills overlooking the Pacific Ocean and Monterey Bay.

Monterey Bay is a bay of the Pacific Ocean located on the coast of the U.S. state of California.

The bay is south of the major cities of San Francisco and San Jose.

The county-seat city of Santa Cruz is located at the north end of the bay.

The city of Monterey is on the Monterey Peninsula at the south end.

The Monterey Bay Area is a local colloquialism sometimes used to describe the whole of the Central Coast communities of Santa Cruz and Monterey counties.

A residential college is an organisational pattern for a division of a university that places academic activity in a community setting of students and faculty, usually at a residence and with shared meals, the college having a degree of autonomy and a federated relationship with the overall university.

The term residential college is also used to describe a variety of other patterns, ranging from a dormitory with some academic programming, to continuing education programs for adults lasting a few days.

In some parts of the world it simply refers to any organized on-campus housing, an example being University of Malaya.

Central California is a subregion of Northern California, generally thought of as the middle third of the state, north of Southern California.

It includes the northern portion of the San Joaquin Valley (which itself is the southern portion of the Central Valley, beginning at the Sacramento–San Joaquin River Delta), the Central Coast, the central hills of the California Coast Ranges, and the foothills and mountain areas of the central Sierra Nevada.

Sequoia sempervirens is the sole living species of the genus Sequoia in the cypress family Cupressaceae (formerly treated in Taxodiaceae).

Common names include coast redwood, coastal redwood and California redwood.

It is an evergreen, long-lived, monoecious tree living 1,200–1,800 years or more.

This species includes the tallest living trees on Earth, reaching up to in height (without the roots) and up to in diameter at breast height (dbh).

These trees are also among the oldest living things on Earth.

Before commercial logging and clearing began by the 1850s, this massive tree occurred naturally in an estimated along much of coastal California (excluding southern California where rainfall is not sufficient) and the southwestern corner of coastal Oregon within the United States.