Neil Fahy, San Francisco's oldest city employee at 99, has been leading nature hikes at Camp Mather since the camp was 20 years old — with one long interruption for a career in geology.

The evening primrose blooms after dark along the trails near Camp Mather, and Neil Fahy knows exactly when to be there. He first learned the timing in 1944, when he arrived at the San Francisco-owned camp in Tuolumne County at age 17, hired to fill a gap left by the wartime labor shortage. He is 99 now. He still leads the walk.

Fahy is San Francisco's oldest city and county employee, working as a camp naturalist, historian, and Recreation Leader at Camp Mather — the roughly 337-acre summer retreat the SF Recreation and Parks Department operates in the Sierra foothills, about 180 miles east of the city on the edge of Yosemite National Park. The camp opened July 5, 1924, built on land that had housed a lumber operation supporting construction of the O'Shaughnessy Dam at Hetch Hetchy, and was later named for Stephen T. Mather, the first director of the National Park Service. This summer is its 102nd season.

Between his first summer and his return, Fahy had a long intermission: a career as a geologist with Chevron. He came back to Camp Mather as a volunteer in 2008. In 2023, the Recreation and Parks Department promoted him from volunteer to paid Recreation Leader — a title that made him, at 96, the oldest employee on the city payroll. His work includes running the junior naturalist program, leading campfire programs, and shepherding campers on the evening walk to watch the primrose open and attract its moth. Asked why he keeps returning, he told a reporter: "Enjoying the wonder of the natural world, and sharing that wonder with others."

The camp runs ten weeks each summer, hosting up to 500 campers a week across 90 cabins and 20 tent sites. San Francisco residents get first priority through an annual lottery. It is one of only two out-of-city facilities operated by SF Rec & Park — the other is Sharp Park in Pacifica.

The camp also sustains a parallel population: staff who return summer after summer and build something resembling a small town in the interim. Kyle Haggerty, 26, is in his seventh summer supervising archery — his colleagues call him "Robin." He has become a kind of institutional memory for newer employees, explaining the rhythms of a place that runs outside ordinary city logic. "You're just out in the dirt and woods, and you're working with the people you live with the whole summer," Haggerty told SFGate. "It's make or break, you know? You either get to know people and have a good time … or it doesn't work out."

Tom Graham, a Riordan High School graduate from the class of 1966 and a former Camp Mather staffer, told the San Francisco Chronicle what draws people back: "Camp Mather is one of those bedrock places you go to where nothing seemingly changes in a world where everything else around you changes."

Fahy is the most concentrated version of that continuity. His connection to these trails spans 82 years, counting from his first summer, with a long career in geology in between. The primrose was blooming in the dark in 1944, when the camp was 20 years old, and he was there then too.