In the 1800s, the area was mined for coal. William H. Brewer, who explored Corral Hollow in the 1860s, wrote about the area and describes its rugged features and tortuous terrain:

If you look on the map, southeast of Mount Diablo, you will find a valley, 'Corral Hollow,' watered by a curved river, enclosed in the mountains. If you are posted in newspapers you have heard of the 'rich coal mines' in said Corral Hollow. Well, here we are! As distance lends enchantment to the view, just believe it a lovely spot; but as we are here, we find it a most Godforsaken, cheerless, inhospitable, comfortless region.

Corral Hollow runs up west into the mountains, then suddenly turns southeast, the canyon much narrowing at the same time. The coal mines are near the curve, about nine miles up. The sandstone that forms the hills is broken and thrown up, and there a few seams of poor coal are found.

We took a circuitous route up, which we thought we could shorten several miles on the return by descending into the Corral Hollow canyon above its curve and following it down. We descended into it, a narrow gorge more than a thousand feet deep, down a very steep slope, our mules sliding and getting down as best they could—it was too steep to ride them—a slope of thirty degrees or more—then struck down the stream. We got into a fix.

The gorge got narrow, huge rocks had fallen in and choked it up in places, but we got our mules down nearly to the road, when the route became absolutely impassable. We spent two hours in getting them about a mile through the rocks, and then had to get them out by making them climb a slope having a average incline of forty-seven degrees, and in places over fifty degrees, for five or six hundred feet. Think of that! But they did it, and we got out safely.

—Up and Down California in 1860-1864: The Journal of William H. Brewer

In the 1960s, over 1,500 acres of Corral Hollow was opened as a privately-owned motorcycle park. In 1979, the State of California purchased the property and created the Carnegie State Vehicular Recreation Area, which spawned several generations of off-road enthusiasts. In the late 1990s, an additional 3,000 acres of land was purchased by the state for planned inclusion into Carnegie SVRA. As a result, tension has increased between recreational users of the park and natural resource groups concerned with the impact to the park's ever-diminishing population of hardy creatures.

Beginning in 2001, Team Wrong Way hosted the first Groovy Gravity Games (a.k.a 'GGG'). The first GGG had 126 riders, free shuttles to the top of the ridge, and a post-race raffle with over $10,000 worth of bike gear and a Mountain Cycle Tremor FR-1 frame. The GGG was held in 2002, 2003, 2004 and culminated in 2005 with the notorious mud fest.

In 2006, Team Wrong Way passed the torch to RideSFO. In recognition of the area's rich history, the GGG was renamed the Corral Hollow Downhill. More commonly known as CHDH, the race continued the tradition as set by Team Wrong Way—flowy turns, high-speed runways, gnarly jumps, and the infamous g-out section—followed by an epic raffle.

In 2007, RideSFO expanded the event to include a three-race series, placed a speed gun at the bottom of the g-out to clock the fastest rider, crowned per-category and overall series champions, and with permission of the park, teamed with a local Bobcat operator to build up the course to feature gnarlier jumps linked by large, sweeping berms, a mini g-out, and, across the finish line, a crowd-pleaser double.

As NorCal's closest off-road vehicle park, Corral Hollow is also a region of historical, natural, and cultural significance.

Just over the hills southeast of Livermore, an arid valley called Corral Hollow runs east to the San Joaquin plain. In the early days of the Gold Rush, Corral Hollow was a part of a major thoroughfare from the San Francisco region to the southern Sierra. It has been the site of Native American occupation, explorers' camps, travelers' way stations, mining enterprises, a brick factory, a railroad, and a town-all gone now, leaving only subtle traces on the landscape. It is the home of a remarkable variety of plants and animals, bringing many desert-adapted species surprisingly close to East Bay cities. It has long provided opportunities for research and training in field biology. But it has also been the focus of land-use disputes in recent decades, pitting ranchers, residents, and biologists against off-road vehicle recreationists. Today that struggle is heating up again, and the fate of a precious natural resource for the Bay Area hangs in the balance."

—Bay Nature (October-December 2001)