Taking Refuge
At this small, sandy National Wildlife Refuge on the industrial outskirts of Antioch, you'll find great views of the San Joaquin River, and rare plants and insects that don't exist...
Geology
Serpentine Splendor
Tucked into less than a square mile of land next to a freeway, the Peninsula's Edgewood Park is a showcase for stunning wildflower diversity, all the result of our region's...
Book Review: A Dangerous Place
by Marc Reisner, Pantheon Books, 2003, 181 pages, $22. Don’t let the hyperinflated housing market fool you. The Bay Area is sit-uated atop some of the most seismically unappealing...
Above Silicon Valley, Black Mountain’s Rich Natural History
Montebello Open Space Preserve in Los Altos Hills. Trail: 5.5 mi, 1,092 ft elevation gain, loop
The Fire Down Below
A shower of magma-heated liquid and steam makes for more than just a pretty Calistoga postcard. It's a 30-million-year-old lesson in California's dynamic underground history of sliding plates, volcanic eruptions,...
What, and where, are the oldest rocks in the Bay Area?
A: The oldest rocks in the Bay Area are metamorphic rocks associated with the granitic rocks at Point Reyes, Bodega Head, and Montara Mountain. They have traveled a long way...
Postcards from Pescadero
True, there was no e-mail, snail mail, or even Pony Express, but somehow postcards from intrepid explorers of the San Mateo coast in days of yore have reached our mailbox....
Edgewood Preserve
One of the best places to experience a slice of Bay Area landscape as it might have looked before European settlement is San Mateo’s Edgewood County Park and Preserve. Offering...
Legacy of the Red Ore
Numerous animals make their homes in burrows in the hills of this Santa Clara County park, but none dig as deep as the miners who hauled mercury-laden ore out of...
The Vale of Tesla
Nestled in the hills southeast of Livermore, at the border between the San Joaquin Valley and the Bay Area, the old Tesla Mine townsite in Corral Hollow sustains a vibrant...
