Vasco Regional Preserve Open for Public Tours
At Vasco Regional Preserve, stone balls the size of dinosaur eggs litter the landscape, the winds burrow into stone, and cup-sized pools tucked into sandstone outcrops teem with fairies (of...
Science and Nature
Dance of the Cranes
The Cosumnes Preserve near I-5 in the Central Valley is a surprising mosaic of flooded rice fields teeming with birds, breached levees creating new forests, and a river reclaiming a...
Restoration of Dutch Slough
In the city of Oakley, Dutch Slough has one foot on the reed-covered banks of the Delta in northeastern Contra Costa County and the other toe-to-toe with a housing development....
Eastshore Park, Two Decades in the Making
Eastshore State Park, an 8.5-mile-long ribbon of East Bay shoreline between the Bay Bridge and Richmond’s Marina Bay, is proof that many good things don’t come easily. The park is...
New Life For The Laguna
Thirty years ago, few people gave a second thought to the Laguna de Santa Rosa, the North Coast’s largest freshwater wetland. The once-teeming marshland had become a dumping ground. But...
A Landscape Renewed by Fire
Enter the woods on Inverness Ridge and pause for a moment to listen. Natural history weaves itself into stories for those willing to hear—whether teased from the patterns in stone,...
Fire on the Ridge
On a clear January day in 2005, I took a walk up from my house on the east slope of Inverness Ridge to the trail that runs south from Mount...
Getting Burned
Fire dwells deep in the human psyche. It is among the oldest of words, the most elemental of tools, and the primary means by which early man projected himself onto...
Out of the Flames
On October 3, 1995, a wildfire erupted on Mount Vision at Point Reyes National Seashore. Before the flames were extinguished a week later, 12,000 acres of this popular park had...
California Ocean Protection Act
In response to a landmark state ocean bill signed into law last year, top state agencies are taking aggressive steps to protect California’s coastline and marine habitats from overfishing and...
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