Adiantum pedatum...Five-finger fern grotto
Mama and her fawnI drank it all in. I let it permeate my soul.
The eucalyptus smell, the rush of the thick fog racing over the Marin headlands,
the Bolinas Lagoon, wild dill, Mt. Tam, the bridge.
My native land.
I miss it so.
And on the rare occasion that I revisit the place of my birth I feel so complete.
I feel so at home.
At ease.
Recharged.
Not so much the city itself, but getting there.
Crossing that grand structure of the Golden Gate.
The approach up the Waldo Grade.
I don't miss the pretense of Marin, just the rural landscape.
Muir Woods, although I've been there as tour guide a gazillion times in my youth, was a whole new experience with my daughter pushing me to tackle a tough trail that had a steep grade warning at its start. Way up on the mountain at a fork in the trail we paused. Hmmm. I wished I had studied the trail map more closely before we started out. And yet there were all the bars on my cell phone in that isolation. But no one would bother to answer at the ranger station to give us directions after many tries. So we waited and along came another hiking party and we asked and they confirmed the correct path to take to return down the mountain. And when we finished the loop and returned to the ranger station a couple of hours later only then did we see the cougar and coyote warning posters.
It was a day of wildlife.
River otter in the creek through Muir Woods, a Turkey Vulture perched, uncharacteristically, in a tree along with Ravens (surveying the fawn carcass), Crayfish in the creek too. Quail and many babies in Bolinas, deer and babies at the Point Reyes Bird Observatory,
and loads of sea birds at Stinson Beach.
That gut wrenching drive, on the edge of oblivion, to Muir Woods is not for the inexperienced driver. Or for those prone to car sickness as it snakes around every runnel of Mt. Tamalpais. I was glad that it was totally socked in with fog so I couldn't see the precipitous drop into the sea from that narrow road bed. But I knew it was there. I clutched that steering wheel tightly
and hoped that my rental car had good brakes.
And off in the far reaches of Point Reyes we arrived at the Bird Observatory. I had a sticker from the PRBO on my very first car many years ago and I wanted to get another on for my car at home. A badge of a serious birder. But not a soul was there at the visitor's center. It was fun to see all that was on display there, most notably the comparative bird skulls, and to see what they had caught in their mist nets that morning on the wall charts.
We hiked one of their trails and came upon a hidden grotto filled with five-finger ferns.
What a glorious haven of endemic species!
Oh to be able to afford to live in West Marin someday....
It is just heavenly.
More pictures later....
