In late July, my family and I moved to Livermore, and following that move my parents came to visit us to see our new place. This was a perfect opportunity to take my parents out to some of my favorite new parks. Here are photos that my dad took of some of the south bay's marshes. Father-daughter photography!
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On the eastern edge of the Dumbarton Bridge is a network of parks that protect the wetlands: Coyote Hills Regional Park and the Newark campus of the Don Edwards National Wildlife Refuge. I visited the latter today for the first time; I was pressed for time today, so I only did a super short hike (0.7 miles) along the La Riviere Marsh Trail.
I fell in love with this park today on my easy half-mile loop on the New Chicago Marsh Trail. It was so much fun to walk on the boardwalk out over the water--it felt like floating or canoeing.
Baylands Park is a city park run by the town of Sunnyvale and Santa Clara County. The park is really geared more towards families who want to picnic and to let their kids play on nice play structures; however, there is a nice one-mile hike through a seasonal marsh.
Bair Island is a restored marsh in Redwood City. The marsh was purchased by POST (which has a nice write-up of the trail here) and is now maintained by the Don Edwards San Francisco Bay National Wildlife Refuge (their info on the park can be found here, a map can be found here, and their nature guide can be found here). Bay Area Hiker has an excellent write-up of the trail here too.
It's cool to see this area, which was cattle grazing land and then salt evaporation ponds, being restored to its natural brackish marshes. Even in July, there were wildflowers still blooming and I saw cool snails, jackrabbits, and LOTS of birds. It was so pleasant to feel the cool breeze off the bay in the summer sunshine (with the fog rolling over the Santa Cruz mountains to the west). Alviso Marina County Park is one of the key gateways to Don Edwards San Francisco Bay National Wildlife Refuge; specifically, it is near the Environmental Education Center in Alviso. The refuge is very large (30,000 acres) and has several access points; I liked this one a lot--much better than Ravenswood and as much as Coyote Hills. The birds here were TRULY spectacular. This is a birder's paradise!
Man, this park never disappoints! This was another wonderful trip to one of my favorite parks.
Shoreline Park and Stevens Creek Shoreline Nature Study Area are adjacent parks near the Google campus in Mountain View. The parks don't comprise a large area, so you can hike a pretty large percentage of the park in one visit.
Coyote Hills Regional Park is a 1,266-acres park comprised of marshland and rolling grassland covered hills. It is near the towns of Fremont and Newark, just off of the Dumbarton Bridge on highway 84. It is a gorgeous park, and I am kicking myself that I was so slow to visit it! I thought that it would be too noisy from the traffic noise, which was what I thought of Ravenswood Open Space Preserve, on the west side of the bay. But a huge part of the park is pretty far removed from Highway 84, so your experience is a tranquil one.
The park does charge an entrance fee of $5, but you get a lot of bang for your buck. The 3-mile loop that I did had three main attractions to it: 1) the butterflies at the Nectar Garden near the Visitor's Center, 2) the panoramic views of San Francisco Bay from the hilltops of the park, which overlook the Don Edwards San Francisco Bay National Wildlife Refuge, and 3) the marshes teeming with birds and rich with history--the site of a 2,000-year old Ohlone village. Read more to see pictures from each section of the hike along with a map of the route I took. Stevens Creek County Park is a lovely park in Santa Clara County right across from Picchetti Ranch Open Space Preserve. I took an in-and-out hike of about three miles today through a mixed forest of oak and bay laurel that climbed up into the sunny chaparral ecosystem.
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