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| Summer Hills |
We started our hike from Rock Spring at about 7:30 this morning and had to hold onto our hats as we leaned into a chilly wind to climb our first hill to the Old Mine Trail. We hiked down to pick up the Matt Davis Trail near Pantoll, then walked through the forest and out onto the sinuous slopes of Bolinas Ridge, then cut off at the Coastal Trail where the Matt Davis heads down to Stinson Beach. We got all the way to the vista point shown above -- just shy of the Willow Camp Fire Road -- before we encountered another human soul.
We encountered other souls before then, from a fat-bellied fence lizard with a cockeyed tail, to a young velvet-antlered buck in the company of a much smaller (possible) sibling. The buck craned its head up into some branches and fed briefly on bay laurel leaves, and we later saw a gray squirrel scurry up a tree with a bay laurel nut in its mouth. We also saw a couple of large mushrooms, an Agaricus sp. and a grisette, and heard numerous warblers: yellow, yellow-rumped, and wilson's, plus warbling vireo. Also hermit warbler and hermit thrush, as well as trilling Pacific wren and gobbling wild turkey.
On the last leg of our loop we encountered a group of young people on the Cataract Trail who might have been part of some kind of biology class. They were all gathered around someone who had just found a forest scorpion under a rock.
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| Fence Hugging Lizard |
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| Blacktail in Velvet |
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| Farallon View |
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| Make Me Dizzy |
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