For the first time in three years, visitors can enjoy springtime at Big Basin Redwoods State Park by exploring miles of recently reopened trails and fire roads.
The Santa Cruz sandhills, a unique, fragmented habitat within the Santa Cruz Mountains, hosts seven kinds of plants, animals and insects found nowhere else in the world.
Beaches initially form where waves and currents move sand deposited by coastal streams. The shape of a shoreline and human structures like harbors and jetties influence where sand piles up.
Schooling fish, such as the tight bunches of anchovies and sardines found in Monterey Bay, uniformly dart away from predators, make hairpin turns, and accelerate or stop without colliding.
They sneak silently into their nests an hour before sunrise, after spending a day and a night hunting at sea. Hundreds of feet off the ground, they settle into the highest branches of old-growth trees.
The waters of Monterey Bay may obscure potential dangers. Far below the surface are seismically active faults that could be the site of offshore earthquakes in the bay.
The campaign to create the Cotoni–Coast Dairies National Monument came to a storybook ending on Jan. 12 when Pres. Barack Obama issued the proclamation three days before Martin Luther King’s birthday.