California’s public Garden of Eden
Standing alone in the “Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District,” I thought I had stumbled upon a “portal to a prehistoric world,” said Bonnie Tsui in The New York Times. Everything in this Northern California greenbelt is “supersized in a kind of lush, Land Before Time way.” That I was only an hour south of San Francisco made the setting “all the more miraculous.” Composed of 26 preserves, the 60,000-acre district was established to create “a corridor of public space that reaches to the ocean.” With a “lacy green canopy of giant redwoods” above and “enormous sprigs of clover underfoot,” I felt lost in a fairyland. Hundreds of miles of trails lead hikers and equestrians through open meadows, past fragrant eucalyptus groves, and along windy bluffs that drop down to the Pacific. The trailheads lie within an hour of several urban areas, but city life seems millennia away.
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