The end of the latest spate of slash-and-boom weather in Marin County brings some beautiful views—emerald hills with clouds like shredded taffeta draped across the summits (check out the pix I snapped today.) If you’re like me and enjoy watching the drama of coming and going storms, you’ll probably like hanging out on the summit of Ring Mountain Open Space Preserve in Tiburon. From this 1,000-foot aerie at the north end of the bay you can watch fronts march in, rumbling over Mt. Tamalpais to the west, muscling their way through the Golden Gate, crashing into the East Bay and Mt. Diablo, and screaming down in Arctic blasts from the north.
As a little girl I used to climb up Ring Mountain from our rambling ranch house on Paradise Drive (Marin kids could wander in those days), but back then I had four-legged company on the summit. Before this ridge-top gained open-space protection back in the 1980s, it was rangeland for a herd of terrifying cattle. Okay, they were dopey bovines, but at age 7 a big cow can be pretty scary. One time during my Ring Mountain wanderings those slough-eyed beasts turned en masse and started to stampede in my direction—probably not much more than a dull trot but again, I was 7 and much, much smaller than a cow. The lowing, lumbering beasts set me to pin-wheeling my not-very-long legs as fast as I could all the way down the mountain to the safety of my fenced-in backyard.
Today, I know better. Cows are dumb, and their desire to trample me or any human is far outweighed by their desire to eat and chew cud in piece. And yet, to this day I get a little clammy when passing cows on trails like the ones in Marin's Lucas Valley, and am glad my favored form of transit these days, my trusty Trek mountain bike, is faster than my little-girl-stumpy legs. And more importantly, faster than a cow.
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