Marin's 2-Pound Bigfoot

There's a furry beast lurking in Marin's darkest corners, living in self-made tunnels snaking through the County's densest brush and chapparal. It's that shadow you can't quite see, that fleeting "what was that?" as you turn the corner on a lonely trail, the phantom of Pt. Reyes.

Okay, perhaps I oversell a bit. After all, this "beast" weighs in at a modest 1 to 2 pounds, has almost no snout and a little wudge of a tail, and, even if it stands on its hind paws, would probably not be able to sniff your knee.

It's a beaver, a mountain beaver to be exact, which isn't really a beaver but a muskrat-size rodent with large teeth, dull brown fur, and a propensity for soft greenery like the young cow parsnips and fern fronds poking up all over Pt. Reyes National Seashore right now. As a lifelong resident of Marin, I'd never even heard of these little critters, scientific name Aplodontia rufa phaea, but I prefer mountain beaver or another endearing nickname, "ground bear." That moniker would fit the little bundle that I saw scurrying across the trail as I climbed up the Drakes View Trail on Mt Vision at Pt Reyes last weekend.

Apparently I'm very lucky to have seen it. The mountain beavers at Pt Reyes are a very select subspecies of mountain beaver--they aren't found anywhere else. And they were almost wiped out by the 1995 Vision Fire; apparently retreating to a little burrow carved out of blackberry brambles and coyote brush isn't a good place to retreat in a wildfire. Of the roughly 5,000 individuals that called Mt. Vision home, less than 20 were estimated to have survived. Less than 20. Maybe I saw one of those hardy (or just lucky) originals. Maybe one of their babies, or grandbabies. All I know is I hope to see more. Marin needs more ground bears and mini-Sasquatches.

Alice's Other Rabbit Hole

If you are one of the roughly 26 million people in the world who saw Alice in Wonderland over the weekend, then you've seen the current interpretation of Lewis Carroll's entry to an altered reality. But here in Marin, we've got our own twist on the classic porthole, this one experience on a walk down the western flank of 1,282-ft Mt. Vision, within Pt. Reyes National Seashore. Burned to a crisp in 1995, the peak isn't really a peak, but more of a sizable a bump in the Coast Range as it ripples through West Marin--the same as Mt. Tamalpais. While the "Vision Fire" certainly proved devastating--several homes were destroyed and the endemic mountain beaver was nearly wiped out--it had its inescapable pluses, most notably, it breathed new life into the elegant bishop pine.

Towering, twisted, and wind-carved, the endangered bishop pine makes a noble sentry in Pt. Reyes National Seashore. But it doesn't reproduce very well. The tree's grenade-like cones don't open like most cones we know; they need heat, either from a very hot day (and that happens, like, NEVER at Pt. Reyes) or fire. And so we turn to 1995, when mature bishop pines (like the skeletons shown above) burned as their cones cracked open and spewed thousands of seeds into the mountain's quartz-diorite soil (primo habitat for finicky bishop pines). Baby trees sprouted everywhere: easily 20 or more in a square yard. They grew, and grew, spidery and dense, like spindling toothbrushes with pine needles for bristles, first 5, then 10, and now, a decade and a half after the burn, towering 15 feet tall. Bending in gentle arches over Bucklin Trail, they create--you guessed it--the illusion of Alice's magic portal.

Check it out now and you'll also see lovely and rare Marin manzanita in bloom, plus Douglas iris, enormous wild lilac (ceonothus), day lilies, yellow violets, and a tangle of other wildflowers. We didn't see a rabbit or a hare or a hatter, but we did see one of those rare mountain beavers. More on that next time. Until then, have fun in the rabbit hole. Trail map and directions: Take Mt. Vision road and park at the end of the road; hike down Bucklin and up Drakes View trails, then back on Inverness Ridge Trail to your car.