First a little geography lesson. There are a number of faults running through California. Probably the most important is the San Andreas fault. This is the one that lead to the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. It turns out that it is the San Andreas where two major plates meet - the Pacific plate and the North American plate. The Pacific plate has a tendency to move north and the North America plate moves south, hence the pressure that builds up and every once in a while is released as an earth quake.
Check this out.
The "you are here" is from Muir Beach, in Marin County, north of San Francisco. In the map you can see the San Francisco bay and the San Andreas fault just to the west of the city. A little north of this is a piece of land jutting out into the ocean, Point Reyes National Seashore. The interesting thing is that this land is on a different plate from the North America plate, and it is slowly moving north. Geologists estimate that this land was next to Monterey Bay about 5 million years ago.
We had intended to visit Muir Woods, a park with old growth Redwoods, but the traffic and people were overwhelming. Perhaps because it was Good Friday and it's so close to the city and a number of tour groups offer trips out there, a lot of people decided to go on the same day we were planning to go. The parking lots were full and cars were parked on the (narrow) road for miles. We decided to give up on the old growth Redwoods. So, we drove north to Point Reyes.
On the way to Point Reyes we stopped at a state park with Redwoods. The park has old growth trees, but the trail to them was closed. It was just not our day! But we did see young growth trees and they were very impressive.
Point Reyes is mostly range land that was given to different families by the Mexican government before California was a part of the US. The same families continue to use the land. This area was also visited by Sir Francis Drake when he circumnavigated the globe. There is now a lighthouse on the western most point.
This place was roughly directly west of our RV park so we drove straight inland to get to Petaluna. This was through a part of Marin county that we had heard from the San Francisco tour guide that George Lucas (of Star Wars fame) has some land, called Skywalker Ranch. We don't think we saw his ranch, but the area was very beautiful with rolling hills and cattle grazing. We also saw some olive orchards. During our tour of the city we learned about an organic olive farm in Marin county and we did drive by this farm (but no tours!).
The next day was our day for touring wine country - Sonoma valley and Napa valley. But first we found another state park with old growth Redwoods (maybe we're a little obsessive here) and so we took a short detour to the Russian River and Armstrong State Park to see the trees. It was well worth the drive.
This was perhaps the largest tree there - over 300 feet tall with a diameter of 14.6 feet.
From the park we drove over to Napa valley and took a tour of a winery. The person in the visitor's center had described it as a rare type of winery; one that uses a "biodynamic" approach.
As described by our guide, biodynamic goes beyond organic and sustainability. There are philosophical, esthetic, and holistic aspects to this approach. The farm has 80 acres but they farm only 40. They do landscaping to encourage bees. They also make a spray for the plants that is made out of sylica that was packed into cows horns and buried for a number of months. The thought is that sylica on the leaves enhances the photosynthesis. (Editorial note - that may be true but it doesn't seem very natural or organic...)
This is a very high-end operation. They have barrels with custom wood from France - over $1,000 per barrel! In addition to using grapes from their own vineyard they also buy grapes from other suppliers.
Looks yummy, right? We were able to sample some of the biodynamic wine and it was fine, but we ended up purchasing chocolate rather than wine! All in all, we were happy to have learning a little something about making wine and the general industry.
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