Bay wetlands and YouTube award

Yesterday I went for a bike ride over the Dumbarton bridge, by the Don Edwards wildlife refuge and Coyote Point park. The bike store guy warned me that the ride over the bridge got windy, but it wasn’t bad. I passed only one other cyclist. The ride passed some grim-looking, foul-smelling mud, and some lovely wetlands wtih reeds, flowers, and various birds. I turned to the right past the toll plaza and went partway around the unpaved trail in the park, with lovely view of bay and hills, then turned around, because I wanted to make sure it would be light when I crossed back over 101.
When I got home, I looked the parks up on the internet. There is great blog Hidden Ecologies with biologist Wayne Lanier and Berkeley architect professor Cris Benton, who blog micro-ecosystems and landscapes in the south bay wetlands. Wayne’s site is Hiking with a field microscope Apparently, the bad-smelling mud isn’t toxic waste from the bad old days of waste disposal. Instead, it’s sulfur-based bacteria with metabolism that predates our oxygen-rich atmosphere. His blog has the coolest thing I’ve seen on YouTube — some of the microcritters move. The blogs link to the story of the abandoned settlement of Drawbridge, an unincorporated place along the railroad between San Jose and Newark, whose distance from law enforcement gave it a reputation for illegal entertainment.
Levees that turned marsh into commercial salt ponds are being graduallly removed, returning more of the south bay to wetlands

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