Читать книгу Afoot and Afield: San Francisco Bay Area. A Comprehensive Hiking Guide онлайн

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Plants use chemical inhibitors to prevent premature sprouting: only when enough rain falls will the inhibitors leach out, thereby allowing the seed to sprout at the right time.

Continuing west on the fire road, you drop steeply over rough ground and then reach a junction where a road branches left. Here you continue straight, and in about 75 feet come to a four-way junction marked by a trail post missing its number — it should be marker 12. From this junction, the Phyllis Ellman Trail, your return route, goes right, and a trail to a rock inscribed with petroglyphs heads left. Turtle Rock, just east of the junction, looks like it has a turtle crawling up it. The exact age of the ancient petroglyphs is uncertain, but they resemble ones in the Sierra that are two to three thousand years old.

Ring Mountain: view south across Richardson Bay to the Marin Headlands.

Preservation Island

Development around the Bay Area has taken its toll on the environment, including habitat loss, the introduction of invasive nonnative plants, and the extinction of species. Ring Mountain is an important island of preservation, especially for native grasslands, one of the area’s most threatened ecosystems.