The Salt Marsh Safari is free, though you have to sign up for tickets online in advance. The hour and a half boat ride through the Alviso slogh, which is the Guadalupe River flowing through the marsh lands on its way to the San Francisco Bay, comes with county park staff to guide the learning.In the San Francisco Bay, looking south east. Flowing towards us from the left comes the Coyote Creek water as it mixes with the Guadalupe River water coming in from the right. In other words, this is all water that has already flowed flowed through several of the county parks we have been visiting.
Ed Levin County Park
Penitencia Creek County Park
Joseph D. Grant County Park
Lick Observatory from the ranch house garden. So many humming birds in here.Black-tailed deer.A family of nine wild boar. This day had so much wild life!Turkey Vulture above. There were also countless wild turkeys on the ground.
Hellyer County Park
Martial Cottle County Park
Wow. That was all 28 Santa Clara County Parks. That was a great adventure for us. We saw so much wildlife, so many reservoirs supporting our drinking water, played and explored in some of our favorite places, found new places, and learned much. In fact, I continue to learn as I research the parks we visited and things we read, saw, or heard from park rangers and other visitors.
Visiting them all, one after the other, was an arbitrary challenge I came up with… And it turned out wonderfully… And it became a sweet and memorable family experience.
Technically, the train station pictured here for the one-third scale train is in the city park adjacent to the county park, though most of the track runs through the county park.
The arbitrary mission I assigned myself was to pack lunches, snacks, water, and kids into a car and visit, or revisit, each of the 28 Santa Clara County Parks within a few days. I don’t know how arbitrary missions and the accomplishment of them can be so satisfying, but it was a wonderful adventure.
The bee’s wings so fast my camera could not catch them.
Chitactac-Adams county park is a remarkable place. For hundreds of years this was the home of Native peoples. We can say that about all of California. But here, you can touch…
Those, in the picture above, are mortars ground into the rock from hundreds of years ago, made by the people who lived here along the Uvas Creek, grinding food from the land around… and you can touch them! There are many of them and it is wonderful to imagine the many hours of their use, the people who were here before in the same space as I occupy now, leaning over these bowls in the rock, and touching history.
On the annual family day, you can do crafts, watch a Native American ceremony, play traditional games, and learn. My children loved making jewelry from pine nuts that they turned into beads by grinding off the two sides and cleaning out the hole through the center.
It is a beautiful place with so much nature to look at. Some of the branches are amazing, like lightning bolts, jerking horizontally through the air above. I try, but the pictures below don’t do the lightening branches justice, try and marvel at them in person if you get the chance.
Hundreds of years with people living here along the river (the Chitactac part of the park name), nearly 100 years with an old school house (the Adams part of the park name), and then the last hundred years, until the recent fences to protect the petroglyphs went up, as a favorite jumping-off-into-the-river point for the local children. Remnants of the rope swing can still be seen, and adults can still be found who will talk of their youth and jumping off the big rock into the creek.
