I was taking a mental vacation from work, if levitra online pharmacy only for buy cialis online a few hours, so it was purely a coincidence that I was down exploring Shollenberger Park just hours before the Sonoma County supervisors were weighing the controversial issue of whether to allow an asphalt plant to be located on the Petaluma River near the park.

(To stay current on the news, I can report that the county governing board voted 3-2 to approve the plant, ending about canada online pharmacy reviews five years of controversy. PD reporter Brett Wilkison has the comprehensive recap here and you can see some of the visual sturn und gust of the contentious hearing (one person was led away in handcuffs) right here.)

Anyway, Shollenberger Park is an interesting and easy place. There’s a two-mile loop around the 16-acre park, which can be accessed from several points near the Petaluma Marina and the Sheraton Hotel. It’s possible to extend your hike a bit too by wandering over into the adjacent Ellis Creek and Alman Marsh areas, which are also wetlands habitats. Here’s what you’ll see during a stroll here – plenty of birds and plenty of birders too. There are well-placed benches generic viagra all over the park for sitting and waiting and watching to see what moves around in the marshes or flies overhead. You can pick up a checklist at the traihead (the parking area is on South McDowell Boulevard and includes paved parking spots and facilities) and keep track of what you are spotting. We saw a variety of wildlife, including some hawks, geese and ducks. There are large, open wetlands spaces that are perfect migratory spots for all types of species, and it’s easy to see why the spot was a good settling point for the Miwok Indians several thousand years ago. Later, as California was settled and the river became an active commercial operation and Petaluma grew, the area changed as dredging was regularly done and tidal basins were formed.

By some accounts, the amount of wetlands in California is drastically shrinking. One statistic suggests that only about 10 percent of the state’s original wetlands habitat is still around. I’ve heard some take issue with both that measurement and with the definitions of wetlands used, so I won’t wander into that proverbial swamp. This blog is about where I hike and what I see, and nothing more politically charged than that, thankfully.

What you’ll also see when walking around Shollenberger Park – and it’s a surprisingly quiet place, despite http://viagraonline-forsex.com/ the presence of two highways not far away – is plenty that isn’t so buy viagra natural. That includes the back of numerous office buildings, and the river itself, which includes the very real physical structure of a manufacturing operation as well as some abandoned docking sites, the view of Highway 101 traffic, and the city’s wastewater system ponds in the distant. It’s nature in an urban setting, and in my visit, it was clearly neither a pristine undisturbed environment nor a industrial-laden park about to vanish. Or maybe it is. But like I said, not the swamp for me.

More on Shollenberger Park here and here. [nggallery id=32]

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