by Bob Zlomke
My wife and I have rediscovered the old salt ponds, located in the Napa-Sonoma Marshes Wildlife Area. If you haven't been there in a while, you turn south on Buchli Station Road from Las Amigas Road in Carneros, and drive to the end. When you get to the parking lot, you're there.
We were there with our dog on a recent winter afternoon and decided to head west from the parking lot, instead of taking the more obvious trail southward that we usually follow. There was a concrete building in sight, which we took as our first objective. This good-sized derelict building, perhaps thirty feet by sixty in plan, was thoroughly adorned with graffiti but would have stood out anyway in that empty marsh, so we stopped to wonder what it had been built for. There wasn't much left of it but the sturdy concrete walls and floor. Volunteer artists had created a red rose on the east side, above the door, and a blue rose on the north side, each rose three or four feet wide. I had been there before but didn't remember these festive adornments. There were probably some graffiti there before, but a collective art work like that is always changing. It evokes the marsh around it, which is steadily reverting to its old ways, before salt was made here.
To get back to the trail from the concrete building, we headed overland, and that brought our dog to life. This dog was born to pull on a leash, but now she went into high gear. She followed an irregular path over the uneven terrain, darting left and right. Whether she was following the varied scents or finding the most convenient footing, we couldn't say. We saw numerous tundra swans, a few egrets and at least one hawk, and there were smaller water birds I couldn't identify. The dog was quite interested in the birds, along with the gopher holes and traces of other wildlife. We saw the water birds all swimming away from us and imagined that we were disturbing them, which we might have been -- even as we were overwhelmed by the restful quiet of the scene. But it seems most likely that they were not interested in us, since we were neither a threat nor a food source.
There were subtle signs of human activity, both present and past. We spotted a fair-sized jet plane coming in for a landing at the nearby Napa County Airport, one so large that I had trouble believing it was coming to our small airport. There were also two smaller propeller planes that looked the right size for Napa. As we walked, we saw a few signs of old infrastructure: substantial rusty machinery that must have been a serious investment once, and a camouflaged tin shed, perhaps a hunter's blind, now converted into an information kiosk.
We eventually circled back to the parking lot in a counter-clockwise direction, having walked 3.8 miles according to Evelyn's fitbit. As we left at 4 pm, there were fifteen vehicles in the parking lot, but we had only seen two other groups the whole time and even then we weren't close enough to say hello. An unleashed dog with one group did not get close enough to rouse our normally excitable dog, who also didn't seem to mind hearing shotguns in the distance on a couple of occasions. Today she was focused on the marsh wildlife, seemingly proof against human distraction -- giving her attention to what was actually going on then and there.
When we got home I went straight to the 7.5 min USGS quad sheet (Cuttings Wharf), with what I thought was a good memory of the route we'd followed, but I couldn't find anything. Resolved: print a copy of the map and take it along next time.