Pescadero Creek County Park in La Honda is reopened, reports the Mercury News. It was closed when a pair of mountain lions came within a few feet of two hikers late Sunday afternoon.

The brothers stood their ground, shouting and swinging a stick, and after several minutes the lions retreated. On Monday, wardens led a pursuit of the lions using trained hounds, and by Tuesday they were confident the animals had fled the park.

This type of encounter, involving multiple aggressive cougars, is "rare but not unheard of," said Patrick Foy, Fish and Game warden. The brothers reacted correctly to the threat, Foy said, adding that running away could have triggered the lions to pursue them. [..]

"That’s what’s very odd about this," he said. "Most lion attacks, the victim never sees it coming."

A 37-year-old woman walking on Sharp Park Beach in Pacifica was knocked down by a wave and carried out to sea by the current Saturday afternoon, reports KTVU.

When they arrived, friends of the woman, who has been identified as Amy Kelleen Nicholson, told them she had been walking near the surf line when a wave knocked her down. A strong current then swept her further into the water, according to the Police Department.

Nicholson was unresponsive when she was eventually located, and paramedics and firefighters administered medical aide to her. She was transported to Seton Medical Center, but attempts to resuscitate her were unsuccessful. Police say she was pronounced dead at the hospital.

A reader at Pacifica Riptide notes:  "Be especially careful at Sharp Park Beach, where the ledge drops off some 5 to 10 feet about 10 feet out from the water line. The trough there is brutal."

The Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District’s newest ranger, Elizabeth Wright, was sworn in as a peace officer at the board of directors meeting last night.

Once her training is complete, Wright will work out of the District’s Skyline field office serving preserve visitors in San Mateo County’s Skyline and Coastside areas. She is a native of San Jose, and has a degree in criminal justice from San Jose State University. Wright worked as a police officer for the City of Fremont between 1991 and 2001, holding several different positions including street patrol officer, drug abuse resistance education officer, training officer and crisis/hostage negotiator. 

She left law enforcement to pursue a career in woodworking and enjoy a slower pace of life in the Sierra Nevada foothills.  As a journey level carpenter and general contractor, Wright specialized in building log homes and remodeling kitchens and baths. She recently moved back to San Jose, and graduated at the top of her class from a nine-week law enforcement academy to become a ranger.

“Having grown up in the rapidly expanding Bay Area, I can appreciate how important it is to set aside such beautiful lands for everyone’s enjoyment.  I am proud to be protecting the land, the wildlife, and the people who enjoy the preserves,” Wright said. After taking the state of California’s peace officer loyalty oath, Wright asked her mother to pin on her new badge.

District rangers are stewards of 58,000 acres of public open space land. They interact with preserve visitors providing interpretive and educational information, first aid, and law enforcement. Rangers also patrol and maintain roads and trails, complete projects that enhance and restore the natural environment and work to prevent and fight wildland fires.

An approximately 350 lb wild boar has been seen in Grandview Terrace area of Half Moon Bay.  According to the county’s alert service, boars tend to run in packs.  If you see a boar do not approach, call police immediately at 726-8286 or dial 911

The public now has access to sixteen years of biological data from 41 Northern California beaches through the Beach Watch online query system.

Beach Watch was founded in 1993 and covers the outer coast of central California between Bodega Head in Sonoma County through Año Nuevo State Reserve in San Mateo County, as well as beaches inside Tomales Bay and Bolinas Lagoon. Along each beach segment, live bird and marine mammals are counted, dead vertebrates are documented, human and dog activities are recorded, and data is collected on oil and tarball abundance and distribution, vegetation/algae wrack, invertebrates, and stream and lagoon status (opened or closed to the ocean).
 
The online query system allows public access to data on live birds and marine mammals and dead vertebrates.  Users can choose different filters and groupings to view the data; for example, the data can be queried for specific species, by individual beaches, or for a particular date range.  The data are summarized and can also be displayed in graph form. 

The Beach Watch shoreline-monitoring program is a partnership of the Gulf of the Farallones National Marine Sanctuary and the Farallones Marine Sanctuary Association.

With the cliffs eroding daily, federal money is not likely for the blufftop apartment buildings on Pacifica’s Esplanade, reports Julia Scott in the County Times.

It remains to be seen whether it’s too late to save 330 Esplanade, which was red-tagged last month, or 320 Esplanade, which was partially evacuated last week. But with the ocean starting to creep up on adjacent homes on Esplanade, Speier is calling for a comprehensive solution rather than a piecemeal approach to protecting one building at a time. [...]

Another option would be to form a neighborhood improvement district that would tax locals to pay for construction work.

While Esplanade Apartments has begun a $6 million engineering "fix" that will hopefully halt bluff retreat before it can undermine the buildings’ foundations, their neighbors to the north at Lands End Apartments ?are preparing for an emergency fix of their own. Previously, the complex has been relatively unaffected by erosion, which explains why its cliff has no shore protection whatsoever. But Lands End has lost 50 to 60 feet of bluff since the summer. The edge of the bluff is now within 55 feet of one of the buildings and 50 feet from their parking lot, according to Rob Anderson, a project engineer with RJR Engineering Group.

Lands End is about to request an emergency permit from the California Coastal Commission to place large protective boulders, also known as riprap, at the bottom of their cliff as a temporary measure. In the long term, Anderson says a whole two-mile stretch of beach along Esplanade and Palmetto Avenues could benefit from a major collaborative engineering effort, like an artificial reef.

Monday, Scott gave us a good description of the $6 million in desperate measures employed by the owners of 330 Esplanade.

Workers will drill more than 200 nails 50 feet into the cliff behind 330 Esplanade, which was evacuated in December, and secure them in the sandy cliff with several layers of concrete. Next, a wire mesh with steel plates will form a smooth shield against rain and wind erosion. A final stage will involve erecting a sea wall in back of 330, 320 and 310 Esplanade to deflect the pounding current, which undermines the bluff from below.

The owners of 320 Esplanade will almost certainly decide to extend the concrete wall onto their property as well, which would mean two construction rigs working side by side by the end of the week, said Tony Fortunato of Engineered Soil Repairs. "The longer you wait, the more you lose," he warned. [...]

Even if the owners of all three apartment buildings chip in together, $6 million could be a lot of money to spend for 50 years of habitation. Millard Tong, owner of 310 and 320 Esplanade, spent a total of $6 million to purchase both buildings back in 2002. And Farshid Samsami and Delfarib Fanaie spent $1.45 million to purchase 330 Esplanade in 2004, records show.

Esplanade Apartments representative Bart Willoughby wants to get money from the Federal Emergency Management Agency for the project, but those funds are generally used to protect public property.

In 2003, San Francisco’s Ocean Beach Task Force recommended several proposed long-term solutions to erosion at Ocean Beach. One option was a strategic retreat from the coastline, moving a nearby sewage tunnel and the highway inland, reports the Examiner.

Now, the city may have to shore up the bluff with a rock wall that will likely only compound its problems.

In recent weeks, the bluffs along Great Highway south of Sloat Boulevard have yielded to powerful waves stirred up by this year’s El Niño weather system in the Pacific Ocean. In the most-extreme areas, the bluffs have retreated more than 70 feet from where they were in a 2007 assessment. In one area, the guardrail of Great Highway has crumbled off the road.

Worse, the waves are now within 20 feet of a mammoth sewage tunnel that lies deep under Great Highway, Department of Public Works project manager Frank Filice said. He said if left untended, and if waves through the rest of winter are anything like they were the past few weeks, that 14-foot-wide tunnel could be breached, spilling as much as 10 million gallons of raw sewage onto the beach. [...]

But advocate Dean LaTourrette, director of coastal advocate organization Save the Waves, said the rock wall could cause further erosion in the long run, and the bad erosion now being seen could partly be caused by the rock walls installed in the 1990s just to the north. The walls also can create a safety hazard and impact wildlife habitat, he said.

The Chron says the Army Corp of Engineers had a plan also:

In 1994, storms erased 30 to 40 feet of the coastline in the same area south of Sloat. A 1996 report from the Army Corps of Engineers recommended building a permanent seawall in the area.

Ian Butler took this photo at Nurdle Beach, the new nickname for Pacifica’s northernmost beach.  Nurdles are small particles that Styrofoam (polystyrene) is made of. According to Butler, writing for the Riptide:

The entire beach was covered in a white layer of the particles, which probably numbered in the millions. Recent rains washed them from Pacifica and Daly City streets into the storm drains, down the "Secret Waterfall" and into the ocean. They were then washed up onto the beach during high tide. They will all wash away in a day or two and head out to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, poisoning birds, fish, turtles, and sea mammals all the way.

The National Weather Service has issued a high surf advisory for Monday from 4am to midnight. Waves from 13 to 15 feet are expected.

A high energy wave train is expected to bring large waves to the north coast by dawn monday morning. These large northwest swell will persist along the coastal waters through monday and will  range from 13 to 15 feet with periods of 16 seconds. Swell of this size will produce large breaking waves and strong rip currents within the surf zone.

Biologist Karen Swaim, speaking at the San Francisco Board of Supervisors on December 16, makes the case that until Sharp Park Golf Course was built, the land could not have been San Francisco garter snake habitat.

The presentation is illustrated with historical aerial photographs that give a good indication of how the land changed over the decades, beginning in 1928.

"This is a photograph from 1928. There is no golf here. The land surrounding Laguna Salada to the East, to the South, to the North, everywhere except the ocean, was agricultural fields. It is not pristine upland coastal prairie that would’ve been high quality upland for the San Francisco garter snake. You can see that there is a major channel up here [points to Laguna Salada] that illustrates there was connection to the ocean."

"1946 is the very first year the San Francisco garter snake and the California red-legged frog were documented… there are 46 [garter snakes] he gets over two years, and golf has already been here for 16 years."

"In 1978 Sean Berry did his studies and he observed 37 San Francisco garter snakes along this area… and again golf has been in place for 46 years"

"1989 - This [photo] is not long after the the El Nino storms and the big storms of the eighties that resulted in a lot of sea water intrusion into the lagoon. By now, the sea wall is mostly constructed… From 1986 to 1988 some studies were done and no San Francisco garter snakes were found in this area after all the salt water intrusion. That was to a large part because the red legged frog was wiped out by the salt water."

"We’re back to present day conditions… the frogs are prolific west of highway one, they are not in any trouble at all west of highway one. San Francisco garter snakes are concentrating again at Mori Point pond and horse stable pond."

"You need to protect the sea wall. You need to have a fresh water managed habitat currently for this species to recover it, and that is all there is to it."

This video is edited from the full supervisor’s session and transcribed by MW blog. The original (anonymous) blogger is clearly pro-golf, but the biologist seems to be merely pro-snake.