Room to Breathe: The Wild Heart of the San Francisco Peninsula

With San Francisco and ''Silicon Valley'' just down the road, the hills and valleys of the San Francisco Peninsula would have been teeming with residential development had it not been for a group of visionaries who forty years ago created the Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District*. More than two hundred miles of trails bring hikers, horseback riders, and bicyclists through 60,000 acres of redwood and mixed evergreen forests, oak woodlands, meadows, and streams.

Room to Breathe is a community celebration of over 100 color photographs and paintings coupled with prose and poetry--preserve users paying homage to the gift of wildness in our midst. It serves as a keepsake for those who know this land well; and for those who don't, it will be a revelatory introduction.

In the words of the Measure R Campaign, which founded the Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District in 1972: ''Open space is our green backdrop of hills. It is rolling grasslands, cool forests in the Coast Range, orchards and vineyards in the sun. It is the serene, unbuilt, unspoiled earth that awakens all our senses and makes us whole again. It is room to breathe.''

*The Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District encompasses northwestern Santa Clara County, southern San Mateo County, the San Mateo County coastside, as well as a small portion of Santa Cruz County.