The technical term in the literature would be wildland-urban interface [1], and Santa Rosa should be pretty easy to find on this 2010 map of the WUI [2] when you zoom in on the Bay Area .
Semi-related: What's the deal with all the empty land between SF and San Jose? I get that it's mountainous, but it seems like at $2,000,000 for a tiny parcel of land someone could figure out how to build on it
Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but it kinda looks like a national forest or something when you drive along 280
The data for Marin county weighed in at 77GB and covered around 520 square miles[1]. The blogger was actually involved in the project and provides a nice link to one of the areas[2][3].
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Nit pik: there's a ton of development west of I-280. Just look at Google Maps. You may have in mind the Rancho Corral de Tierra nature preserve (https://www.nps.gov/goga/rcdt-factsheet.htm), which abuts I-280 for a long section at the north of the peninsula. But on the other side of that, especially along the coast, is significant development. Rancho Corral seems only loosely connected to other preserves, and in general the entire peninsula has significant development, just not very dense or obvious from the highway--on Google Maps be sure to zoom in so you can see the little communities and houses scattered around the lower-half of the peninsula, which is presumably why all those nature preserves cannot be merged. So the movement of animals from further south along the Santa Cruz Mountains is probably relatively restricted. That doesn't prevent mountain lions from making their way near and even into San Francisco, but in no way should the situation diminish concern for habit loss.
Do you mean off to the side of I-280? It's government protected nature park reserves at the northern end, and the Santa Cruz Mountains to the southwest.
One of the perks of living in Silicon Valley; you can get out of the office and go hiking or biking in nature
That term could fit most of the Santa Clara Valley if you’re operating on the definition provided by the person you heard that from. I won’t link their name here, since I do not believe it is worthwhile to give them attention.
It's not all that far from the spaghetti neighborhoods, but that's where the weird stuff happens. Cranky rural folks break things at the encroaching edges of development. Bored kids get a couple of miles past streetlights and sidewalks and feel like it's no-mans-land.
This reminds me that SF's actual neighbor to the north, Marin County, is mostly real unbuilt wilderness.
Imagining a Sci-fi scenario. Elon Musk has Tesla develop an autonomous hovercraft ferry, which only requires ramps into the water to be built to allow operations. Access to and from Marin becomes several times easier, causing its population and development to rapidly increase.
The Santa Rosa area is being hit hard. See the Cal Fire map.[1]
Two of the fires in Sonoma have connected since last night, and it looks like the Patrick Fire and the Norrborn Fire will connect soon. Many towns are already gone. Santa Rosa looks like it will make it.
I have friends in Lake County. They're helping evacuate horses from areas that are worse off.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wildland%E2%80%93urban_interfa... [2] https://www.fs.fed.us/nrs/pubs/rmap/rmap8/rmap-nrs-8-WUI-MAP...
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