Our Lady of the Wayside Church

The Portola Valley School is a one-room schoolhouse that sits at 775 Portola Road in Portola Valley, California. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1974. It is currently used for Portola Valley town-hall meetings.

Sausal Creek is a 3.0-mile-long (4.8 km) northwesterly-flowing stream originating in Portola Valley along the northeastern edge of the Windy Hill Open Space Preserve in the eastern foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains, in San Mateo County, California, United States. After being joined by Alambique Creek it flows through Middle Searsville Marsh/Pond before ending at its confluence with Corte Madera Creek in a natural marsh above Searsville Reservoir on Stanford University lands. Below Searsville Reservoir and Dam, Corte Madera Creek joins with Bear Creek to form San Francisquito Creek and flows to San Francisco Bay.

Corte Madera Creek (Spanish for "a place where wood is cut") is a 7.3-mile-long (11.7 km) creek that flows north-northwest to Searsville Dam and then joins with Bear Creek to form San Francisquito Creek in California.

Portola Valley is a town in San Mateo County, California, United States. Located on the San Francisco Peninsula in the Bay Area, Portola Valley is a small, wealthy community nestled on the eastern slopes of the Santa Cruz Mountains.

Woodside Priory School (commonly known as The Priory) is an independent, co-educational, Benedictine Catholic, college-preparatory, day and boarding school in Portola Valley, California, United States. It is located within the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of San Francisco and is thirty minutes from San Francisco to the north and San Jose to the south.

Windy Hill Open Space Preserve is a regional park located in San Mateo County, California and operated by the Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District (MROSD). It is readily identifiable from the flatlands of the South Bay, as it is the only "naked" part of the peninsula range (not forested). The Windy Hill Preserve comprises an important 1132 acre (4.6 km2) stretch of conservation land on the eastward side of the Peninsula Range (Santa Cruz Mountains), rising from the valley road near Portola Valley to the 1905 ft (581 m) summit from which it gets its name. Access to the summit is easy (0.5 mile moderate grade) from State Route 35, the ridge road along the Peninsula Range. Facilities focus on trails for hiking and mountain biking, with around 14 miles (22 km) of hiking trails. Paragliding and hang gliding are permitted with a special use permit, and are popular activities in the winter months when there are East winds. In clear weather there are magnificent views from the summit, and indeed the entire upper end of the park, across the campus of Stanford University to the San Francisco Bay and beyond to Mount Tamalpais and Mount Diablo. Downtown San Francisco is visible, as well as the Pacific Ocean. Most of Windy Hill is sheltered from the prevailing weather, which comes in off of the Pacific Ocean. A nice day further down can be very cold, windy, foggy or rainy at the summit. The area is rich in wildlife; among the species likely to be seen are California mule deer, coyote, California vole, white-tailed kite, American kestrel, band-tailed pigeon and California quail. There are signs warning about mountain lions, but bobcats are more common. Rattlesnakes and gopher snakes may also be found. Banana slugs and, in season, California newts are common. Spring Ridge Trail runs from the Portola Valley trailhead to Skyline Boulevard through the open, grassy part of the preserve. It, like most of the lower trails, is a fire road, open to cyclists as well as hikers and equestrians. Two trails further to the south (Hamms Gulch and the Lost Trail-Razorback Ridge-Eagle Trail combination), are single-tracks not open to cyclists. These trails run through forested country: oak, fir, buckeye, bay laurel, madrone and one or two redwoods. Because the far shore rises so steeply, Sausal Pond appears to be black or murky green, rather than sky-blue. This marshy pond is home to a few coots and the occasional mallard, to dragonflies and bullfrogs. Shoreline access is limited to not more than one or two hundred feet, much of that surrounded by bush and accessible only to the determined.

Searsville (c.1854–1891) was a San Mateo County, California town located in what is now the Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve on Corte Madera Creek and adjacent to Woodside. At the northwest corner of Sandhill Road and Portola Road is a plaque, and this location has been a California Historical Landmark since 1950.

Searsville Dam is a masonry dam in San Mateo County, California that was completed in 1892, one year after the founding of Stanford University, and impounds Corte Madera Creek (in the San Francisquito Creek watershed) to form a reservoir known as Searsville Reservoir or Searsville Lake. Searsville Dam is located in the Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve and is owned and operated by Stanford University. Neighboring cities include Woodside and Portola Valley, California.

Alambique Creek, or Arroyo Alembique, is a 2.7-mile-long (4.3 km) stream located in San Mateo County, California, in the United States. It is a tributary to Corte Madera Creek and is part of the San Francisquito Creek watershed.

The Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve is a 483 hectares (1,190 acres) nature preserve and biological field station formally established as a reserve in 1973. The biological preserve is owned by Stanford University, and is part of the Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences. It is located at 37.408°N 122.2275°W / 37.408; -122.2275 south of Sand Hill Road and west of Interstate 280 in Portola Valley, San Mateo County, California. It is used by students, researchers, and docents to conduct biology research, and teach the community about the importance of that research. The preserve encompasses Jasper Ridge and Searsville Lake (actually a reservoir) and the upper reaches of San Francisquito Creek, along with the latter's Corte Madera Creek and Bear Creek tributaries.

Thornewood Open Space Preserve is a small regional park located in the Santa Cruz Mountains in San Mateo County. The park lies in the San Francisco Bay Area and is operated by the Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District. It offers approximately 1.5 miles (2.4 km) of hiking and equestrian trails and is dog-friendly. The Schilling Lake Trail leads to Schilling Lake, a protected wildlife habitat. This trail offers brief views of the southern San Francisco Bay, Palo Alto (including Stanford University's Hoover Tower) and surrounding cities, and the Diablo Range. From Schilling Lake, the Bridle Trail leads to Old La Honda Road. The name Thornewood comes from Julian and Edna Bloss Thorne, who developed the land in the 1920s. The Thornes built a house designed by Gardner Daily and surrounded it with extensive gardens. Those gardens included Schilling Lake, named after the nearby August Schilling land. The Thorne and Schilling estates were both part of Rancho Cañada de Raymundo in old California. When Edna Bloss Thorne died in June 1970, she bequeathed the land to the Sierra Club Foundation, with the requirement that the land surrounding her 86-acre summer home be kept as a nature preserve and not developed. The foundation donated the acreage to the Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District in September 1978.Second-growth redwood trees grow in portions of Thornewood Open Space Preserve, especially by the lake. There are false brome grasses throughout the area.

Martin Creek, known locally as Dennis Martin Creek, is a 1.4-mile-long (2.3 km) north by northeastward-flowing stream originating just east of Skyline Boulevard in the Santa Cruz Mountains, near the community of Skylonda in San Mateo County, California. It flows through the town of Woodside before crossing Portola Road and joining Sausal Creek on Stanford University lands just across the border from Woodside. Sausal Creek enters Searsville Reservoir, which flows to San Francisco Bay via San Francisquito Creek.