This was once a great, easily-accessible, bit of coastal grassland near to the Monterey Peninsula, and just north of the City of Marina. The grassland is now much reduced, and may have lost all its special avifauna.

Grasshopper Sparrows used to regularly breed here in some numbers. The grassland remaining is quite distant and inaccessible (on private land), so it is not known if any remain. In winter, it attracted raptors, sometimes Long-billed Curlews, and the occasional wintering Burrowing Owl. Its current potential for these birds is now dramatically reduced to distant, inaccessible patches of grassland.

Lapis Road is a short, one-mile paved road that parallels busy Del Monte Boulevard north of Marina, with its north entrance near Highway 1 and is south entrance at the beginning of residential/commercial development in Marina. It runs along what we used to call "Armstrong Ranch," a grassland between Highway 1 and Lapis Road, but is now being developed for commercial agriculture (in 2023, strawberries). This invensive agriculture has reduced the grassland -- sometimes grazed by cows -- to less than half its usual extent, and what grassland that remains is now distant from Lapis Road.