Yak Audio Guide w/ navigational assistant

A Self Guided Experience, Without Distraction

Optional light-touch, geolocated audio guide is available to quietly enhance your journey—offering gentle navigation and sharing insights into the surrounding ecology and history. Thoughtfully written with input from local voices, it’s there when you want it, and silent when you don’t.

Connect with Nature & History

This experience is designed first and foremost for connection—to the stillness of the water, the movement of birds overhead, and the layered history of the Carneros Wine region.

Download the NVP Audio Guide

Carneros Estuary - Lazy River Marsh

*Enhanced by Yak Audio!

Round Trip

Duration: 1.5-2.5 hours | Distance: 3.25 or – 4.15 miles | Difficulty Level: Easy or moderate

Starting Point: Cuttings Wharf in Los Carneros, 12 min south of town in the champagne region

Discover a Private, Front-Row Seat to the Carneros Wine Region

Slip into the quiet backwaters of the Carneros Estuary, where a narrow, winding channel carries you along the eastern edge of the vast 15,000-acre Napa-Sonoma Marshes Wildlife Area. Stretching across the north shore of San Pablo Bay, this landscape is one of the most vital wetland ecosystems on the West Coast—and a key stop along the Pacific Flyway, where millions of migratory birds pass through each year.

Here, the world slows down. The water narrows to just 10 feet wide in places, enclosed by towering stands of tule and bulrush that rise overhead, creating an intimate, almost hidden passage through the marsh.