Sibley Volcanic Regional Preserve

18 January 2010

Sibley is another one of the great preserved spaces that belongs to the East Bay Regional Parks District. It's just about 4 miles from our house, up at the ridge line immediately east of us.

I especially like visiting on wet winter days and I had a nice visit this afternoon. It had rained fairly hard all morning. The storm let up in the afternoon, but heavy clouds and gusty winds persisted. I had been working at home and started losing steam in the early afternoon, so at 2:15 I drove up to the park and spent about 90 minutes on a nice photographic explore.

I first hiked to the summit of Round Top. According to the EBRPD website, Round Top is "made up of lava and volcanic debris left over from a 10 million year old volcano!

The summit is at an elevation of 1763 feet, which is only a few hundred feet above the parking lot. There are some creepy old communications towers at the top and some bushwhacking is necessary to see the views. The shot at the top of the post, looking east, was taken from the Round Top summit. There were also lots of mushrooms, mossy tree trunks, and these very cool dead weed heads!



Another great feature of the preserve is this old, long-abandoned quarry. It's situated on the eastern edge of the preserve, probably about a mile from the parking lot.



There is a labyrinth at the bottom with a definitely weird cache of items in the center. Just north of the labyrinth is a reed-filled pond. At times over the years, we've come here and seen loads of newts in the water or snakes or small frogs that fill the small space with their croaks. I suspect, though, that the reeds and sediment have choked most of this life out of the pond. Anyway, the water was far too muddy to see anything living today.



It started raining again, so I headed back. But then the rain stopped and I was treated to this lovely view of a sunburst over the bay on my drive back down the hill.