Santa Cruz-in’

24 January 2010

Friday was Rani's birthday. Tuesday is Ingrid's. On Sunday, Alexis, Ingrid and I drove down to Santa Cruz and Rani drove up. We met late morning and spent the day on foot wandering.



I have been to Santa Cruz several times, but we saw wonderful places on this visit that I didn't know about.



We parked along the sea coast on West Cliff Drive, near the Natural Bridges State Beach. From there, we ambled along a pedestrian/cycling path that followed the coast line to the wharf.



We next headed inland to Pacific Avenue, a nice shopping street. We had lunch at a Japanese restaurant and topped off with cappuccinos and pastries at Lulu Carpenters. (Ingrid remembers this spot from many years past as making the "best cappuccinos this side of Venice (Italy)." That is a tough memory to live up to, but they were good this time, too!)



On the return, we found a city park built at the end of an abandoned railway with a few cars set up on the end of the tracks. After following the tracks for awhile, we meandered through residential neighborhoods to find our way back out to the coast. In all, we walked more than 11 miles.



The weather was great for a wintertime outing on the coast: chilly and heavily overcast, but with very little rain. The uniform sky light and the bright rain clothes made for nice coloring in the photos. Because of the low light, I did have some trouble with landscape shots getting a sufficient combination of strong depth of field, fast enough shutter speed and fine enough resolution (that is, a low enough ISO number) to capture well what I saw.



It was a great outing!

Wet!

20 January 2010

Last semester, I never used motorized transport to get to campus.

Yesterday and today I did. On both mornings, it poured and so Ingrid drove me to College and Bancroft, on the south side of campus. Even with an umbrella, the half mile walk across campus was a challenge. This morning, the wind was blowing the rain sideways and my legs got soaked.

There's good news. We need the rain to offset the risk of drought. Also these storms are intense but intermittent. Each day, we've also had dry periods and have even seen a bit of clear sky.



With weather like this, sundials are not of much use, except maybe to reflect an image of the Campanile.



Strawberry Creek is running full and muddy! And salmon-colored rain boots are cute!

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.

Sequoia Bayview Trail

17 January 2010

Here's the weather forecast: tonight — rain; tomorrow — rain/wind; Tuesday — rain/wind; Wednesday — rain; Thursday — rain. All this wetness was supposed to start yesterday, and it did, but only weakly. Today, we've had drizzly weather punctuated by brief periods of blue sky and sunshine.

We took an easy walk midday through Oakland's Joaquin Miller Park. The first mile or so of the trail, starting from Skyline, passes through a heavy forest of bay trees and coast redwoods. In the summer, the trail is dry and dusty. But in the winter it is delightful, surprisingly reminiscent of forest paths through some of the great western national parks. I especially like the bright green colors of the mosses, ferns, and grasses. In places, these are the only patches of brightness on the wet forest floor.

Toward the end of the walk, I spied this mushroom. I don't know anything about mushrooms. But I did a google search and decided that it might be an amanita muscaria, which is both psychodelic and poisonous.

Fantastic Fog!

11 January 2010

Bernal Heights, San Francisco

10 January 2009

This is a guest entry!



As you have probably noticed in reading this blog, the blogger, (i.e., Bill) loves to ramble about — and in — mostly natural settings, you know, nature. I love nature too, but we happen to live just 20 minutes from a truly fascinating city. When I suggest some walking outings across the Bay to discover what tourists come thousands, yes, tens of thousands of miles to visit, the response ranges from EXTREME reluctance to a litany of reasons why we should hike/walk on this side of the Bay and leave urbanity to the urbanites. He doesn’t want the traffic, crowds, messiness and jostle of a densely packed city. I could never really argue the point until I found the book Stairway Walks in San Francisco by Adah Bakalinsky and Bill rediscovered his love of photography.



Truly, with this book one can discover that San Francisco is oh-so-much-more than crowded double-parked streets, pavement and concrete. The book takes you well beyond what the tourists see and deep into where the locals live and why they love it here. San Francisco is made up of dozens of individual neighborhoods built upon 42 hills with houses and streets at such a wonderful human scale that walking is truly the only way to discover the charm and intricacies of the pocket parks, community gardens, public art, mosaic murals, charming coffee houses, bookstores, and views worth two million bucks. Stairways are the way neighbors meet each other, get together to plant and beautify the common areas, and reach that amazing park with the playground, the tiny little-league diamond, views to the Pacific, the Financial District, the East Bay and beyond. On one of the SF staircase walks is where we began today’s outing.

Holly Park, in the neighborhood known as Bernal Heights West, was the starting point for our hike today and in the 5-mile loop we climbed up two major hills and walked up or down probably ten different stairways. We enjoyed amazing views, beautiful cypress trees, playgrounds, lots of nature, quirky and charming houses, tiny terraced community gardens, and streets that met at anything but 90-degree angles. Lots of people out walking, lots of friendly greetings and short conversations, lots of dogs, kids, and at the end, a delicious brunch at a neighborhood coffee-house bakery. You don’t get amazing espresso, scones and veggie scramble on Mount Diablo, do you Bill? HUH!

Winter cycling in Berkeley

9 January 2009

It seems that most of the US is in the grips of a frozen winter. Here in northern California, we are enjoying a cool but not cold winter. We've not had nearly enough rain and so we're feeling a bit anxious about another year of drought.



For the past few days, there has been a gentle flow of air from the northeast, which creates cooler than usual winter temperatures and also produces fog in the inland valleys. Yesterday, it was sunny on the west side of the East Bay hills, but we could see bits of fog hugging the ridge line. During most seasons, our fogs blow in from the west, through the Golden Gate. However, at this time of year, the coast is usually fog free and ground fogs develop in the inland valleys. It's odd for these valley fogs to have enough strength to survive a windblown journey up to the east-bay ridge line with an elevation of 300-500 m.



In the late afternoon, I rode up to Inspiration Point via UC campus. It feels odd to first descend to College Avenue only to then face the climb up Euclid. But this turns out to be shorter than the alternative of climbing directly up Old Tunnel Road and then traversing Skyline and Grizzly Peak Boulevard. And the total climb is about the same.



The round-trip distance is 21 miles. The net climb on the way out is about 260 m (from 60 m on College to 320 m at Inspiration Point). On the return, I have to climb about 110 m from College back up to our house.

The first four photos were taken from the immediate vicinity of Inspiration Point. The sunset was shot from Spruce Street, which is the way I chose to descend back to campus.

Happy New Year!

1 January 2010

We celebrated New Year's Day with a bike ride up Mt. Diablo, with our friends Alison (aka "The Pink Lady") and John.



It's a popular New Year's Day activity among East Bay cyclists. I'm guessing we saw about 300 people on the mountain today and a wet morning probably kept the numbers down.



We start in Danville on Diablo Road about a half mile west of I-680. The climb is 14 miles and about 3500 feet. (The summit elevation is 3849 feet.) The first 3.5 miles is a gentle warmup through Danville. Over the next six miles, we climb to 2200 feet to the Junction Ranger Station, the most popular spot on the ride to take a break. The final push is 1600 feet of climbing over a 4.5 mile distance. We rode at a leisurely pace, clocking about 3:15 of seat time (2:30 on the climb up and 0:45 coming down) during the five-hour outing.



Although it threatened to rain at times throughout the day, we stayed dry. The temperature was cool, 50-55 °F at the base and probably 40-45 °F at the summit. I climbed in a long sleeve jersey & undershirt plus full length biking pants. For the descent, rolling down at 20-30 mph in the chilly air, I added a light sweater, a fleece vest, a wind breaker, nylon wind pants, and a second pair of gloves.



Views throughout the ride were terrific. For most of the time the sky had a high overcast with thin mist and haze in the distant valleys and good visibility in the middle layer. Later, the high overcast broke up into scattered clouds at high altitude. New clouds formed at lower elevation that engulfed the summit for a brief time. Just before we arrived, the skies above the summit opened up for a brief period of brilliant sunshine!