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Two-Heel Drive

Tom Mangan's Bay Area Hiking Blog

Mercury News article on ranching history of nearby parksYesterday

Lisa Krieger’s latest Wanderlust report covers ground trodden many times over around here. She starts at Grant County Park and ranges over to the Skyline Boulevard open space preserves.

While the pioneers who toiled on our old family farms are long gone, they left poignant traces of their hard work. Some are easy to see, such as the Picchetti Winery at Cupertino’s Picchetti Ranch Open Space or the Victorian ranch house at San Jose’s Joseph D. Grant County Park. Others — a broken fence line, a crumbling rock wall, an aging olive tree — require a more observant eye. Each has a story to tell:

Visitors to Monte Bello Open Space Preserve can envision a ridgeline once dotted with cattle belonging to Black Mountain Ranch, Stevens Creek Road Ranch, Monte Bello Ranch and others.

Walk the Canyon Trail to see an ancient walnut orchard, its 30 trees gnarled and covered with lichens. If squirrels haven’t snatched them all, the lucky hiker can find a tasty nut in the leaf debris. Continue on this trail to arrive at the former site of the 694-acre Black Mountain Ranch home, bunkhouse and barn.

Gary Reyes’ pictures here.

Here’s a video Reyes and Krieger collaborated on: (Has an obnoxious ad at the beginning)

Mass link paybackNovember 17

Ever so often I get around to updating my list of “A-List Hiking Bloggers” over there on the right-hand side. I’ve added a bunch in the past few days — if yours isn’t there or you know of another hiker’s blog that belongs on the list, leave a note in the comments.

Oakland hiker’s blog: DilettanteNovember 17

Rebecca Bond is a graphic artist with a get-out-under-the-trees bent. Just last Friday she was haunting Redwood Regional Park, one of the few big Bay Area parks I have yet to check out.

Starting out on a ridge at the Skyline Gate staging area, across the street from multi-million dollar bay-view homes, you wouldn’t quite understand why this park is called Redwood Regional as you mostly see pine and eucalyptus trees ahead of you. And continuing down West Ridge Trail, you enter oak woodland filled with lots of California hazelnut, bay laurel trees, madrone trees, oak trees, huckleberry bushes, pine (not sure if they are Monterey or knobcone, but definitely pine) and many others. But descend farther, and the oak and madrone trees become older, the underbrush sparser, and the sunlight dimmer. As you get closer to the bottom of the ridge it gets much darker, and suddenly, you are amongst those giant conifer trees—Sequoia sempervirens a.k.a Coast Redwood, hundreds of feet tall, blocking out the majority of light. It feels as if you’ve entered a fairy-tale forest—moist, dark and cool.

Redwood’s higher on my list now, for sure. Rebecca also stopped in on Tomales Point to check out the elk awhile back. Looks like I’m about the only hi

An idiot’s guide to orienteeringNovember 16

You’ve no doubt heard of the pastime of orienteering, in which you dress up in your finest hiking regalia, navigate miles of hairpin-turn mountain roads to an appointed trailhead, hit the trail with maps designed to get you lost, and dash through the bush to get it over with ASAP.

This is the Bearded Spock Parallel Universe of Hiking, where up is down, left is right, and “Do Not Enter” signs mean “it’s fine to head this way to Checkpoint 3, and besides, what kind of moron doesn’t know the sign is for cars, not orienteers?”

Not that I’m complaining. If my wrong turn hadn’t taken me half way to Albuquerque, I’d have been sitting there on the picnic table at Joseph D. Grant County Park with nothing to do after about 57 minutes, violating my “hike must last longer than drive to get there” rule.

My only gripe is that to my mind, the next best thing to the towering exultation of victory is the perverse pleasure of coming in dead last (to my enduring chagrin, my hometown always came in 297th in those “top 300 places to live in the United States”; I always wanted to be from the worst town in America). Bad as I was, somebody robbed me of the honor of being worst. Alas.

So this is what happened: Sunday capped the Bay Area Orienteering Club’s three-day O in the Oaks competition, which pitted some of the best orienteers in the West against the relentless hi

Weasels at Point ReyesNovember 16

I’m talking real weasels, not the metaphorical kind who always seem to be in the men’s room when it’s their turn to buy a round of beers. I’ve never seen one in the wild, or even on somebody’s blog, until the past two days, when I’ve seen two (two posts; might be the same critter).

One was spotted yesterday on the Tomales Point Trail by Dave Miller of the recently discovered Bay Area Outdoors and Beyond Blog. He also got to see some real life elk combat (though his photographic luck is about like mine — fuzzy in the clutch).

The other was on hardcore Oakland hiker Timecheck’s blog. He also saw a skunk, and his hiking partner captured a nifty video of the weasel, bobbing and weaving.

Got any recent wildlife shots to your credit? Drop a link in the comments already.