Check it out at www.mercurynews.com

You don’t hike at Los Trancos Open Space Preserve hoping for an earth-shaking experience — not with the San Andreas Fault beneath your feet.

The fault that flattened San Francisco in 1906 cuts through the center of this small park in the hills southwest of Los Altos. This stretch of the fault, situated deep underground, hasn’t had a major rupture in a century, so its motions are not obvious. Interpretive panels and a fault trail map from the Midpeninsula Open Space Authority, which manages the park, will tell you what you’re seeing.

Permalink to the Los Trancos park profile is here.

Here’s an old oak whose great big elbow branch almost certainly dates to the great quake of ’06.