A year ago last weekend I visited the Sunol Wilderness Regional Park for the first time. Since then I’ve been back to the park at least a half-dozen times. Sunol has just about everything you’d want in a park —…
Day hikes I’ve done
Hot day at Angel Island
by tmangan • July 26, 2005 • 0 Comments
Operative adjective of the past few days has been "scalding." Well, scalding by our standards. It’s not like the brutal 95/95 (degrees/humidity) that we’ve known in Tampa or the insufferable 103/92 we’ve known in Peoria, but even when there are…
Touched by an Angel
by tmangan • June 5, 2005 • 1 Comment
Angel Island is this hunk of rock poking up out of the middle of San Francisco Bay. The island’s a state park now, but over the years it’s been home to an anti-aircraft missile base, a prisoner of war camp…
Among the giant trees
by tmangan • May 22, 2005 • 0 Comments
Big Basin Redwoods State Park is one of those places where you walk into the woods thinking of trees as expendable implements of human intent like any right-thinking Republican but you walk out of the woods a confirmed tree-hugger. The…
A-camping we have gone
by tmangan • May 2, 2005 • 1 Comment
The storyline could’ve been "city slickers go camping, hilarity ensues," but there are no disasters to report — primarily because Melissa had our camp-out worked out to the tiniest detail. If an earthquake had ravaged the region, we’d have been…
Good day at Alum Rock
by tmangan • April 18, 2005 • 0 Comments
I’m on vacation for the next two weeks, so the first order of business on Day One had to be a hike. I chose Alum Rock Park, which is run by the city of San Jose. It used to be…
Sunol after the rain
by tmangan • April 10, 2005 • 0 Comments
Saturday dawned gray and bleak, a gloomy reminder of the storm that drenched the Bay Area on Friday (and hailed all over Melissa’s freshly planted garden. She’s still a little miffed). Within a couple hours, though, the skies were back…
Ridge roving
by tmangan • April 3, 2005 • 0 Comments
The mountain range facing the Pacific Ocean has oodles of open space set aside for hikers, bikers and others who like to gawk at green stuff. I went with Mike, Kathy & company on Saturday to trod some of the…
At the park down the road
by tmangan • March 27, 2005 • 2 Comments
Yesterday it was back to Ed Levin County Park, the one just down the road from our place. The park attracts lots of people trying to catch fish at Sandy Wool Lake or imitate soaring birds with the Wings Of…