I focused on the park’s ranching heritage. Often called Grant Ranch in honor of Joseph Grant, who once owned this vast, mountainous tract east of San Jose, the park still has plentiful reminders of its ranching heritage: old windmills, rusty…
Day hikes I’ve done
Santa Teresa County Park, a first look
by tom • March 31, 2008 • 3 Comments
So I told the gray-bearded mountain biker dude with the bike that probably cost more than my car, “I’d probably be a mountain biker but I have a this strange fear of flat tires.” “Well if that’s the only thing…
Caught in the act
by tom • March 28, 2008 • 5 Comments
Cheryl Norlin, one of my Carrizo Plain camping cohorts of last weekend, sent this picture of me taking a picture: I’m pretty sure this is the picture I was taking: This originally was a vertical that I cropped into this…
Carrizo Plain camp-out report
by tom • March 24, 2008 • 9 Comments
It’s a damn long drive to Carrizo Plain National Monument from the Bay Area (or any area, for that matter) to see this. Must be why they call it a plain, eh? Then again, you can never tell a park…
Latest Hikes column: Los Trancos Open Space Preserve
by tom • March 20, 2008 • 0 Comments
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…
Half Dome hiker on OpenRoad.TV
by tom • March 20, 2008 • 0 Comments
Rick Deutsch has a five-minute video with Doug McConnell of Bay Area Backroads fame. It’s all familiar ground to many of us in the Global Hiker Elite (particularly those who’ve had the good fortune to drive 60 miles to a…
Wildflowers and more from Henry Coe State Park
by tom • March 18, 2008 • 5 Comments
It’s not exactly a riot of color out there just yet, but there’s plenty for alert eyes to see. Oddly enough I’m still not seeing many California poppies in parks this season, but keep seeing tons growing along roads —…
Beyond the Alviso slough
by tom • March 17, 2008 • 3 Comments
It would be unfair to call Alviso the armpit of the South Bay because in the real world, people wear deodorant that makes the smell go away, whereas in Alviso, the smell never goes away. On one side there are…
Expanded Black Diamond Mines tours
by tom • March 14, 2008 • 0 Comments
East Bay Regional Parks is having an open house April 5-6 for the silica/sand mine tours at Black Diamond Mines Regional Park, where you’ll be able to go 810 feet into the mine rather than a mere 400, which was…