In Beauty I Walk. San Bruno Mountain.

In Beauty I Walk. It's the refrain of a Navajo prayer called Night Chant. It's also a tag I've used 450 times in my LiveJournal blog to describe my joy and harmony of hiking in nature. It's my #1 tag over there, eclipsing even the "Planes, Trains, and Automobiles" tag I started blogging with.

You wouldn't know that from reading over here on Dreamwidth, though. In the month and and half since I made this my primary platform I've used it exactly... never. I realized that as I went to post an "In Beauty I Walk" entry today. Blame a combination of Coronavirus and weather. Coronavirus has made travel out of the area impractical, and weather the past few months has made this an unsatisfying time of the year for hiking locally (recent lack of rain has left vegetation brown and streams dry). Plus, honestly, after 10 months of barely being able to leave the area I've grown bored with the options locally.

Saturday we put those frustrations aside as we got out for a real hike for the first time in a long time. We went to San Bruno Mountain, just south of San Francisco.



We've been to San Bruno Mountain a couple times before, most recently on a trip in late July. On that trip we didn't get to the peak because we misread some of the one-way markings (to promote social distancing during the Coronavirus pandemic) on the trail map and didn't want to violate the rules like most of the other people there. This time we took the correct trail to be able to get to the top, legally. The top, BTW, is that antenna farm you can see in the upper left corner of the pic above.

The trail we hiked Saturday began by looping down through a ravine. For what's supposed to be a peak hike that was disheartening. Climbing back out of the ravine to a neighboring ridge gave us extra exercise, though, and once we topped that ridge the views became expansive. Yes, the scenery gets better than looking up at that antenna farm above. Way better. Keep reading (next entry) to see.

Hiking San Bruno Mountain (Again!)

This past Saturday we hiked San Bruno Mountain just south of San Francisco. In my previous entry I provided some setup for the trip. Among other things I noted that we'd visited this park just under 6 months ago; hence the "Again!" in this blog title. So why go again? Well, 1) The views are amazing in clear weather, like we had on Saturday, and 2) Last time we didn't get to the top because of trail restrictions we chose to obey (which many fellow visitors ignored). Saturday we took a different route with different amazing views and a trek to the top.

The trail started out quietly. The route we picked begins by descending at least 200 feet— not a great beginning for people wanting to ascend a mountain. That makes it less popular than the other trails, and that's a good thing. We enjoyed the brief solitude. Nature seemed to close in around us. Though we could hear cars buzzing by on the parkway just 100 meters away, we could also smell the fresh air and the rich musk of undergrowth still damp from rain a day or two earlier.

Soon it was time for the first leg of the ascent. And with it, the first rewarding vista.



We huffed and puffed up the first ridge, working our way south. Looking up it seemed like we were less than halfway there. But turning around and looking north, with almost all of San Francisco coming into view beyond the foothills, we could see we were already "there".

As we climbed ever higher to the second ridge we took a slight detour, breaking away from the views of San Francisco.



On this leg of the hike hiked a ridge overlooking Daly City and Colma to the South. In the distance is the Pacific Ocean, with the sun starting to set over it. (Yes, it's only 3pm. Screw winter and its short days.) In the midground are the cemeteries of Colma.

Yes, Colma is basically a necropolis. Huge cemeteries were plotted there starting in 1900, when San Francisco outlawed burial within city limits. Today it's estimated more than 1.5 million people are buried there. The number of dead dwarfs the living population of about 1,500— by a ratio of 1,000 to 1!

After walking that ridge we had one more stretch of huffing and puffing to reach the summit.



The summit itself isn't much to look at. Like most prominent mountain peaks, San Bruno Mountain has an antenna farm at the top. Utility companies bought up land rights in the 1930s and 40s, a few decades before even the Bay Area's robust environmental movement formed to purchase land for preservation and recreation. The two uses (utilities and recreation) now coexist atop many of these peaks. Find spots between antenna towers and you can enjoy views in 360°. The pic above shows the long-distance view east across the San Francisco Bay to Oakland and the Oakland Hills beyond.

Because it's not the top that matters as much as the views from (near) the top we paused at the summit long enough just to catch our breath and snap a few pictures. There were plenty more vistas on the way down, though, as our loop trail took us down the opposite flank of San Bruno Mountain.



This is a slightly zoomed-in view of downtown San Francisco. You can see all the main towers. Toward the left is the brown-ish Bank of America Building, for many year the tallest skyscraper in SF. In the middle is the "Eye of Sauron" Salesforce Tower, now the tallest. Toward the right, at the foot of the Bay Bridge, is the Millennium Tower, aka the Tilting Tower, because it's sinking like the Leaning Tower of Pisa (though not quite as badly— but give it a few decades!). Beyond, at the far right, are the towers of the western span of the Bay Bridge.

We got back the trailhead parking lot at 4pm. We'd hiked just over 5 miles— more than we expected, though we didn't object. The thing is, though... by Saturday night and Sunday morning our muscles did object! That just reminds us that we need to keep in better hiking shape, Coronavirus or no.

Parler Deplatformed

After the violent anti-democracy riot at the US Capitol last Wednesday, Twitter, Facebook, and a few other social media companies booted President Trump off their platforms for violating their terms of service against inciting and glorifying violence.

"We'll just go to Parler," a lot of people said. Parler is an alternative social media platform that has billed itself for months now as the last bastion of free speech— speech free of restrictions against planning violence and crime, that is. It's been gathering a base of politically conservative users who enjoy being able to share violent content & threats without fear of having their accounts suspended or terminated. On Thursday, when Twitter and Facebook booted Trump, Parler's free app was the #1 most downloaded app on Apple's iTunes store.

Parler's popularity surge didn't last long, though. On Friday Google removed the app from its Google Play store for violating its policy against encouraging violence. On Saturday Apple did the same with its iTunes store. Sunday Amazon announced that at 11:59pm it would shut down Parler's servers in its AWS hosting service. Amazon carried through on that threat, and since 12:00am Monday morning Parler has been completely offline. The company currently has no credible plan for restoring its service.