Hiking Mindego Hill, part 2

I have enough pictures I want to share from hiking to Mindego Hill on Friday that I split them across two blog entries. I posted part 1 yesterday. Here's part 2, picking up with us still atop Mindego Hill in Russian RIdge Preserve.

In the previous blog I noted that being atop Mindego Hill provides 360° views... though I only showed one direction of views, looking toward Hawk Ridge and Russian Ridge. Here are others.



There are a lot of ways to describe where we are. Russian Ridge Preserve is the name of the park. Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District (MROSD) is the agency that manages it. Santa Cruz Mountains and Coast Range Mountains are geographical terms. So is "in the mountains above Palo Alto", particularly as we drove up Page Mill Road to get here... though at this point we're over the ridge from from the SF Bay side of the mountains and on the Pacific Ocean side. Perhaps it would be more appropriate to say, "In the mountains above La Honda"? Or Pescadero? In the photo above you're looking out to the west. The Pacific Ocean is in the distance. The small town of La Honda would be visible if its residents didn't strategically build their houses beneath tree cover to evade surveillance. (That's not an exaggeration.)



The trail to Mindego Hill Friday was surprisingly busy. We passed several small groups coming out as we headed in, including a person Hawk knows! We stopped to chat for 15 minutes. We shared the summit with another few small groups coming or going. I thought this trail was off the beaten path enough that we might have it to ourselves. Well, at least the groups were small enough, singles or pairs like us, that it never felt crowded. And everyone out here was a serious hiker, here to enjoy the scenery like us.



Humans weren't our only companions on the trail. The last 1/2 up to the summit is open range land for cattle. Cows weren't at the summit Friday afternoon. Cows don't really care much to climb peaks. They stood somewhat below it giving us the stinkeye as we passed. Though it's clear they come up here occasionally to show us what they think of our hiking trails. Yeah, that's a cow shit seeming to anchor that trail sign in place.



We made our way back with darkness already falling across the deep valleys of the area even though it wasn't yet 4pm.



As we continued the hike back after 4pm the sun kept getting lower in the sky, casting new light on things we'd already seen. "Always check your 6," paramilitary types would say. Here, ours is looking back at Mindego Hill.

Sunset continued to be the theme as we made our way back to the trailhead.



Back at the trailhead we expected to find the place clearing out but people were actually arriving. They were setting up blankets on the grass atop the knob (remember, we had to hike back up to get to the start!) to watch the sun set over the Santa Cruz Mountains.

We might've stayed for the sunset but we were already tired and spent, plus it was getting chillier. Plus, we were hungry and wanted to get home for dinner and our New Year's Eve celebration!

2021 Wrap-up: Oh, the Places I Went

Every year around the new year I do a variety of retrospectives about the year just finished. I thought I would get to this a few days ago but there was too much of a blogging backlog (as is usual when I travel) from our Hawaii trip. So I'll start it here with this blog about travel statistics, aka "Oh, the places I went", for 2021.

Here are Five Things:

1. Coronavirus remained the big story in 2021. It kept me home for 3 months early in the year, Even after we got vaccinated in March-April it remained a concern hanging over our heads, a constant "Should we or shouldn't we?" question about travel. Then came the Delta surge, casting more of a pall over late year travel, though getting boosters in October shored up our confidence enough to travel over Thanksgiving— though we tried to avoid areas where people went unmasked. Then the virus came back with a vengeance in late December with the winter/Omicron surge, causing us to cancel a planned New Year's Eve trip just hours before we would have left. For much of the year it felt less like, "Oh, the places you'll go!" and more like, "Oh, the places you won't go!"


2. I flew 21,000 miles in 2021. I track this via flightmemory.com, where you can input your flights and it computes the distance via Great Circle routes. (Technically the actual distance I flew with my butt in a seat is greater, as flight plans deviate from Great Circle routes to take advantage of winds and avoid bad weather, but this is the statistic I go with because it's easy.) Except for 2020, when I flew just 11,000 miles due to the pandemic deterring me from flying most of the year, this year's 21k miles is the fewest I've flown since... 2003.


3. I traveled outside my home area 50 days and 46 nights in 2021. As with flight miles this is up from 2020, when I logged 32 days and 27 nights away from home, but it's lower than any other year going back to about 2004. One interesting thing about 2021 is that my travel was all leisure travel; I had 0% work travel. Credit the ongoing Coronavirus pandemic/endemic for that. Even in 2020 I had two work trips early in the year, before Coronavirus precautions started shutting things at the end of February.


4. New states visited, new countries visited: 0. In 2021 I held fast at having visited 49/51 of the United States and the District of Columbia. I visited no new countries. Visiting all the states is one of my bucket list items. The two states I'm missing are Alaska and Mississippi. Hawk and I are discussing whether to visit Alaska next year or in 2023. As for Mississippi... well "the armpit of America" may be the last crossed off the list.


5. New national parks visited: +1, -1. Wait, what, minus one? Yes, this year I went from having visited 50/62 US national parks— another of my bucket lists is to visit all the national parks— to having visited 51/63. Visiting #51, Acadia National Park in June, was the step forward. The step back came when an Act of Congress created a new national park, the New River Gorge National Park and Preserve. Technically the legislation passed in late December 2020 as part of the massive $1.4T omnibus spending bill with $900B of Covid-19 relief, but even the Park Service didn't publish a press release until late January.

More 2021 retrospectives to come.

The Upside of a Stay-Home Vacation. Back to Work Tomorrow.

I've been mostly chilling at home for the past 5 days. It wasn't supposed to be like that. When we got home Tuesday night from our last-minute Hawaii vacation our plan was to make a quick turn and board a flight early Wednesday morning out to Chicago to spend 5 days with friends around New Year's Eve. But on the flight back from Hawaii we were already reconsidering the Chicago trip due to the surging Covid case rate. We sat down late Tuesday night to make a go/no-go decision. In light of the fact the surge had only worsened from 3 days prior we made the last-minute decision to cancel going to Chicago. By that point it was less than 7 hours before we'd have left for the airport again.

Usually the prospect of having 5 days off from work (in this case a weekend plus 3 weekdays) without anywhere to go or anything special to do drives me nuts. This time... it wasn't so bad. Part of that is Coronavirus; going anywhere is risky. Part of that is the weather; it's cold out, and that's not enjoyable. And part of it is right now I don't mind just relaxing.

• Wednesday morning I slept in then lazed around like a slug most of the day. It was a much-needed rest after 5 go-go-go days in Hawaii without a decent night's sleep for any of them.
• Thursday I lazed around again and... I'm not sure what else. I don't even remember!
• Friday we took it easy in the morning then went hiking in the mountains in the afternoon. For New Year's Eve that night we cooked a nice dinner, had a just-the-two-of-us celebration, and went for a late evening soak in the hot tub.
• Saturday I lazed around again. We were both a bit achy, probably some kind of common cold thing and NOT Covid (we tested negative), so we put off plans for another hike and walked about 2 miles around town instead.
• Sunday I lazed around yet again. 🤣 Hawk was still feeling achy, and I... was okay being a slug. She organized some of her comic books while I fiddled on my computer.

So, here I am at the end of 5 days off, with little to show for it... and I'm okay with that!

Tomorrow is back to work, though. As I've managed barely to think about work for 10 days now I'll have to ease back into it. ...And I do expect it to be ease, not crash. I've glanced at my work email once a day or so during this time off to check if there will be any fires I have to put out immediately upon return. There are not. There's not even a big backlog of normal priority stuff waiting for me. That's the good thing about taking time off when most people are also taking time off.... If they're not in the office, either, they can't make work for me!