January now my new second bloggiest month

I wrapped up last month with a total of 68 entries on my blog. That puts it in the #2 spot, with an average of 2.19 blogs/day just ahead of December 2021's 2.13/day. Alas it fell well short of my all-time high of 80 entries in September 2020 though earlier this month I was on track to beat that record.

What changed from that record-beating pace were two things. First, I slowed down a bit around mid-month. Second, while I could have caught back up by "finishing strong" I actually sort of ran out of steam in the last week of the month. Oh, I still had stuff I could have written about; I just didn't have the desire to write. It's one of the aspects of spiraling. The upside, though, is I still want to write about the things I've left in my backlog, so I should be able to get off to a strong start here in February.

Hiking Flag Hill (Sunol Wilderness, part 2)

Our trip to the Sunol Wilderness wasn't just about seeing birds of prey along the way. The birds were a nice bonus. The main point of our outing was to hike: specifically, to climb Flag Hill.

Flag Hill is difficult to see from the trailhead. The trail starts near a creek, and the dense stand of trees along the creek make it hard to see the hill above. But once we gained even 50' of elevation on the trail the escarpment of Flag Hill came into clear view.



This was our main view for what seemed like quite a long time. Though we labored and huffed and puffed up the trail the ridge barely seemed to get closer. Ahead of us was "up". To our left, up. To the right, also up. The only way to really gauge our progress was to look back and see how high above the valley we'd climbed.



Soon enough we reached Flag Hill. The monument announcing the location struck me as superfluous. We'd been looking up at this blasted ridge for the last 90 minutes as we labored to climb 1,000 feet up from the valley below. We know when we're at the top!



If they were going to put a big sign up here I wish they'd put one to tell us why it's actually called Flag Hill. Sure, okay, someone probably put a flag here at some point, but why? At 1,320' this isn't even the highest peak in the area. There are literally higher peaks and ridges visible in every direction, including 2,500'+ Mission Peak to the west. There's a nice view south over the Calaveras Reservoir (above) though.



We could've headed home by retracing our steps down the steep front face of Flag Hill, but where's the fun in that? Fortunately there are loop trails. Having taken the hard, steep trail up the mountain we were able to take a gentler one down. We dropped down through High Valley Camp (above), a converted old ranch that dates back to 1939. The area has been used for cattle ranching since Spanish missionaries arrived in the 1700s.

We arrived back at the trailhead around 5:10pm. The "golden hour" you can see in some of the pictures here had already turned to the "blue hour" by then; the sun had already dropped below the mountains to the west, casting twilight across the valley. Still, that was earlier than the 5:30 return I'd estimated. We'd covered 4 miles and 1,000' of climbing in just over 2.5 hours, including stops.

The Tafoni Monolith

This weekend we made a "twofer" of hikes; we went hiking both Saturday and Sunday. Sunday, like, Saturday, we got off to a late start. Actually we loafed around the house even longer than Saturday morning, not really asking ourselves, "Okay, where do we want to go?" until after 2pm. By then longer and more distant options were off the table because not many hours of daylight were left. Just as we were downsizing our list to another visit to the baylands or a walk around the neighborhood I remembered, "Hey, what about the Tafoni Monolith?" I remember hiking to it years ago but Hawk didn't. I think she might have been ill the day I went.

The Tafoni Monolith is an interesting rock outcropping in Corte de Madera Preserve, a unit of the Midpeninsula Regional Open Space Diistrict (MROSD) [link to blog from several weeks ago]. Rather than start with pics of the trail there I'll start with a pic of what's at the end (right/below).

The Tafoni Monolith is a 40' tall rock outcropping. From this angle it looks like a misshapen skull. It's also riddled with tiny caverns. "Tafoni" is Italian for caverns.

More about the rock in a moment. Before that I want to talk about getting there.

"There are no wrong ways here", part 2

Corte de Madera Open Space is in the Santa Cruz Mountains of San Mateo County, above the town of Woodside. It's not terribly far from us, not even 45 minutes of driving including all the slow, twisty roads up into the mountains; yet if you'd asked me Sunday morning where Corte de Madera is, I couldn't have told you without double checking a map. It's just a few miles north of the "Alice's Restaurant" intersection we go past pretty much every time we visit places such as Russian Ridge.

As we were going to a place we haven't stopped in umpteen years we started at the wrong trailhead. There's a nice, big, busy parking lot clearly market Corte de Madera. It's the right park, just the wrong area. Fortunately we discovered our mistake before hiking a mile down the wrong trail this time. We hopped back in the car and drove to the next trailhead.

At the next trailhead we pulled off in the dirt alongside the road. There were only a handful of cars there. I laced up my boots, shouldered my pack, and went over to read the direction signs at the trailhead. We were another wrong trailhead! Yes, there are several wrong trailheads available. Except at some point there is no such thing as a wrong trail. We were close enough to where we wanted to be.

When you come to a fork in the road, take it

Our next choice was which way to go. The trail forks immediately at the trailhead. Like the great Yogi Berra said, "When you get to the fork, take it." Both of these trails could get us to where we wanted to go. We took the left fork in and the right fork out.

The left fork dropped down into a canyon. We descended about 200 feet we then had to climb back out. It was no biggie. We needed the extra exercise anyway. Once out of the canyon we walked along a ridge trail for a bit, then down into another canyon, then to a spur trail to the monolith. On the return we stayed on the ridge trail and came back out right branch of the fork above.

Rains erode a mountaintop seabed

The first thing that's unusual about the Tafoni Monolith is that it's sandstone. There's not a lot of sandstone in these mountains. They were formed by the collision of two tectonic plates along the San Andreas Fault. Most of the underlying rock is metamorphic or igneous. But when all that rock was pushing up from deep underground, up along with it came some ancient seabeds. That's where the sandstone comes from.

Sandstone is soft rock, so it can get eroded by rain and wind. One interaction with rain and evaporation, though, creates a tougher crust on the surface of the sandstone, protecting it somewhat. Except this crust can get broken in places. Where it chips away the softer rock underneath gets eroded very quickly. Those are the places where you see all the scalloped little caves, the tafoni.

Update: When we got back to the trailhead we didn't go home, we visited the Methusela Tree first!