Tales & Trails of a Traveling Wiseguy

This weekend was a frustrating one. I'd planned to enjoy it outdoors, getting out for good hikes both days to take advantage of the window of clear weather in between winter rains. Instead we spend most of Saturday indoors, planning a last minute trip to Hawaii— which brought its own set of aggravations. At times I felt I was being taught a Biblical lesson, being punished for yearning. Then Sunday came, with fog all morning. I feared we had completely missed our chances to enjoy the great outdoors. But then around noon the sky started to clear. We gathered our hiking clothes and packs, ate lunch, and drove up into the mountains.



My idea for a hike was to reach the top of Mindego Hill. It's in the Russian Ridge Preserve we also visited last weekend but it's on the much less visited back side of the park. Indeed, ours was the only car at the barely-there trailhead we started from.

Signs of trouble started appearing right away. First, Mindego Hill looked too far away. (It's on the left in the photo above, in the distance.) The trail distance is 2.3 miles; it looked more than that. "Enh," I figured, "That's just how distances look outdoors." BTW several miles beyond the mountain is the Pacific Ocean. The clouds in the far distance are mostly over the ocean.

Then the trail started going the wrong way relative to what my map showed. I had a very detailed topographic map, freshly downloaded in PDF from MROSD— one of several things I like about the agency. But whereas the map showed the trail angling down the side of a hill while heading northwest, the trail under our feet switchbacked steeply down toward the southwest.

After exclaiming a few times about how the map could be so wrong I realized I was wrong. I'd parked at the wrong trailhead! The right one was almost a mile away.

We could have kept going, adding on the extra leg to our hike, but the added distance both ways would have had us hiking back to the car well after dark. Ditto for hiking back to the car and driving to the correct trailhead. We'd lost too much time to reach Mindego Hill Sunday. 😖

While we wouldn't hike the correct trail we decided at least we should drive to the trailhead so we absolutely, 110%, know what it looks like for next time. 😅



Here's where we found more than we were looking for. From this viewpoint (photo above) at the correct trailhead, Mindego Hill is much easier to see. It does not look too far away here. 🤣

Mister Ms. OSD, I presume

The "more" part we discovered is about the agency, MROSD, that operates these parks. I've always lovingly referred to it as "Mister OSD". See my "Mr. OSD, I presume?" post from almost 8 years ago. It's a play on words of the famous 1871 greeting, "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?" But here's the thing: this viewpoint is dedicated to Audrey Rust, who served as president of MROSD from 1987-2011. So really it should be Ms. OSD.

I also learned a bit about the relationship between POST and MROSD. POST, the Peninsula Open Space Trust, is a charitable organization that buys land to preserve it and make it available for recreation. MROSD is a governmental agency that manages land it buys or acquires. POST has contributed most of what MROSD manages.

What's cool is that while POST gets a lot of its financing from deep-pocket donors like the founders of HP and Intel, I'm a donor, too! Hawk and I made a small donation a few years ago to support the preservation of green spaces around our burgeoning city. To some very small extent, this is our charity dollars at work!