Tales & Trails of a Traveling Wiseguy

My blog about our hike Sunday at Russian Ridge Open Space unexpectedly grew large— just like the hike itself more than doubled in length based on choices we made on the fly— so I've split it into a second blog entry.

I left off in part 1 of our hike at Russian Ridge with us angling up a wide-open hillside just beneath the ridge. After climbing gradually for a while with 180° views across the mountains to the Pacific Ocean (not that we could see the water, it being totally socked in with thick fog) the trail dipped under tree cover and began descending.



Hey, look, fall foliage! Is it time to stop and smell the roses? ...No, wait, that's poison oak! 😰

Shortly after this photo op we reached the next trail junction. This is where I thought we'd loop back up to the ridge and then back to the trailhead, making a nice little hike of just over 2 miles for the day.

"How about we go further, to the Hawk Trail?" Hawk suggested.

It would not only more than double our mileage but add at several hundred additional feet of ascent. The weather was nice and we were enjoying it, so I agreed.

We even saw an actual hawk on the Hawk trail. 😂



Usually when we hike the Hawk Trail at Russian Ridge we loop around so that we're hiking down it. Sunday we went up. It's steep! Going up it makes it a different kind of challenge. Going down it's all ankles and trying not to slip on the dry, dusty surface. Going up it's all cardio and muscle tone.

Finally we got up to the top. ...Not that the top is even the top!



From atop the Hawk Trail there's still plenty more hiking, including another few hundred feet of ascent. On the whole day we hiked over 5 miles, more than we estimated even when we made the choice to extend our hike. By the time we were done we were tired and sore. But it was a good kind of tired and sore! It's been too many weeks— six of them, now— since we got out like this. Hopefully we won't wait another 6 before doing something like this again.

So, what did we do this past weekend other than eat at a skeezy restaurant with a sign illustrating how NOT to pee on a toilet? Well, a lot. And also a little. It was a mostly relaxing weekend at home.

Our relaxing began Friday night with a soak in the hot tub. Saturday morning I planned to get up early and spend at least an hour on housecleaning before going out to run a few errands. Ah, the best laid plans of mice and men. I got up early but then went back to bed and slept in/lazed in until about 9. I did get up after that and do some serious housework, though not all that I had hoped to. By the time we went out for our errands we were running two hours behind.

After lunch we had friends coming over to join us in our pool with their son. We had to delay those plans an hour because of our running behind. That was fine for everyone. And we didn't miss anything... Saturday morning was bleh with cloudy skies and cooler weather than we're paying for. We still enjoyed the pool and the sun deck for a while, but with more of a rotation to the hot tub than the pool.

Late afternoon, after a few hours at the pool we went out for that aforementioned dinner. After that we said goodbye to our friends and headed back home. I started feeling a bit ill shortly after that. It could have been lunch... or it could have been dinner at a restaurant where apparently people piss on the floor.

Sunday we had plans to go hiking. I got up in the morning feeling 100% again, but Hawk was too sick to want to go out. Ming's Revenge? The weather was bleh again anyway. I suggested since the days are so long we could relax at home a few hours, get some lunch, and decide in the afternoon if or where to go hiking. That worked... to a point.

Hawk started feeling better, we enjoyed a tasty lunch, got donuts for dessert at one of our favorite donut shops, then drove up into the hills toward Russian Ridge. It was a positively beautiful day for a drive in the mountains with the convertible top down... until we got to 1/2 mile short of Russian Ridge where the Pacific fog wall had just risen over the ridge. Fucking fog.

Undaunted, we turned around and drove the opposite direction, seeking out an old favorite, Summit Rock. We used to go there a few times a year but haven't been in... I dunno... at least 10 years now? Except when we got to Summit Rock it was closed. For falcon nesting. Fucking falcons.

Sunday afternoon and evening we rounded out the day at home. The time I spend last weekend cleaning the patio and balconies paid dividends again as I enjoyed sitting outdoors. We made dinner at home then went out to the hot tub for another soak at sunset.

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!

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!

I've said it countless times before and I'll say it again: in the San Francisco Bay Area we are blessed not just with natural beauty but also with natural beauty that thoughtfully has been protected as park land. In addition to state and federally protected areas there are also county and city parks, plus several networks of regional parklands.

One of these is the Mid-peninsula Regional Open Space District (MROSD). "Mid-pen" they call themselves; "Mister OSD" has always been the nickname I prefer. Whatever the sobriquet, they're a special district that manages 26 parks across Santa Clara and San Mateo counties (plus a tiny bit of Santa Cruz). Their parks, all free, have been a regular destination of ours since shortly after we moved out here 25 years ago... and they've been around since 25 years before that! Check out their website at openspace.org to learn more or get downloadable maps (which they've had for at least 25 years!).

This afternoon we took advantage of the briefly clear weather and drove our convertible up into the Santa Cruz Mountains to visit Russian Ridge. The weather wasn't exactly great... though it was sunny it was chilly. We put the top down and blasted the heat. But even so that's better than the gray skies and chilly air we've had most of the past week and the deluge of rain that's supposed to start in the wee hours tomorrow.



There are a few entrances to the Russian Ridge Open Space. Our favorite has long been a foot gate opposite a scenic pullout on Highway 35, aka Skyline Boulevard. From this vista at elevation 2,350' one can look east and see down across a significant part of the Bay Area. Centered below us is Stanford University in Palo Alto. Looking north and south one can see almost as far as San Francisco and San Jose. (They've both more visible from atop Borel Hill behind this viewpoint.) The high peak in the distance is 3,849' Mt. Diablo, some 50 miles to the northeast.

As this excursion is more an In Beauty I Walk thing than Road trip! (though it is partly both) we turned west from the highway vista point after several minutes and walked into the preserve.



As we entered Russian Ridge Preserve I noted the newer regulatory signs. NO DOGS has been policy for as long as I can remember. NO DRONES appeared at a nearby park 2-3 years ago though I think it's new here. And NO E-BIKES is definitely new. Signs of the times. Literally.

We like this park entrance because once you get past the somewhat unwelcoming gate area— sadly it's got to be like that otherwise careless people would destroy it— trails split in three directions from a ridge top with excellent views whichever way you go. Often we hike all of them.



Today we started one of our usual loop hikes by walking north along the Ridge Trail. It provides alternating views of the bay and the Pacific Ocean. It's enjoyable to look at the mountains, too. In the distance, back to the south, is Borel Hill. I enjoyed this view today because of the clear skies and green-ish grass. Green grass isn't a given this time of year. It depends on how much rain has fallen recently. As our last significant rain— an atmospheric river, no less— was a month ago I thought the hills might be awash in gold. Today they're gold and green.

Keep reading: Hiking Russian Ridge, part 2