A month ago I hiked a loop from the Mitchell Canyon Vistor Center to the summit of Mt. Diablo and back again. It was about 13 miles round-trip, with 3269 feet of elevation gain and subsequent loss. You’d think standing on a trail and pointing a camera straight ahead would result in a “good” shot more often than not, but the opposite is true—especially in terms of interestingness. The sky was clear, the autumn sun was shining at a sharp angle, and I came home with bupkis. This was the best of the bunch. Meh.
I’m fortunate to live within bicycling distance of work. Google says it’s about 2.2 miles door to door. There are dedicated bike lanes almost the whole way, and the route is mostly flat. San Francisco has a temperate climate year-round, bordering on cool, and we’ve had a series of dry winters, so I’m able to bike almost every day. When it rains, I prefer to take an umbrella and BART.
I get to work around 9, sometimes a little before, sometimes a little after. I work in a unusually bright and well-lit space for an engineering team. Actually engineering, design/product, and growth/marketing all sit together, currently 11 people. It’s a good group, and I genuinely like everyone I work with. A catered lunch arrives every day around noon. I used to look down on perks like these—as infringing upon my food-finding and choosing autonomy—but now I value it, because it brings everyone across the whole company together and away from their screens once a day. We use that time to eat, talk, play games, and share silly videos. And then it’s back to work until 5 or 6.
A few weekends ago I made the two-hour trek down to Big Basin Redwoods State Park to hike the Sunset, Berry Creek Falls, and Skyline-to-the-Sea trails. 101 Great Hikes says the loop is 12 miles long, Bay Area Hiker says 11, the park’s own trail map placard says 10.5, and Google Maps says 9.8. Whom to trust? It doesn’t really matter, but it makes me wish I had a GPS watch to know for sure. In any event, I burned through it in exactly 4 hours, including a short sit-down for lunch, which means I was averaging somewhere between 2.5 and 3 miles-per-hour.
I took photos along the way, but the light coming through the canopy was too harsh for most shots. That and the trees were just not cooperating, compositionally. Except for these.
A few weekends ago, I gave myself a four-hour window to hike a 13-mile loop in Point Reyes (before racing home to return my Zipcar). Turns out four hours was a little tight. I ate my lunch in motion and jogged a few downhill sections, but I also managed to take a few photos that show a different side of this national seashore.
We were still waking up early a week after returning from France, so on our first weekend back we drove out to Mt Tam State Park at 7:30 in the morning—and that was after a leisurely breakfast—to reconnect with home.
