Eagle Peak & Aquarian Valley

Having just finished up graduate business school at Stanford, Dave had free time on his hands. I happened to have the day off work. So we decided to to traipse around skyline and look for rocks to play on.

Monument Valley

The Grand Canyon

First light of the day on The Grand Canyon.
First sight in my life of The Grand Canyon.

Yosemite

Getting ready for some extreme x-country skiing in Yosemite!
(l to r) myself, Jay, Sara, Kristine, Annette, Liz, Rich, Steph, Dave and Dave


The reward for our efforts:
A grand view from Dewey Point


Sunset on El Capitan, as viewed from the shuttle bus back to the valley floor.

Hot showers, a quick nap and a frolicking wake up call from the ladies kicked off our evening activities. The Curry Village buffet was way too crowded so we trekked over to the Yosemite Lodge food court for some decent and inexpensive food. After scarfing down some grub we decided to entertain ourselves with a spontaneous game of "Egyptian rat screw" until we got booted from the cafe - presumably because it was closing time, not because of our riotous laughter. So we moved our card party to a small corner of the Curry Village Lodge where wonderful dance music was conveniently provided by the neighboring family reunion. After much "Nertz" we were again vacated from the premises, again due to closing time. But before actually leaving, "Big Johnny", the night janitor, provided two more hours of colorful entertainment with stories of growing up in gangs on the south side of Chicago, resulting in various scars and a piece of lead still lodged in his foot, and other adventures that led him to working in Yosemite for the last seven months. The funniest of these stories being that of his grade school nemesis, Wanda, who regularly stole his lunch money by threat of a serious whoopin!

Portola Redwoods Hike

Old Tree
Species: Sequoia sempervirens
Diameter: 12 ft.
Height: 297 ft.
Age: ~1200 years old
Thought to be the tallest Coastal Redwood on the San Francisco peninsula.


Anna checks out the rings on a fallen pine tree.


Mixed forest in Portola Redwoods State Park.


Sara crosses Slate Creek.

07/07/07 in Zion - The Perfect Day?

Here are some pictures:


Going down the first rappel.



The Palo Alto crowd (Dave, myself and Sara)



The Crew right before the last rappel. (front to back: Brent, Ronnie, Tara, Sara, Reina and myself)



Sara descending with grace down the 165' last rappel of the day.


Here's an email from Reina regarding this calculated adventure:

Friends new and old,

07/07/07
was the perfect day. Yes, triple 07 was Better than Bond. There was action (9 rappels, including a 165 foot free rappel in the sunset), blood (a few burns and a bloody nose), terror (Tara can tell you about that), and romance (even the cesspool stench couldn't keep 4 women away from Evans, Brent Evans).

With that, let's look at the results for the
Perfect Day Behunin Canyon Awards

* Brent wins sacrificial pimpin' frog award. …By the way, judges are wondering if you've showered yet. Judges also want a personal demonstration of how you like the women walking; feel free to post it on YouTube.

* Reina wins best guinea pig award.

* Sara wins the wet t-shirt contest (self-proclaimed and uncontested). Looks like she won 2 awards! The other is…most appreciated for being a great hostess. And the canyon walls are echoing, "Here, here!"

* Tara wins most improved. (And she actually wasn't even too sore the next day! Hard core, Tara! Speaking of hard cores…)

* Ronnie wins hard core award. Oh wait, there's some confusion among the judges… judges say she actually wins… best hair award!

* Robert wins most willing to save Jefe.

* Dave wins best giggle. That's right, best giggle.

Thanks, folks. All I've got to say is, YAHOOOOOO, let's do it again!

Send Pics Soon,
Reina

Here's a video showing what I hope was a calculated rappel:

Half Dome McTwist

Andy and I at the top of Half Dome.

I love Yosemite. I don't think I can ever get enough of it. In fact I drink it every day - but that is a different story. This is about Half Dome, a 4,800 ft granite dome sliced in half by a glacier millions of years ago. I'd already hiked Half Dome several times previously and though it is a breathtaking and rewarding view from the top it can be quite crowded. So I vowed several years ago that the only way I would do it again was by the light of a full moon.

-to be continued-

A day in the Foothills

Cooked myself a nice pre-marinated juicy steak from JJ&F's at Foothills Park for a barbecue organized by Joe and Angela. After leaving there I decided I needed to do some exploring, so I headed up Page Mill Road a little ways to Foothills Open Space Preserve. Lucky for me there was one parking spot left of the two designated for this small preserve. Coincidentally, I happen to have my GPS and knew of two geocaches in this preserve. The half-mile trail leading to the grassy knoll was easy enough, as was the first cache.



The rest of the trail leading to the second cache was, shall we say, not currently maintained. It was obviously a well used trail at some point in time, judging by the well worn rut, but the dense brush and trees that had since grown over it made for an interesting hike/crawl. My GPS batteries gave out while crawling through an overgrown tree about 500 feet from the second cache. By this point I felt committed to finding it, or rather I wanted something to show for all my scratches and scrapes. I figured I could roughly gauge the distance on the trail and that with the dense foliage it couldn't be that far off the trail, if there was a trail left by then. Thankfully right about the time I was ready to turn around, or try bushwhacking a new route back, I found it. I opted for the known route back and found it fairly uneventful, except for the baby rattlesnake I nearly stepped on.

Condors at Pinnacles

Volcanoes were one of my favorite subjects in elementary school and Pinnacles National Monument is one of my favorite places currently, partly because Pinnacles is half of an ancient volcano (the other half is somewhere near LA) and partly because this is where I got hooked on rock climbing. But this adventure to Pinnacles with my mom and two brothers John and Steve was to hike to a spot where we could hope to see some California Condors.

Currently there are only 280 California Condors in the world. Of these, 135 are wild and of those, 15 are flying around Pinnacles. Today was a release event open to the public for up to five more juvenile condors but unfortunately they didn't feel like leaving their pen today. Fortunately for us there were several wild condors flying around near the pen.

At first it was hard to tell if we were seeing any condors or not as we looked through our binoculars to the ridge across from the viewing area. With a six foot wing span, Turkey Vultures are big birds and look very similar to a condor. But with a nine foot wingspan for the condor, it was easy to tell what we were looking at when these two birds glided around in circles near each other.

Gossip Rock

Me and my favorite jacket

Today's goal was to find the crash site of ill fated United Flight 615 in the east bay hills above Union City. I read about this 1951 plane crash a couple years ago and have wanted to find the location ever since. I found the exact coordinates of the crash site on www.geocaching.com just this past week. I also found coordinates for a brand new geocache nearby that was yet to be found called Gossip Rock. 'First To Find' was still up for grabs, very enticing!

The hills in the east bay are mostly grass and lack the tree cover that the Santa Cruz Mountains have so the views of the bay were spectacular as I gained elevation, rather quickly, hiking through Dry Creek Pioneer Regional Park. I chose a ridge I thought was most likely to get me to my goal but after a lot of climbing I began to realize Flight 615 would be on the ridge just to the south of me. As I reached the top of the ridge I was climbing, Gossip Rock was clearly visible not more than a quarter mile south of me on a clear posted trail. I hadn't seen anyone since the ranchers herding cows a mile or so below so I had the whole ridge to myself. Gossip Rock is a big pile of rocks with a nice canopy of trees which makes for a nice shady rest spot on a ridge that is otherwise completely open.

It didn't take too long to find the ammo box cache cleverly hidden among the rocks. I signed the first page of the empty log book and noted how beautiful the morning was with views of the bay below and lizards playing on the rocks around me. I lounged on the rocks for a few minutes and then decided I should head out if I wanted to make it home in time to take a shower before going into work at 1PM. After a slight detour and some birdwatching I quickly made it back to my car. Flight 615 would have to wait for a different day.

Jasper Ridge

Today I had the privilege of hiking a couple miles around Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve. Ever since I saw Searsville Lake on a map in high school I wanted to explore the area. Unfortunately for me it is not open to the general public, which is a good thing for the preserve.

Once, in about 1995, when I worked a construction job nearby, I noticed the gate was open as I was driving home from work. I made a quick decision to pull in and park next to several other cars and proceeded to start hiking on a marked trail. I passed a couple Stanford field trips but just smiled and said hi, acting as if I knew what I was doing. I really didn't have much of a clue as to where I was going but I did want to find the dam and I knew that I was downriver of it in a steep narrow little valley. I rounded a turn in the valley and was awestruck to see the steep faced 100' concrete dam in front of me. It seemed so out of place in comparison to any other shallow dirt and rock dams in the area that I had seen. I would have liked to explore more but didn't want to push my luck.

In talking to my mom after this adventure she told me that she brought me to Searsville Lake as a baby when it was open as a local recreation area. Apparently sand was trucked in from Santa Cruz to make a little beach area and there was a concession stand too. I have no recollection of this at all so I'm guessing I was younger than three.

Fortunately for me my new friend Jaimie, who recently joined us at The North Face, did her undergraduate work at Stanford and is a lifetime docent for Jasper Ridge. Which leads to my privileged hike today. After growing up in this area and exploring every bit of local open space I could get to it was quite exciting to hike several miles over a 100' dam, past natural bat caves, along an untouched creek, through redwood groves, up a ridge, across a meadow and through a small delta. All of which I had never even seen before today!

I love the outdoors and I love exporing new places, so thank you Jamie!

Hiking at Monte Bello

Woke up warm and toasty atop Black Mountain inside my Mountain Hardwear down sleeping bag and Kelty tent. Alice, Jared, Amy, Bryan and I fired up some hot water on the camp stove for our power breakfast of maple and brown sugar oatmeal and hot chocolate. Then we packed up and headed back to the parking lot to meet up with a group of eight or so friends who wanted to hike on the beautiful Saturday morning.

Alice, Jared and Amy headed off while Bryan and I dumped our packs and headed out with the anxious group. We did a nice five mile loop down to Stevens Creek, climbed to the very top of Black Mountain and then made our way back to the parking lot.

Foothills Park

A casual day hike at Foothills Park with my co-worker from The North Face, Lee, and his friends James and Amanda.