Henry Coe State Park is like a supermodel girlfriend. Difficult, at times impossible, yet impossible to stop looking at. And gorgeous from every angle.

I found another of those angles on Saturday at the grand opening of the Dowdy Ranch Visitors Center. Getting there requires an hour’s drive south from San Jose, crossing one of the deadliest highways in the region and rattling one’s ribs for another half-hour along 7.3 miles of curvy, hilly, dusty gravel road. But of course, it was worth it.

The visitor center has been in the works for over two decades. First the state parks people had to buy the last couple miles of road to Dowdy Ranch, then it had to find funding to build the visitors center, then it had to find volunteers to staff the center, since the state generously provided money to build it and ingeniously provided no money to staff it. In any case, all the ducks were in a row on Saturday when then the ribbon was cut.

So let’s take us a look at some pictures:

Upon arrival, we notice this cool sign cautioning people that big cats roam these hills.

Melissa scopes out the countryside. Having Melissa along gave me an excellent excuse to hike here on another day (like, say, November, when the weather starts to cool down).

Behold the Visitors Center. I’m told it was built a year ago but it took all this time to make the final adjustments to get it ready for public consumption. It has running water and flush toilets — borderline plush for these parts.

A horse named Secret await a rider. Equestrians will probably be the most frequent users of this end of the park, I’m guessing.

An old oak tree and a sign directing hikers, bikers and horse riders to share the trails and register at the headquarters so they’ll know where to send rescue teams.

The view from a knoll overlooking the visitors center.

Guys look over the map and discuss the good old days when they could ride horses back here to their hearts content. I couldn’t help noticing 80-90 percent of the crowd looked to be over 50, which sorta makes me wonder who’s going to take care of this park after they’re gone.

I’m hazarding a guess this is the last time this parking lot will ever be this full.

A ranger reads from a prepared speech to dedicate the visitors center. If anybody got lost in a California state park yesterday and couldn’t find a ranger, it might’ve been because they were all here for the grand opening. “I’ve never seen so many rangers,” somebody told me.

Ranger asks for a show of hands. This is one of them.

Finally, the ribbon-cutting. These two girls performed admirably, though I couldn’t help noticing the bigger of the two had an exasperated “geeze, the things my parents put me through” look on her face after it was over.

J.T. is a hiker we met; he had been camping in the park since Wednesday and hiked over here for the grand opening.

While J.T. and I were gabbing and watching the opening ceremonies, Melissa was sitting on a park bench in a shady glade, just checking out the scenery. When J.T. and I approached, she shushed us: she was watching a big snake make its way through the brush about 15 feet away. Before that she’d seen a deer trot through, and a bunch of quail dash across the hillside in that way only quail can dash.

Henry Coe is dependable for delivering moments like that, in ways no other park in the Bay Area can.

(For you Coe-philes, here’s a page by a guy who tried to hike all the trails in the park in 40 days. He did all but 50.)

I had to replace my Canon A520, which had developed an annoying tic of not opening its lens cover without assistance from yours truly. Naturally, two years later its replacement, a Canon A710 IS has all sorts of features unavailable on the previous cam — most notably image stabilization, which is designed to reduce shake caused by the hands of incompetent photographers. It appears to work pretty well. I tried it out at Castle Rock State Park and Sanborn-Skyline County Park on Friday. Among the highlights:

This is one of my faves: I shot the sun filling this wildflower — called, you guessed it, a sun cup, — by shooting it from behind.

It gets the color of the sky right.

Madrones are one of the great challenges for shutter-bugs. They grow in clumps in the forest, where seemingly infinite variations of lighting make it hard for a camera to make up its mind and settle on a shutter/aperture setting. This is one of the better ones, but it still gets the lighter areas washed out a bit.

Another shot from behind — note the bug shadow.

A good dead tree picture pretty much takes itself.

A climber at Goat Rock.

Pretty clouds. These were fairly faint but the cam picked them up pretty well.

An iris: note the capillaries in the leaves. I’m not sure if this its original color or if it’s been bleached in the sun.

Summit Rock at Sanborn-Skyline County Park. This immense hunk o’ sandstone has been thoughtfully decorated by local high school hooligans.

A flash might’ve served this image well. It feels kinda flat.

Orange flowers shot in macro mode, handheld. Note the bug crawling among them.

Another macro shot. This is a crimson columbine … note the fuzz.

Overall it’s a pretty good camera; my previous one never let me shoot any wildflowers in macro mode without a tripod; this one’s pretty good with handheld shots.

I’m sticking with my insistence on using inexpensive point-and-shoots — the A710 street price is about $250 … it uses double-a batteries and SD memory cards. I bought an option package deal with two two-gig cards, a five year extended warranty, a battery charger (with batteries) and a case that fattened the final purchase price by another hundred bucks. Normally I never buy extended warranties but both of my previous Canons have developed malfunctions after the regular warranty had expired; I’m sure this purchase will guarantee a long and healthy life for this latest cam.

Why not just suck it up and buy a digital SLR? Mainly because those have a bunch of features I’d have to learn how to use, and I don’t want to have to haul around all the extra weight. Plus I like the challenge of plucking good pictures from the dross these smaller, less ambitious cams produce.

It’s strawberry pickin’ time in California.

We picked about 20 pounds of them on Sunday at Gizdich Ranch.

The History Channel is showing a documentary called “The Hippies.” It’s Sponsor: The AARP.

Priceless irony of history: California declared LSD illegal. A massive event called the Human Be-In launched on the day the new law went into effect — in defiance of the anti-LSD law — essentially launches the hippy movement, virtually guaranteeing kids across the country would become entranced with the idea of tripping on the newly criminalized psychedelic drug.