Two-Heel Drive

From my column in today’s Mercury News

Skyline Ridge is one of a string of preserves managed by the Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District along Skyline Boulevard in the Santa Cruz Mountains crest west of the Santa Clara Valley. The main attractions are Alpine Pond and its nature center, staffed by volunteers on weekends. A wooden walkway allows close inspection of life at the pond’s edge, and there’s a drinking fountain nearby to refresh your water supply.

This one’s always a fave. Previous Skyline Ridge hikes here.

Hiker lore: stories that practically beg to be shared. What are yours?

One from my mental archives: I hiked to the top of Monument Peak at Ed Levin County Park one time with a Persian pharmacist who had lived in the United States for many years, then returned home just in time for the Iranian Revolution … he was stuck there for several years and finally had to bail with his family, whatever they could fit into a few suitcases, and a few thousand dollars to start over from scratch in the Bay Area. Totally fascinating guy who’d seen a lot. Told me Las Vegas has tons of great trails in the hills outside of town … one time he slipped and got wedged between some rocks and, as I recall it, had to wriggle his way out or starve in the attempt — because nobody knew exactly where he was and he was out there solo. He also talked about how his dad took him mountain climbing in a range near Tehran during his boyhood. Very illuminating.

Another story I’d like to hear more about: Dinesh Desai’s attempt to hike every trail at Henry Coe State Park. I bumped into Dinesh and his wife, Joy, (left) at Butano State Park last summer — we chatted a bit but it was clear he was hot to keep moving up the trail. He was glad to meet another hiker who was not satisfied with going back to the same old trails at the same old park time and again.

Got any such lore you’d care to share? Click on comments and let us have it.

(Related: “Coolest people you’ve met on hikes.”)

I’ve been meaning to do this for ages and finally got around to it: a business card I can hand out to unsuspecting hikers on the trail.

The tagline at the bottom says “news, links and lore for hikers in the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond.” Any suggestions for a sexier tag are welcome.

Lemme know what you think.

Yeah, I should’ve been out hiking yesterday but instead I spent the afternoon gawking at the clever creations at Make Faire, where wacky do-it-yourselfers get their ya-yas out every year at the San Mateo County Fairgrounds. While there’s a smattering of annoying Burning Man types using sculpture to make political points you already know by heart, quite a bit of it is frolicsome and zany, and much of it is downright ingenious and practical, like this no-frills fold-down camper, called the Quickup.

Here’s a peek through the back door, and the view from the front. The table folds down and a 7-foot by 4.5-foot bed folds out. It has a little sink, stove and nook for a porta-potty.

I head the guy who made it bragging that it stood up to 80-mph winds. His site’s here (more pictures of how it works are there, too).

This blog post has much more on the designer, Jay Baldwin, who is quite the pioneer on things like this.

More of my Maker Faire pictures are here.

… runs through his feet. Another way to say it: all gifts of high-quality hiking socks are gratefully accepted. A few weeks back, Wade at Outdoorzy.com sent me an e-mail saying he had something he’d like to mail to me. Discounting the likelihood that he might be a long-lost co-conspirator of the Unabomber, I sent him an address, and what to my wondering eyes should appear in this afternoon’s mail: a brand new pair of Wigwam Trail Mix Fusion socks, which look to be about as high-tech as you can get without adding space suit boots.

I figured the least I could do in return is throw some on-trail publicity Wade’s way, so I slapped his bumper sticker on my old orange day pack.

Hildy regards this move with suspicion. That’ll teach me to adopt a commie cat.

The Santa Clara County Open Space Authority is sitting on $56 million, paralyzed since 2001 by a lawsuit that prevents the authority from spending it on trails and other stuff we like. Tomorrow, the state Supreme Court will begin hearing arguments on the suit, filed filed by anti-tax crusaders who say the initiative that funded the authority for all these millions violated tax provisions of a previous initiative (one thing about us Californians, we love our initiatives. Our legislators can barely find a butt cheek with either hand, though, so maybe it’s for the best.). From this morning’s Mercury News:

The Supreme Court will hear arguments in a challenge to the county’s Open Space Authority, which created a special assessment on property owners in 2001 to pay for open space from Milpitas to Morgan Hill. The Silicon Valley Taxpayers Association sued to block the fee hike, arguing that it violates a 1996 ballot initiative designed to limit ways the government can raise revenue.

Two lower courts have rejected the lawsuit, but the state’s highest court agreed to review the case, which offers an unprecedented test of Proposition 218, the so-called “Right to Vote on Taxes Act” approved by voters 12 years ago.

For Santa Clara County, the legal battle has tied up $56 million raised during the past seven years to preserve open space. If the Open Space Authority loses, that money most likely will be refunded to property owners instead of being used to carry out a long-stalled plan to use it to stave off development across the valley by acquiring parks, trails, ranches and other land.

The Supreme Court has 90 days to make up its mind.

The Santa Clara County’s Open Space Authority has an almost laughably small array of land holdings that people can actually hike in, compared to, say, Midpeninsula OSA, which runs all those great parks along Skyline Boulevard. Just two, actually: Boccardo Trail near Alum Rock Park and Rancho Canada del Oro OSP next to Calero County Park. It has all these other properties — maybe if the lawsuit gets settled, the agency can actually do something with them (or successfully leave them be, which wouldn’t be all bad).

I do have to say hats off to the anti-taxers for keeping this tied up in court long enough for the cost of real estate to double, guaranteeing the OSA will be able to buy only half as much land as it would’ve been able to, leaving the rest open to marketplace, which will carefully assess the land’s true merit and start placing calls to strip-mall developers.

(All this reminds me that the first-ever Bay Area hiking blog meet-up happened when I bumped into Dan Mitchell at the grand opening of Rancho Canada del Oro in December 2005. Dan’s account here. I hiked to the top of Boccardo Trail in April 2005; link here.)

A reader e-mails to ask where hikers from Marin might want to live if jobs oblige a move to the South Bay. Just to make it interesting, the reader asks, could it also be at least somewhat affordable? Well, that takes Palo Alto, Saratoga, Los Altos (and Los Altos Hills) out of the picture but hey, who wants to live around all those dull moneybags anyway (just because they have better jobs, sexier clothes, bigger houses, faster cars and their very own poolboys, it doesn’t make them superior to the rest of us, right?). A few thoughts, based on my travels and home-hunting experiences:

In San Jose

Berryessa: This neighborhood on the east side of San Jose is close to Alum Rock Park and seems mostly unpretentious and perhaps less pricier than other parts of town (kiss the Rose Garden goodbye, for instance). It’s near the trolley line, if that matters, and it’s close to I-680, which means easy access to the Santa Cruz Mountains on the weekends (Steve Sergeant lives there, if you need any further encouragement).

South San Jose: I’ve heard there are housing deals to be had in the south end of town. The neighborhoods around Santa Teresa and Almaden Quicksilver county parks would be worth a look, though I suspect there are fewer deals around Almaden Quicksilver.

Elsewhere

Santa Cruz Mountains: Scotts Valley, Felton and Ben Lomond along Highway 9 are remote enough that there’s not quite as much demand for housing as you might expect, which could make them affordable. Of course then there’s the gas to drive over Highway 17, and the risk from taking your life into your own hands every day in the process and hoping the daily fender-smasher always happens to somebody else.

Fremont: OK, so it has no downtown and it’s mostly sprawl central. But it’s a pretty quick jaunt down to San Jose from there, and it’s right between I-880 and I-680, and it’s not so far from Coyote Hills Regional Park, which remains one of my favorite hang-outs (more for the birdwatching than the hiking, which isn’t especially challenging). I wouldn’t rule it out.

Milpitas: Also close to I-680, a bit less pricey than the South Bay, but suffers from the tract-house mania that infects so much of the region. This page lists lots of hiking opportunities nearby.

Mountain View: Not exactly cheap, but very close to the Santa Cruz Mountains. A careful consumer might be able to luck into a good housing deal (though Fedak, who lives there, tells me the unremarkable house across the street from him is on the market for $1.3 1.6 million).

Campbell: I always pass it on the way down south on Highway 17. It has a cool/funky (by South Bay “Empire of the Geeks” standards) downtown shopping strip. Housing might be a bit more affordable, though I haven’t really shopped it myself.

Sunnyvale: Some of my favorite hikers (Winehiker Russ and Mike and Kathy of the FOMFOK hiking club) live there; it’s close to I-680 and Highway 85, which offer easy access to most of the prime hiking areas. Little ’60s tract houses in Mike’s neighborhood were going for 700k, the last I heard, but I wouldn’t rule out finding deals here and there.

So those are the first ones that spring to mind. I know some of you live in the South Bay, so how about chiming in?

(Those of you from the rest of the world are forgiven for wondering how we can afford such stupendous prices for housing; I just imagine that I’m on vacation all year, which helps reassure me when I can’t afford to take one somewhere else.)

Get this: Yet another local hiker named Tom who has a hiking site. Weekly Walker is old-school, without many of the doo-dads some of us are prone to play with, but it has in-depth descriptions of hikes across the Bay Area, with category pages hikes according to interest (one for Grandads and Grandkids) and location (no Santa Clara County page just yet, but there are some South Bay hikes in the site.)

The Footnotes page has a ton of hiking-related info.

The entries are columns Tom Davids wrote for some newspapers on the Peninsula. I liked the ones I saw. (No new ones since spring of 2007, though).

Update: oddly enough the upgrade seems to have succeeded.

I’m sure new “features” (previously known as “bugs”) will emerge.

The details:

250,000 to 500,000 circulation
WINNER
Backpacker: Jonathan Dorn, editor-in-chief, for April, May, September issues.

National Geographic rakes in the most awards; no surprise there.

Every time I pick up Backpacker, I find myself wanting to go on a camp-out. Every time I put it, down my brain returns to “comfy beds were invented for a reason and day-hikes ain’t so bad” mode.

I do have to give the magazine props for not filling its pages with heavy-breathing profiles of adventure athletes. Most of the time Backpacker is downright useful, which reminds me, I should go looking for something useful to post on the blog this morning. (Useful is dull as dirt, which is why I try not to overdo it).