Two-Heel Drive, a Hiking Blog

I’m thinking if you live in Orinda you pretty much have to belong to a hiking club (it’s a village in the hills east of Berkeley), to catch up on who’s not talking to whom and such. But anyway: The Orinda Hiking Club is a serious organization that leads not-for-weenies hikes every weekend around the Bay Area. It also has a $20 annual membership fee, which may seem quaint in the Internet era where Everything Must Be Free but you have to admit that obliging club members to pony up a bit of cash obliges them to act more like, well, members of the club.

And this is pretty cool: The club is organizing a west-to-east California through-hike (Waddell Beach to Squaw Valley to King’s Beach at Lake Tahoe).

The park in the Oakland Hills is announcing this trail closure:

Redwood Regional Park Trail Segment Temporarily Closed for a Hazardous Tree and Fuel Mitigation Project

Beginning Tuesday, July 15, the East Bay Regional Park District will begin a hazardous tree and fuel mitigation project at Redwood Regional Park. This project will last until mid-September.

Approximately one mile of the East Ridge Trail from Skyline Gate to Prince Trail will be closed, as will the Phillips’ Loop and Eucalyptus Trail. To minimize the impact on park users, these closures will occur only during project work hours which are 8am – 5pm, Monday through Friday. The trails will be open during the weekends and before 8am and after 5pm during the week.

The purpose of the project is to thin aging Monterey pine and eucalyptus trees that grow along the trail to create a safer and healthier forest environment. In addition, the thinning of weak and older trees will provide a safer path for park users, enhance fire protection, and improve growing conditions for native plants. Because of the age of the trees and density of the forest, incidents of falling trees, branches, and dead material have been increasing. Falling debris is hazardous to park users and results in a greater fuel load which would be dangerous in a wildfire. This section of trail is popular for hikers, runners, dog walkers, cyclists, equestrians and children on bikes and in strollers. Once finished, the trail will still offer plenty of shade and less debris.

During the project hours, equestrians and hikers may use the Stream and Prince Trails to bypass the project zone. Unfortunately, cyclists will not be able to bypass the project zone and will need to turn around at the junction of East Ridge and Prince trails. The Park District apologizes for the inconvenience and will work as quickly as possible to complete the project.

Hat tip to Isa at the EBRPD.

This map shows where millions of dollars would be spent if a parks measure passes. Among the highlights:

• $5 million for Sunol Wilderness.
• $8.1 million for Coyote Hills Regional Park
• $8.3 million for Las Trampas Wilderness
• $4.5 million for Black Diamond Mines

Also: a bunch of regional trail work including an intriguing Calaveras Ridge Trail from Sunol to Las Trampas.

More on the parks measure:

On July 1 the East Bay Regional Park District Board of Directors took the first official step to place a proposition on the November 4 ballot to extend a bond measure passed in 1988 without raising the present property tax rates above the present rate of $10 per year, per $100,000. A final vote will occur at the board meeting on July 15.

If approved by the voters, this $500 million extension will be used to continue to restore urban creeks; to protect wildlife; purchase and save open space, wetlands, and bay shoreline; and to acquire, develop and improve local and regional parks, trails, and recreational facilities.

Of the $500 million, $375 million of the revenue (75%) will fund regional park acquisitions and capital projects, with $26.2 million (7%) of that amount held in reserve for unanticipated future needs and opportunities.

I wonder: with $500 mil. on hand, perhaps they’ll be able to afford getting rid of the cows.

Thanks to Ann L. for the link.

Poking around at the BAHIKER.com discussion boards the other day yielded a couple interesting links:

• North Bay Hikes: Rob Laddish built this site for his hiking group. Lots of pictures and hike write-ups from Marin, the coast and points northward. Bonus link: Condor close-ups on a page of pictures from a camp-out Pinnacles National Monument (scroll down about half way). The site runs a bit slow, but hey, if we wanted fast, we’d ride bikes.
• Baychic’s Xanga page: One of our most frequent commenters of late, she’s been posting a link to her page with her posts, but there’s one catch: you have to sign up with Xanga to view it. Curiosity finally overcame my ingrained laziness so I became a Xanga member just to see what she’s been posting: as expected, it’s many of the sites we’ve been visiting in the past few months.
• Hikin’ the Bay… but not quite like the Dharma Bums: Gotta like any blog with a Jack Kerouac reference in the title. It’s mostly hike write-ups and pictures of the kind we’ve become familiar with. The latest outing at Wildcat Canyon Regional Park looks most interesting.

Speaking of the BAHiker discussion board, I had never really noticed the Trip Reports section, which has bunches of dispatches from Two-Heel Drive regulars like Gambolin’ Man. For instance, you can check out Baychic’s Skyline-to-the-Sea adventure.

My Wilder Ranch column will appear (if there are no publishing glitches) in the Mercury News on June 5, and the one after that will be June 15 — at which time I’ll be obligated to start writing about places where hiking in the heat is less of an issue. Usually that means coastline and redwoods.

What I need:

1. Must be a park (rather than, say, a regional trail) because, for now at least, the columns are written as reviews of individual parks.
2. Must have enough trail choices to have “easy, moderate and hard” hike suggestions.
3. Must be reasonable driving distance from San Jose (less than an hour, basically — I know this rules out a lot of the North and East Bay but I’ve gotta think about who signs the checks).
4. Can’t be a place I’ve already reviewed.

These are the places I covered last summer:

• Angel Island State Park
• Big Basin Redwoods State Park
• Butano State Park
• Castle Rock State Park
• Portola Redwoods State Park
• Purisima Creek Redwoods Open Space Preserve
• Sanborn-Skyline County Park
• Wunderlich County Park

So, let me have ‘em. This’ll be a challenge because I’ve covered all my favorite parks in the past year. But there’s always time to find new ones.

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).

Steve Sergeant interviews Captain Bligh, Nellie Bly and Scrambler, the family who hiked the Pacific Crest Trail in 2004, chronicled in the book “Zero Days” (since trail season is officially under way it’s OK to call ‘em by their trail names).

Mary, AKA Scrambler, was 10 when she hiked the trail with her mom and dad. Though she seems like an obvious role model, listening to the interview makes it plain she’s quite a remarkable individual — bright like the sun and wise far beyond her years — almost too exceptional to make the case “well, anybody can get their kids to do something like this.” She was the star of a presentation her mom and dad gave for folks at the Mercury News in the spring of 2005.

Try to avoid the urge to wish you had such great kids; they hate it when you do that.

The East Bay Regional Parks District is again showing its Web strategy leaves all the other districts in the dirt: It has PDF guides to the wildflowers sprouting in each of the district’s parks, plus an overall guide of all the East Bay blooms. (Whether the taxpayers want their money spent on such a thing is another issue, mind you, but for it’s cool for us hiker types).

Speaking of flowers, the Sunol Regional Wilderness Annual Wildflower Festival is this Saturday from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. More on the goings-on here.

East Bay Regional Parks District got a corporate sponsor (Kaiser Pemanente put their “thrive” money where their mouth was) to pay the freight for free T-shirts and other goodies for those who sign up for the annual Trails Challenge. The pitch:

Thousands of people like you have participated over the 14 years-over two thousand last year alone! Register to receive the 2008 Guidebook filled with 20 of the best hikes in the Regional Parks. Trails Challenge invites you to hike 5 of the 20 trails or 26.2 miles of trails listed in the booklet by December 1. Participants will receive the Trails Challenge guidebook, T-shirt, and a special gift. A commemorative pin will be sent after participants have completed the ‘Challenge.’ Kaiser Permanente is a major sponsor of this program, enabling us to offer the materials free for this special 15th Anniversary. (one packet per person while supplies last) Reg. Required: 1-888-EBPARKS (1-888-327-2757).

Note you have to call to sign up. Packets are supposed to go out by the end of April.

Meetup.com has scads of hiking groups, including quite a few in the Bay Area. These are the most promising ones I scouted out this morning:

Related links
• Etiquette for group hikes
• Hiking clubs of note in the Bay Area
• Oakland Dog Hikers — This group charges a $2 fee. Next outing: Equinox Hike – Full Moon Hike — 6pm (March 21) in Berkeley at the Steam Train Staging Area of Tilden Park.
• “Let’s hike and maybe take a break if we get tired” — Sounds like the title of a discussion thread that morphed into a hiking club, something that could only happen on the Internet. Next outing: Diablo Foothills – Livorna (4.4 mi, 400 ft) Contra Costa County — 10 a.m. Saturday (March 22). This one’s not taking on new RSVPs (just as well; there’s 49 already). This group looks to be super popular, so you’d have to sign up early when hikes get announced. Also: be sure to read the group’s “about us” page.
• Super Fabulicious Hiking and Outdoor Adventure Group — Next outing: Morgan Territory 13mi. 3000ft. — 10 a.m. March 29 (a Saturday). This group also has 25 RSVPs for an overnighter April 12 at Sunol Wilderness … wonder where they’re gonna put ‘em all.
• The San Jose Hiking Meetup Group — Next outing: St. Joseph’s Hill OSP – Dog Friendly Hike — 10 a.m. Wednesday (that is, tomorrow).

Well, if you want some company on your next hike, you ought to be able to find some with one of these groups.