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:

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.