Irrelevance Glorified

I decided to celebrate July 4th by doing some hiking. It was still pretty hot out there, so I traveled to another redwood-dominated state park, Portola Redwoods State Park. I think this park probably gets overshadowed by Big Basin, since this place doesn’t have the gigantic redwoods, but this park in the Santa Cruz mountains is still a welcome respite from the heat, the bustle, and the noise of Bay Area civilization.

I’m normally used to solitude when I go on my hiking trips, but for the early part of this hike, I was surrounded by the sound of noisy mobs. Apparently, a number of groups were out at Portola Redwoods this weekend, and were enjoying themselves loudly. Interestingly, most of the voices I heard were foreign; the groups appeared to be south asian, and large packs of teenagers were scrambling over rocks and falling into the creeks. While somewhat distracting, these sounds faded away as I ranged away from the heart of the park. I imagine that the long weekend played a role in all this activity.

This hike started out on the Nature Trail just outside of the very informative ranger station. From there, I took a short hike to Tiptoe Falls (fairly unimpressive at this time of year) before doubling back and taking the Iverson Trail to the Pomponio Trail. This trail crossed me over to Pescadero Creek County Park, where I continued on to the Bridge Trail and then Old Haul Rd., a fire road that was once used to haul lumber out of the area. Eventually, this fire road took me back to Portola Redwoods, where I took the Summit Trail up a decent hill before following the Slate Creek Trail back down to the parking lot. Before ending, I took a little trip to see “Old Tree”, apparently the largest tree in the park. According to my guidebook, this was about 7.5 miles.

Overall, I give this hike a B. No vistas, but a nice hike through coastal redwoods, and decent variety.

Flickr set here.
Slideshow below.
Pictures After the Jump.

 

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Note: this post describes events that took place on or about the last week of April

So, as I’ve intimated before, the traffic here really annoys and frustrates me. I can think of few things that are as soul-draining as sitting in my car, waiting at a red light. Nothing good comes of it. So I’ve started biking in (so now I am sitting on my bicycle, waiting at red lights). I’ve even worked out a route that’s moderately safe, with a bike lane and everything. However, there’s one development which has me quite embarrassed – I am really slow. Like, slow enough that I wonder if something is wrong with the bike. Slow enough that ten-year olds are passing me on their way to school. The way I see it, I can blame it on the double-edged sword of being out of shape and fat. I mean, since I’m out of shape, I just can’t pedal very fast for very long. And because I’m fat, it just means I’ve got more mass to move. It’s really a lose-lose. But, thanks to lots of hippies and recreationists around, there’s quite a lot of bike paths around. In fact, there’s an initiative to create new paths and connect up exiting ones so that there is a continuous path around the entire bay.
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