Here are some views from the exposed cliff, Hanging Rock, in Sequoia National Park. Awesome! Today (10/13/2012) was very foggy. Not much of the valley below could be seen. The views were spectacular nonetheless. The large grey (granite) rock to the left is Moro Rock. It will be the next stop on my route. (More on Moro Rock later.)
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If today wasn’t foggy, you would be able to see the valley in the canyon below. This includes views of the fertile San Joaquin Valley (made famous by Steinbeck in his novel, The Grapes of Wrath). The climb to Hanging Rock is very easy and as you can see, the views are spectacular.
We went to Yosemite and enjoyed the waterfalls, brilliantly powerful from last year’s rains and snowfall. The Merced was a rushing, roaring monster of a river. It was breathtaking. In a little grove inside the park I agonized over a plaque, a commemoration of the First Peoples. It told the story of the original inhabitants who were burned out of their home in the very spot where I stood. I took some photographs of the plaque so I could go home and do some research/further reading on the peoples and the subject. Ironically, they are part of the cache of deleted images that remains deleted from my computer files. Though in no way incriminating, these photographs stayed where I sent them, first in and then out of the Trash Can. Not so the other photographs that you find interspersed in my “Red Book Stories” posts.
I created an oil and acrylic painting of the very first stop that DSan and I made in Yosemite. It is our first view of the river [the Merced?] from a very high perch atop granite rocks. If you look carefully, you will see his profile along with a head in the clouds and also an emerging (or disappearing) face in the water below. Both head and face are substitutes for two women, his Europe woman and his California woman.
Some excellent views are to be had at Monte Bello Ridge. If like me, you start out late (around 5:15 p.m. on a mid-August evening) and want to reach Black Mountain summit, it is best to take one of the shorter routes. The preserve, like other California open spaces and parks, closes to visitors a half an hour after sunset. Sunset was at 7:00 p.m. the evening that I was there. This meant I would have to do the round-trip within two and a half hours. Doable! I would still have time to stop at the summit, take in the view and take some photographs.
I started out at the main parking lot on Page Mill Road and headed towards Bella Vista Trail. Soon I came to a sag pond, densely populated by cattails, under the shade of several oaks. (Take this route and you can make the hike from the parking lot to Black Mountain summit within an hour.) Here by the sag pond is a marker explaining the concept of ecological succession. I enjoyed the shade, knowing that soon I’d be back skirting open meadows in an unforgiving sun.
I hiked past wide open grasslands, and sections of trail shaded by trees, listening to the garbled sounds of birds and the wind rushing down the canyons. Even after 5:00 p.m. the sun was parching hot. I drank almost an entire liter of water on my push up to the summit. The faraway sound of motorcycles on Skyline Boulevard could be heard at intervals but didn’t manage to detract from the solitude and beauty of the ridge. I half expected to encounter a mountain lion or bobcat along the way as there was scat on some areas of the trail; there wasn’t a sign of either animal anywhere.
About a mile and a half into the hike I came to the Black Mountain backpack camp where visitors can stop overnight (with special permit from the Midpeninsula Regional Outdoor Space District (MROSD)), for a maximum of two nights. This is the only MROSD preserve with camp grounds. On its toilet door was a recently posted sign that warned of a rattlesnake sighting. I didn’t bother to stop!
Golden light at the summit, time? 6:23p.m.
Not too far from the backpack camp was my final destination, Black Mountain summit. Here there are strange looking outcroppings of Calera limestone boulders, quite out of character with the rest of the place; so too, was the power station over to the left, and the steady stream of overhead planes. But the views were spectacular and so I didn’t mind too much, the intrusion of the outdoor world upon this natural space. Here, at an elevation of 2,800 feet, one could look out at Skyline Ridge and Butano Ridge to the west, the Santa Cruz Mountains to the south and dense fog banks over the Pacific Ocean. Directly below the summit was an equally spectacular view of the San Francisco Bay and the surrounding cities of Palo Alto, Los Altos, Mountain View, etc.
If you want to learn more about the land and human succession in recent times, read about George Morell, an old Stanford alumni who purchased the place and later turned it over to the MROSD. Here is a decent link: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Monte-Bello-Open-Space-Preserve/137705576250404?sk=info. Another good read is one about “The Land,” a hippie commune that was on Monte Bello at the time that the MROSD acquired the land from Morell. Details are here at http://theland.wikispaces.com/.
Take a leisurely hike through the Las Trampas Regional Wilderness. Follow either the Williams or Madrone Trail to where they junction at a fire road leading to the back of Eugene O’Neill’s old property. Enter the gate and walk past the final resting place of Blemie, O’Neill’s elderly Dalmatian.
Bay Area Adventures at WeWereNothing.org 
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