Money’s wearing a little thing winding down to my first full paycheck, so I decided I should probably continue my California make-myself-glad-I-moved-here tour with something a little closer to home. Yesterday I went out to Alum Rock Park. Alum Rock is the oldest municipal park in California, and is the namesake of next-to-last major road on the way to my house, the one you take when you exit the freeway. It’s basically a section of Upper Penitencia Creek canyon and surrounding hills; it’s 720 acres of hilly goodness, with trails along the north and south rims of the canyon. I parked near some picnic tables in the center of the park and walked to the nearest trail head. There was leaflet warning about mountain lions (last sighting 10/29) and a short history of rail in the park, but no map or anything. I could see a rocky prominence with people on it about 400 feet north of me, and about 400 feet higher in elevation, as well. I figured the trail I was on probably went there, so I started uphill until I found a sign that said Eagle Rock Overlook, .4 miles. I was there pretty soon, just in time to watch the sunset turn the valley red and gold. It was actually only maybe 360 feet higher, but it was quite a view, anyway.
I come the cross timbers region of Texas, specifically the western cross timbers and the grand prairie. It’s a fairly flat place of low, gently rolling hills and dales. It’s nowhere near as flat as California’s central valley, but the furthest thing you see is generally the next hill higher than yours. There are very few places where you can see more than five or six miles.
California’s not like that, at all. Most of the Santa Clara Valley is like that–it’s a very flat valley, and mostly what you see are mountains rising on all sides of you, except for a bay to your north. The edges of the valley, though, like where I live, you can see quite a way. Or, at least, you think you can see quite a way, until you go somewhere where you really can. The furthest I can see from my front porch is the Santa Cruz mountains, maybe twenty-some-odd miles away.
The road I live on is called Mount Hamilton Road. It was build in the late 1800s in preparation for a project by the University of California to build the first year-round mountain-top observatory, at the very summit of, of course, Mount Hamilton. It’s a twenty-mile long road that starts at Alum Rock Road. I live about two miles up it, which means that I’m about 18 twisty miles from Lick Observatory. It famously has 365 turns, one for each day of the year, and you pass fourteen before you get to my house. That leaves 341, or just about nineteen per mile. This is a lot twistier than it sounds; you basically just spend the whole trip with the wheel crossed up one way or the other.
That’s where I went on Sunday. To get back to my earlier point a bit, once you do get there, assuming you don’t at any point let your concentration slip for the half-second or so it would take to send you hurtling over the edge to an untimely demise, you get one helluva view, as well as a large complex of telescopes and telescope buildings, with information displays and tours. On a clear day they say you can see clear to the Sierra Nevada, the mountain range where Yosemite is located.
Today was not a particularly clear day, and if I saw the Sierra Nevadas, it was only as an indistict, blurry haze slightly darker than the blurry haze above it. Nonetheless, you could see for miles and miles and miles in any direction, and I took me some pictures to try to convey what that’s like. The thing that blows my mind is that this place is eighteen miles from my home. I live on the road that goes to it. There’s also a big-ass county park (ten thousand acres) on the way, but I haven’t had a chance to check that out yet. Sounds like a project for next weekend.
Another thing that’s crazy to me is that the grass here is green in the winter, not the summer. I took this picture three weeks ago, but I might as well have taken it last weekend, for all the difference it would have made:
If this looks like a gigantic fire hazard, it is. The whole mountain range is covered in This is what it looked like a week later:
The whole hillside is covered in new blades of green grass, two or three inches long and growing at least a half-inch a day. It’s not just my place, either. The reclaimed landfill next to my work has pulled the same trick. In fact, the whole Diablo mountains and foothills are starting to turn green, even from a distance, before my very eyes.
This is very different from home.
Everything here is different. The deer are different; their tails aren’t white. The squirrels are different: some of them are gray, and some of them live in holes in the ground. The birds are subtly different. The oak trees are different. The pine trees are different. I guess none of this should be any surprise whatsoever, but the combined affect is to make the whole place seem a little alien.
