It’s Guest Blogger, Molly, again! Meagan, Chrissy, Michelle and I planned on having dinner at the Bean Bag Café to catch up and hang out. Meagan and I needed to get some more hikes in, so we planned a SF Beer Week Hike Part 2 to hit all the bars we didn’t the first time around. We had a 6 mile route planned, but the actual hike was going to depend on Meagan’s poison oak and how far she could comfortably walk. Guess the poison oak was feeling really lazy, so it called upon a skin infection to break Meagan out in hives and send her to emergency care. SF Beer Week Hike Part 2: Cancelled.
The three of us met for dinner anyways, which was quite tasty. Afterwards, Michelle left to go back to work (boo) but, we had a few hours before Chrissy had to go to a concert at the Independent, so we started a crawl of our own. We walked a block south on Divis to Madrone, where we both had a beer and enjoyed people watching (strange people in shorts and wasted wobbly people at 7pm). After hydrating at Madrone, we geared up for our arduous 4 block walk to Candybar. We walked in, but weren’t feeling the wine and cheese plate vibe, so we moved on. We hiked another block to Bar 821, which would end up being our final destination.
Hike #9.5: short, but sweet.
Lessons learned: every 0.003 miles counts, as Meagan so succinctly texted us from emergency care
Flora and Fauna: brown sugar cubes at Bar 821 look like croutons, but why would croutons be sitting in a bowl at a bar?
Location: San Francisco (SOMA, Mission, Lower Haight)
Distance: 6 miles (planned…actual – much, much shorter)
Entry fee: $0
Stop #1 - Anchor and Hope
Hello to the Meggawho Blogosphere! Molly here guest blogging for Hike #9, which Meagan unfortunately missed. Be nice, I’m an engineer by profession and haven’t written much since college, so bear with me. I’ll do my best to be as witty and informative as Meagan.
I received an email from a friend informing me that SF Beer Week was happening and we decided that it would be a great theme for an urban hike. For once, we planned our route early enough to have a bunch of friends join us. Everything was set until the very last minute when Meagan had to leave early for Santa Cruz and nurse her poison oak butt. However, that didn’t stop the rest of us from foraging on ahead without our fearless leader! Allie and I got out of work early, so we decided to add the Anchor and Hope event to the hike. I started the crawl with a delicious Czech Pilsner that has been brewed in since 1008.
To-Go-Cups
Next, we walked to City Beer Store – a fun little place with a wide selection of bottled beer that you can buy beers for either to go, or you can pay a fee and enjoy it right in the store. Next, we were set to meet Meagan’s replacement, Paul, at Rosamunde in the Mission…and since we thought we were in a hurry to meet him there,we decided to skip this leg of the walk and cab it over. Here, we had a specially tapped Stone IPA that I paired with my beer sausage dinner. Deeeelish. After fueling up at Rosamunde, we noticed our walk to Toronado was quite far and decided to get a beer to go. At the next corner store we got a Bud Light tall boy, which we split into the To-Go cups that Allie so thoughtful brought with her from work. But, after a few blocks of walking and the tall boy almost gone, we hopped into a cab.
Toronado ended up being the designated meeting place for a few more friends, which was great, but kinda derailed the remaining two stops on our hike. Oh well. While at Toronado, the Edel-Weiss beers were flowing and we started to miss our blogger extraordinaire. So, with the aid of my awesome and handy Droid, we sent her a series of photos and texts so she wouldn’t miss out.
Having FunBut sad at the same time (we missed you, Meagan!)
Hike #8: failure on actually “hiking,” but a success in enjoying delicious beers for SF Beer week
Lessons learned: without Meagan, I’m pretty lazy and can be talked out of actually “hiking” on an urban hike
Flora and Fauna: allie f, paul h, chrissy, allie c, ferg, carl, brian, and paul b: awesome friends to have beers with on a Friday night.
I started this book like a year and a half ago, maybe more. I then loaned it to my brother in law (I was about 50 pages in) who graciously sent it back to me, where I picked up where I left off…and lost the book for about 6 months. FINALLY, about 3 weeks ago, I found it! I picked it back up and started the from the beginning. And now, 200 pages in, it’s missing. Again. This is just not meant to happen.
With about 100 or so pages left in the book, here is my review (until I can find it, finish it, and update):
A partner at work told me to read this book. Combine that with the fact that I don’t follow (or really even like) baseball, and I expected this to be a painful experience. I was pleasantly surprised.
This book is an interesting, relatively easy read (or at least the part that I got through was). Despite the blahness of the general plot (a baseball franchise short on funds battles the machine that is major league baseball recruitment and, through statistical analysis, beats the draft), Michael Lewis makes this into a story that can be read by someone with minimal (or no) background in stats. Or baseball. He doesn’t delve too deeply into the methods of data collection or analysis, but emphasizes the value in stepping back and re-approaching a problem from a completely different angle, even (or especially) in the face of mainstream criticism.
As a sidenote, it still blows me away that people so completely removed from sports in their daily lives would devote years, even decades, studying baseball stats in such detail. Ugh.
But in a time where the amount of money flowing through the world of professional sports gives a bitter aftertaste to being the biggest, strongest, or fastest, the story of this underdog team gives you hope that dedication and innovation can still win out over the big guys. Warm fuzzies.
So that “rapidly escalating” case of poison oak from the second Mt. Tam hike has spread to my leg, side, and back, and is now a full-blown skin infection (I know, disgusting…that phrase comes in a (distant) second to mucus plug for words that should never be next to each other.) I am on steroids, antibiotics, benedryl…blah blah…anyway, point being, wearing clothes and walking really irritates everything. My condition has already postponed two scheduled urban hikes…so we are officially on hold until further notice. (This is especially disappointing because the past 10 days have been Beer Week in San Francisco, so we missed out on some awesome microbrews and presentations and tastings.) Oh well.
Because she is such a good friend, Molly will be guest blogging to cover a few hikes that I was scheduled to participate in but couldn’t attend. MOLLY ROCKS
While spending the weekend in Santa Cruz with Emily and Ashley, two of my closest friends from high school, I figured it might be a good time to knock out a hike in the area. Despite a rapidly escalating case of poison oak, I figured a short, flat stroll outdoors on wide, paved roads, far away from any questionable foliage with some old friends might be a nice way to spend the weekend.
Not entirely what happened. It would be misleading to say we did this hike as described in the book. We definitely went hiking in the Henry Cowell Redwood State Park, but our hike was 8 miles (not 4), the grade was pretty steep in some areas (not “steady and mostly downhill”), we never made it to the observation deck (despite convincing ourselves that we had), and half the time the river was on our left when it should have been on our right.
How did this happen? There are many theories. Ashley blamed the book. Emily blamed the guide (me). I kind of blamed Ashley, because I was under the impression that she had done the hike before (sorry Ash) and because I lacked any other defensible rationale for our situation.
About 10 minutes into the hike we (read: I) reference the book and see that, though we have apparently walked the right distance and are in the right location, the river is on our left instead of our right. So we are walking the wrong direction. Weird.
Oh, well…we turn around and continue walking another mile or two following what we believe is the right trail despite the fact that we a.) are not seeing any white, sandy trails as described in the book (we blame the rain and mud and point to some white rocks on the side of the trail…”yeah, see? there’s the white sand!”), b.) have yet to see the name of the trail we are supposed to be walking along on any trailhead post (we blame the book/trailheads being outdated), and c.) had long since passedthe mileage marker for the observation deck according to Emily’s pedometer.
Almost 3 miles in we come across a small clearing with a bench that looks out over the valley all the way down to Santa Cruz. “The observation deck!” we cry, wanting so badly to believe we are going the right way that we ignore the fact that there is absolutely no deck whatsoever near these benches, no “360 view” of Santa Cruz, and that there is a hill rising up behind us when the book says this deck is located on the highest summit in the area.
From here things became even less logical…we decided to take a detour (some people were getting bored with the paved road) and, going off of our location on the map (which wasn’t our real location at all), start down a muddy hill towards the river, thinking it would take us back to the car. Wrong. Dead ends into fallen trees and the rushing river. There are beware of mountain lion signs everywhere, which has Emily nervous. I pick up a big stick and start swinging it around to protect us as we walk. Back up the hill. Back to the fireroad which takes us to…a major thoroughfare, where a nice gentleman shows us that we have actually strayed so far south that we are now off the map entirely.
Long story short (too late), 5 miles later we made it back to the car.
Hike #8: failure. But good times anyway. And we saw a really cool huge bright yellow banana slug. Those things never get old.
Lessons learned: don’t give me the map
Flora and Fauna: blackberry bush (which I kept confusing with poison oak)
These made their way into our office the other day:
Team Realtree Outdoor energy drink. A camouflaged, sugar-packed, carbonated energy drink custom packaged for hunters (so not to “scare away the critters”). I have included photos of the front and the back not only so you can fully admire the camo, but so you can also read the ingredients and, more importantly, the tag line.
My initial reaction: God, ANOTHER energy drink…just in a ridiculous(ly awesome) bottle. Is this a real product? Aren’t there too many energy drinks already out there? Who would ever buy this? I then showed it to my husband, who is from Kentucky. His reaction: “Oh my God, this is genius! Why couldn’t I have thought of this?? People are going to love this!” Really?
Yes, really. This drink, with 26 grams of sugar, tastes like Squirt and has been a WHOPPING success. Sales have apparently exploded over the past few months and continue to grow. Millions are being made off this product. Baffling. So of course, the next obvious step was finding other ridiculous(ly awesome) hunting paraphernalia from Team Realtree.
I discovered: an extensive hunting gear/gadget collection (personal favorites include scent-free metal, squealing hen call, and the savage predator hunter rifle); a wide selection of books, the most prominently displayed being Michael Waddell’s Hunting Booger Bottom (sidenote: Booger Bottom is a place, not a thing); and a full line of women’s clothing, including camouflage mini skirts and camouflage WAFFLE HOUSE hats (specifically for girls). It’s like a whole new world, I had no idea.
I know where I’ll be doing my Christmas shopping this year.
This hike yielded some of the best flora and fauna to date. And some of the most awesome views. I am falling in love with Mt Tam.
Molly and I had originally planned to do the Cataract Falls hike in the same area. We underestimated, however, the level of fun we would have the night before at Chrissy’s 29th birthday celebration (which started out at La Trappe…we should have known better). So after a late start to the day and taking into account the puke probability, a 7 mile “moderate” hike did not sound appealing…or even really possible. So we settled for the shorter, easier Phoenix Lake.
After driving through much of Marin (yes, we may have gotten lost on the way there), we pulled up to a line of cars waiting for a parking spot. Wtf. Lesson one: if you plan to do this hike, get there early. We only ended up waiting about 5 minutes (during which we ate about half the birthday cupcakes we had baked for Chrissy the day before…we had them in the car with the good intention of delivering them on the way home. Guess what didn’t happen.) Anyway, we finally parked and got our hike on.
Chrissy's cupcakes
The fireroad at the early part of the hike has relatively heavy traffic…the area is very popular with mountain bikers, and the very beginning of the fireroad is full of families and dogs and people just enjoying a nice stroll around the lake. Once you break off the fireroad onto Yolanda trail (which, surprise, we missed on the first flyby and had to backtrack to find), it empties out.
The first half of this hike is AWESOME. To begin with, the day was beautiful. The recent rain meant that all of the brooks and streams and waterfalls were flowing, and that the moss and mushrooms were all out and sporing (or whatever it is they do) making everything look soft and fuzzy and bright green and surreal.
We saw tons of birds (humming birds, robins, hawks, vultures–which freaked Molly out) and some really amazing views of the peak of Mt. Tam. We also identified a few flowers and plants, including the invasive broom (duh duh duh) and bluedicks (I’m not going to say anything in case my parents read this site).
Once you complete that part of the loop, you hit the fireroad again and, after about 300 yards, branch off into what is essentially a small redwood forest. While this part of the hike was less exciting (partially because we’ve spent a decent amount of time in redwood forests, partially because we were ready to get back to the car and eat more cupcakes) it was here that we saw some of our more exciting fauna, including: a huge banana slug (which, did you know, can weigh up to a quarter pound), and what we thought was a salamander but is actually a coast range newt.
(For all of you out there wondering what distinguishes a salamander from a newt…and I know you are….a newt is actually the common name for certain members of a family of relatively small salamanders.)
banana turd
Hike #7: hungover success! I know I said this about the last Mt Tam hike, but I really think THIS one might be my favorite so far.
Lessons learned: all newts are salamanders, but not all salamanders are newts
This hike borders on too short to be a hike, but considering the fact that it is
a.) on dirt trails
b.) requires you to climb some hills, and
c.) has some really spectacular views
I decided to count it. This is a perfect hike if you would like some fantastic viewage of the Bay and want to feel like you are in Nature…all while being a stone’s throw from 19th Ave.
Somebody had said that doing this hike at night during a full moon is really awesome. So on Saturday, with a break in the rain and the biggest full moon of the year on the docket, we decided that would be a perfect night to do just that.
Unfortunately, due to poor planning on our part, we arrived just after sunset and the moon didn’t crest the first hill until we were almost back at the place that we parked our car. So we did most of the hike in pitch black with no flashlights…which had the potential to be dangerous (lots of steps to trip on and cliffs to walk off of.) But we survived without major incident and even made the trip down to the cove rock beach, which was very cool (even in the dark) and got a good look at the stars (and thanks to the Google Sky app on Molly’s Droid, IDed a bunch of constellations.)
Once we rounded the final corner of the bay on our way back, the moon was indeed out and very, very bright. It lit up the bay over the bridge, making for an amazing panoramic that our wimpy little cameras simply could not capture.
Hike #6: a short success. I would like to go back and re-do it during the day.
Lessons learned: The reason pirates wore eye patches is so they could run below deck, switch their patch over to the other eye, and be able to see without a lantern, not because they had missing eyes (courtesy of Molly)
Flora and Fauna: Cassiopeia, Orion, Pleiades, Mars, Jupiter (I know, technically stars and planets aren’t flora or fauna….but it was dark out)
Rambulatory Ambulatory 
