Hike #5: (Urban Hike #2): Seward Street Slides

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Location: San Francsico (Lower Pac Heights, Castro)

Distance: 6 miles

Entry fee: $0

Molly knew about the Seward Slides and neither of us had been before, so we figured it might be a good urban destination to check out before work one morning.   We rose bright and early this morning (like, really effing early) for this hike.  We met at Molly’s apartment at 5:15 (yes, A.M) and set off down California Street to hit a few local landmarks along the way.

The first landmark was the Atherton House.  This place is apparently haunted by 4 ghosts, one of which is George Atherton, the owner, who died in Chile and whose body was shipped in a barrel of rum back to San Francisco for proper burial.  Gross.

Next we stopped by Cottage Row, a historical row of TREA Victorians designed by William Hollis in the 1860s.  It was pretty cool, there is even a little park in there, but we felt a little weird lurking outside of strangers houses in the dark at 5am taking pictures.  So we quickly moved along to Castro Camera, the shop that Harvey Milk first bought when he arrived in SF which later became his campaign headquarters (today it’s a gift shop.)

Around the corner from Castro Camera a few blocks down is the Alfred E Clarke mansion.  This building enormous and totally schizophrenic, with one side looking like an old victorian, the other like a baroque castle.  (I don’t know anything about architecture, I had to look that up.)  But really, this is a very cool building, worth checking out if you’re in the neighborhood.

From there up a steep hill and down Seward Street to the slides.  We had heard so much about the slide troll and how awful the neighbors were…and there are signs that the park is closed sunrise to sunset (at this point it was about 6:30…so the sun wasn’t quite up) that we were a little paranoid about making too much noise and didn’t even fully enjoy the slide experience, which was a shame.  We’ll have to go back.

So, with the sun rising, we walked along Market back up to Castro.  Molly was hauling.

Hike #5: anticlimactic.  Though it was nice to get a little walk in before work.  Made it home by 7:15, just in time to see Paul off to his first day of work.

Lessons learned: uuhhh…San Francisco has haunted mansions?

Flora and Fauna: no slide troll, which we considered a success.  And we saw a few pugs.

Hike #4: Mountain Home-Muir Woods Loop, Mt. Tam State Park

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Location: Marin, Mill Valley

Distance: 4.7 miles (if you don’t get lost…for us, ~7 miles.  you can see where this is going.)

Entry fee: $0

Three of us set out for this hike early to make it home in time for the NFL playoffs.  We got to the parking lot at the trailhead and I…promptly locked the keys in the car.

After finding out it would take the tow truck almost an hour to make it into the boonies and get my keys out, we decided to head across the aptly-named Panoramic Highway to the Mountain Home Inn for some coffee.  Everyone was really happy with me.

An hour later we finally started hiking.  The trail (which was built by the boyscouts in 1931) almost immediately leads into some pretty dense foliage.  It was raining on and off the whole time, but the area was so wooded there were times that we barely noticed.

On the trail there are groves of baby redwoods, a lot of weird looking moss, waterfalls and streams, colorful mushrooms…it really is an awesome hike to do in the winter.  But get ready to get muddy.  There are a lot of things that will tempt you to test your physical prowess.  Like:

Tall trees:

Sideways trees:

Fallen trees:

…and branches suspended over ravines:

After about 2 hours Paul was starting to get antsy about making it home in time for the second game (we already had to sacrifice the first one because of the later start).  According to the book we had only gone 3.3 miles…it kind of felt longer, but since no one had an pedometer we really had no idea.  (As Molly put it, it felt like we were in a mileage warp).  After following a short stretch of the Muir Woods trail (which was amazing) we hit the Lost Trail, which we knew was the last section of the hike and only about 1 mile from the finish line.  Finally, we had a sense of security about where we were and how much further we had to go.  Enter: poor trail markings.

We BOOKED IT up some serious inclines, ready to be back at the car and get some food.  About halfway up the Lost Trail we hit an ambiguous clearing.  We paused for a second, considered a few options, then without much discussion continued hiking aggressively down what we thought was the right trail.  After 15 minutes, when we hadn’t seen the landmark that we were supposed to hit 0.3 miles after the clearing, I began to suspect that this “mileage warp” may be intrinsically linked to our inability to read a map.  20 minutes after the ambiguous clearing we ran into another hiker, who confirmed that yes, we had in fact been walking as fast as we could downhill for 20 minutes in the wrong direction.  Turn around.  20 more minutes back uphill to the clearing.  From there another 10 minutes steep uphill to the actual end of the trail.  Goddammit.

Hike #4: quasi-success (to be honest, in my opinion, this was the best hike we’ve had so far…if we didn’t spend a good portion of it feeling and being lost, it would have been even better)

This is a fantastic hike if you don’t want to go too far outside the city (only about 20 min away) and are up for a little exercise but nothing obscenely strenuous.  Exceptionally stunning views, lots of interesting vegetation.

 

Lessons Learned: bring a pedometer if you are on a tight schedule

Flora and Fauna: we saw a redwood that had sprouted a new trunk about 90 feet off the ground (this happens when the tops of redwoods break off as they mature.  More info here.)  It was pretty cool.

Hike #3: First urban hike- Marina/North Beach

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Location: San Francisco, CA (Pac Heights, The Marina, North Beach)

Distance: 5 miles

Entry fee: $0

Blisters: 2

This whole week it has been POURING, which has really put a damper (ha) on our ability to do any serious hiking.  So on Thursday Molly and I decided we were going to brave the rain and set out on Urban Hike #1 (still trying to come up with a good name for it.)  Decked out in rain gear and galoshes, we started out at my apartment, heading over Divisadero, through the Marina, up to Aquatic Park and North Beach, and finished up by the TransAmerica building in the Financial District.  Because the weather was so bad, we decided we should probably take shelter periodically to avoid getting too cold and, you know, pneumonia.

Fish Bowl--stop 1

First shelter we found was the Fish Bowl, ~.6 miles from my home.  I actually met Molly there.  She was alone at the bar.

We made our way over Divis without much trouble.  Molly demonstrated some of her x-treme hiking technique, but my camera is apparently not extreme enough to fully capture the skill involved at night in the rain.

DONAHUE'S!--stop 2

Though this wasn’t an originally scheduled stop on our trip, our spontaneous break at Donahue’s in the Marina turned out to be (not surprisingly, look at the name) one of the best of the night.   We made a ton of new white, slightly overweight, middle-aged male friends and got some free drinks from the owner, Tommy Donahue.  Sully, the bartender, also provided me with a few Donahue coasters.  We’ll be going back.

Next we stopped by Ghirardelli Square to see the gazebo that Molly designed.  It was VERY cool and made me feel like I have accomplished little in life, you should go see it.  Or maybe even sit in it.

We also made a visit to the Buena Vista cafe, where the first Irish Coffee was made.  Who knew.  Molly’s roommate, Laura, met us there.  She joined us for the remaining 1.3 miles.

La Trappe -- stop 4 (hydrating before recreating)

1.8 miles after Donahue’s we made a stop at La Trappe for a little taste of Belgium.  The night quickly deteriorated from there.

We arrived Vesuvio, our final destination, about 2 blocks up the street from the Trans America building (on the left), just in time for me to catch a cab home and (almost) make my 10pm bedtime goal.

Urban hike #1: success…though we may need to readjust the bar:mile ratio for the next one.

Molly imitating art at Vasuvio -- stop 6

Lessons learned: the first Irish coffee wasn’t made in Ireland, hiking 5 miles in galoshes isn’t as bad as you would think, Molly should model

Flora and Fauna: Tommy Donahue

The Elementary Particles by Michel Houellebecq

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This book came very highly recommended to me.   It is the story of two half-brothers in post-1960s France.  The brothers share a mother; a free-love, New Age hippie, who abandons both boys early in life as she runs off to join some utopian enclave in California.  The brothers are sent to live with their paternal grandparents, and don’t meet until their adult life.  One brother grows up obsessed with sex but struggles to find consensual partners, the other is completely devoid of any sort of sexual drive or real human emotion but excels in the field of science and DNA sequencing.  Both suffer.  The entire book.

Bottom line: this is not an easy read.  I can appreciate the points the book is trying to make, but I had trouble getting through the pages and pages of sex clubs and orgies and public masturbation on which this story so heavily relies.  I know this was intentional, the story is supposed to be a “raw, bleak, unredemptive, unfliching review of humanity and existence”, and many have described the book as “difficult but necessary.”   But with one part philosophy, one part storyline, and eighteen parts crude, graphic sex scenes…it just wasn’t really my cup of genetically modified tea.

Rating: meh

Hike #2: Uvas Canyon County Park

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Location: South Bay, Morgan Hill

Distance: 4 miles

Entry fee: $6

*Note: All pictures on this post were taken with a Droid, since I couldn’t find my camera this morning.

With a storm forecasted to roll in before lunch, Molly and I hit the road early hoping we could beat the rain (Uvas Canyon is right around 60 miles south of SF, so it was a little bit of a trek.)  To get there we drove though an awesome little private Swedish community called Sveadal. Secretly I was hoping for horse-drawn buggies and butter churns, but the reality was even better.  Moss-covered rocks, little cottages…I was afraid a gnome was going to jump out in front of my car.   So anyway, we finally got to the trailhead.  Armed with raincoats we set off onto…totally sunny trails.   We started out heading toward Alec Canyon trail.  The first part of the hike was on wider fire roads up to a 35 foot fall called Triple Falls, which was cool, and the views of the valley were awesome.

The falls that followed were even better, though, with a heavier water flow and dramatic drops.  And on the hike back we stumbled upon colonies of ladybugs hibernating, which was really interesting/gross (too many bugs in one place always make me a little squirmy.)

Hike #2: RAGING SUCCESS!  We did the whole thing in under 2 hours and got great views, sick waterfalls, and learned a little bit about nature.  Food afterwards was a local favorite, chicken pho from Sai’s Vietnamese in the Financial District.  Totally delicious.

Lessons learned: I want to live in a Swedish village, ladybugs hibernate

ladybugs on a stick

Flora and Fauna: Toyon (which also excited me bc in 6th grade our class took a trip to Toyon Bay on Catalina)

Random wedding post

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So i got married in December and just had to put a little promo (for all the heavy traffic on this site) for Lilia Photography and Jaclyn Jean hair and makeup.

Lilia rocks.  Not only is she fantastic at what she does, she is also a great person to drive around the city with (we spent some quality time in the car on the way to Crissy Field.)  She was very flexible and offered up a lot of ideas for locations, and her city hall special is a fantastic deal.

And Jaclyn.  Jaclyn is amazing.  I was lucky enough to catch her up in the Bay Area (she is based out of LA), she woke up at 5am to make the trip over the bridge from the East Bay into SF to get my hair done on time.  Despite somewhat of time-crunch, she was super calm and kept telling me it would be no problem to fix my hair if there was anything I didn’t like about it.  Couldn’t have made better choices, two thumbs up, highly recommend them both.