Trip report: California hikin’ on a winter’s day

Photo courtesy of Two Heel Drive.

My buddy Vindu emailed me Friday to suggest a Saturday hike of Long Ridge Open Space Preserve, with a little Table Mountain thrown in for good uphill measure. Because fellow outdoor blogger Tom Mangan was also planning to come along, and because I didn’t need much of an excuse to avoid the shopping malls on what was slated to be a bright clear day, I willingly obliged.

I’d had my reservations, though. I consider November and December to be my off season, and thus I hadn’t put together more than about six miles on any given day over the last month, nor any type of sustained hillclimbing activity. I therefore hadn’t expected to feel strong over the course of our 9.3-mile, 2500-foot-gain trek. Nevertheless I was quite delighted Saturday, when climbing out of Stevens Creek Canyon, to find myself chugging upward with such resolute capacity.

The Charcoal Road trail out of Stevens Creek Canyon is not a tough climb, but it does go on for well over four miles, taking hikers from the stream’s edge in deep fir forest through oak woodland and chaparral to finally top out onto grassy windswept ridges over 1500′ above. Yet the grade of the trail is quite steady, and while I can’t say that I felt overly challenged by it, my repeated disappearances off the front may have demoralized my buddies just a little. Don’t know for sure, but I believe I recall Mangan muttering, under his breath, something akin to “geez, what an assbreaker.”

Now was he commenting about the trail, or little ol’ me?

Well, I may have been the old guy of the group, but I was willing to stop and wait for my friends anyway. Most of the time. After all, we’re legends in our own legs – the Triumvirate of the South Bay Hiking Elite – and we stick together like words on paper. Like freshmen at an upper-class party. Like stink on fish.

Like red wine on a white turtleneck sweater.

I love days like this – days that don’t give me any early clues as to how I’ll feel, yet somehow allow me to “fire on all eight” and just motor up those long climbs. It’s good to feel this strong, given my recent sloth, but it was even better to have opportunities to stop in the sunshine every so often. While ostensibly waiting for my friends, I simply stretched the long muscles, filled my lungs with fresh ocean air, and enjoyed a mighty fine view of the Santa Clara Valley to the east and an extraordinarily rare view of the Pacific Ocean to the west.

So many of the hikes I do with others I tend to plan weeks in advance. It’s remarkably refreshing, then, when the impromptu plan delivers beyond the typical anticipation. It’s now the day after Christmas, and this may still be my off season, but I swear I’m ready for another day like Saturday.

Tom has also written about our Long Ridge excursion over on his own blog. He’s added some rather appealing photographs, too. Check out Tom’s Beyond the Grizzly Flat trailhead.

~winehiker

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 26th, 2006 at 2:57 pm and is filed under winehiker's trails. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.