Snake day at Windy Hill

Sunday, 9 August 2015

Today was for hiking all the trails at Windy Hill, a bit more than 18 miles, a bit less than 4000 feet of vertical gain. Nice to get out and get a little exercise.

I haven’t seen very many snakes this year, nor for the past few years. I think the drought has reduced the amount of vegetation available for the little field mice and voles that form the snakes’ diet, and the snake population has declined accordingly.

So I was delighted to find a rattlesnake today.

It was quiet and relaxed. I was quiet and relaxed. Two or three minutes, during which I fired off a number of photos, and then it oozed off the trail into the bush.

I mentioned having seen a rattlesnake to several dog walkers I met afterward. Some of them tightened up their leashes. It’s good if no one gets hurt, including the snake.

Not much further along, another snake, this one a gopher snake. My cup runneth over!

And just to gild the lily, I came upon two hikers a few minutes later, still looking off the trail into the weeds, where they told me a ringneck snake had just disappeared.

Great day, great place!

Pain is weakness leaving the body

Saturday, 12 October 2013

After a week of conferring, with zero exercise, I needed to move the stress points from the mind to the body.

Jacky and I had volunteered for an open space project, which turned out to be way the hell and gone down the side roads on the far side of the ridge, Star Hill road and Native Son road, places I never explored even during the heyday of my cycling career.

Very pretty redwood country. There were four or five volunteers, along with two or three from the open space district. We went to an area that’s closed to public access, where a couple of forests of acacia are taking over. They may have been planted intentionally by someone who had a house there, but they have spread.

Small ones can be pulled up with gloved hands. Those whose trunks are up to maybe an inch in diameter can be pulled up with weed pullers. I had never seen these before; they comprise a clamp and a fulcrum at ground level, and a long handle up to hip, waist or shoulder level (three sizes). The long lever arm allows the trunk to be jacked out of the ground. They work very well, except that lateral roots sometimes refuse to come out and require extra effort.

Acacias larger than an inch in diameter — some of them were 20 feet tall — come down with saws, and the open space people then girdle the stump to be sure they die. The saw is obviously the way to build a big pile of debris in a hurry, but all sizes need to come out. To be sure all upper body muscles were equally sore, we used all of the tools ad hoc.

Sunday, 13 October

I had been thinking of doing the Rose Peak hike for a few weeks, but it has been pretty hot. This weekend was cooler, so it was a good opportunity. Rose Peak is the trek that prompted me to originate the term killer hike a few years ago, 19 miles, 5000 vertical feet.

I like to climb up inside my own head for hours on end, and hiking alone on deserted trails is a good way to do it.

Cooler weather is one thing, but today was almost too much! Stiff wind in the exposed areas, and chilly! I love it.

It’s the middle of tarantula season, and I have seen none so far this year. There are tarantulas on the peninsula, but the probability of finding one is lower because the ratio of grassland to forest is so much lower. The Ohlone wilderness is the best venue I know of: here is where I saw six in one day a few years ago.

Their population waxes and wanes. I think this year is a sparse year. One, only one, and very glad to see him. He started off into the tall grass, where the camera can’t track, but I put a boot in front of him, and rather than climb over my toe, he turned back out onto the trail.

Beautiful big guy!

Only a few minutes later, I found a small gopher snake, only about a foot long. It’s not a big year for snakes either.

There are several areas with large new burrows in the ground. When I came past the first, a raptor flew away, and landed some distance away on the ground. My imagination immediately suggests burrowing owls, which I have never seen outside the artificial mounds built up in the city park to attract them (mostly unsuccessfully).

I was hoping to see some owls at the burrows, but didn’t. It would be great if they took over the wilderness and reduced the overpopulation of ground squirrels!

The wind sweeps an arc with this plant, which is probably not broom. Cool!

I spotted a small lizard darting across the trail, on an absolute rendezvous course for dead center of my descending boot. I held the downstroke for a quarter second with a bit of a stumble, and the lizard darted through. That’s my good deed for the day.

The grand vistas of the Rose Peak hike

The out-and-back hike from Sunol to Rose Peak was the original inspiration for my term Killer hikes. I have recently expanded the category by stitching together trails from adjoining open space areas, but even though it’s less than 20 miles (19.00 according to the GPS), Rose Peak is still the classic (5004 feet of climb).

I haven’t been there for a couple months; time to do it again. The wildflower season is fading fast: quite a bit of green, but already fading to the white of new grass seeds and the golden hills of summer.

This little wildflower is about the size of a smallish pea. Flowers like California poppies grow pretty much everywhere, but this species showed up only in a stretch of maybe 100 meters of trail. Dark enough that you might not even realize they were flowers, if you weren’t keeping an eye out.

Cloudy and chilly. I left my jacket in the car, expecting to warm up as soon as I started uphill (true) and to break out into the sunlight fairly soon (not true). Lots of backpackers on the way down from last night’s camping, probably thirty or more by the time they had all straggled past. I kept thinking each new one or two represented the lanterns rouges, and then I would meet yet another one or two.

Because the day remained cloudy, there was a lot of dew on the vegetation.

I programmed the image processors in my brain to match against mantis. No hits among the millions of images that flowed past, all day, but the filter did pick up one of these pretty little orange spiders.

He figures that, if he can’t see me, I can’t see him.

The filter spotted a wolf spider. I like the 747 upper deck, complete with rear window, as well as the four parking lights just below the headlights.

I noticed a second wolf spider, so small it could have gotten lost on the nail of my little finger. The one above would have sprawled well beyond the nail of my thumb, but if it does well this season, it will be twice as big (8x as massy) by fall.

This little guy was almost invisible on a stalk of milkweed. I am delighted with the fine detail visible in the photo (and this is the low-res version!).

Near the top, a bobcat, something we don’t see very often. No photo, sorry; it didn’t want to stay around and pose for me.

On the way back, I stopped for calories at the little pools where McCorkle trail crosses the W-tree rock scramble. Water striders, and the opportunity for almost abstract photos.

And under water, a larva of some kind, very likely preying on an even smaller larva under its left foreleg, while just under its tail section, another larve would be breathing a sigh of relief, if only it could breathe.

As I drove out, late afternoon, I saw a car stopped off the road ahead, people out in the traffic lanes. I slowed and passed in the left lane, and saw that they were protecting a large gopher snake as it crossed the road. Good for them!

Snakeskin

I was out hiking Ed Levin park the other day, the park that ascends Monument peak above Milpitas. Near the bottom of the hill on the way back, I discovered a freshly-shed snakeskin.

I thought at first that it was a rattlesnake because the head looked triangular. But the tail was not that of a rattler; therefore a gopher snake.

When I inspected the head end more closely, I saw that the triangular shape was just the way the skin had fallen, not an intrinsic shape.

I pulled the skin back from the hole, and saw that it had been telescoped. What had happened was that the snake had used the edge of the hole as a scraper, left the skin behind and wriggled on down into the underground.

Because the shed skin was blocking the hole, either the snake was still in there, or there must have been another exit. My money is on the snake still being at home.

Cool!