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| Resting Great Blue Heron at Lily Lake on Friday |
As I biked past one of my favorite trees in Golden Gate Park on Wednesday, I thought to myself that I should come back to photograph it with my full-frame camera before winter storms blew it down. I had no reason to think it might fall over, but for some reason the possibility entered my mind.
When I rode by again on Friday (Halloween) I was shocked to see that the tree had been cut down! All that was left was a low stump. A park employee at the scene told me the tree had developed a crack running up its trunk. He said an arborist noticed last year that its trunk had developed a three-foot-long crack, and when they checked it again this year the crack had increased five-fold, to fifteen feet. They figured it was better to cut it down now than to risk lives by letting nature take its course.
Although I subscribe to the digital version of the San Francisco Chronicle, I missed the story about the tree's demise. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that they actually covered the event, which happened on Thursday, the day I was on Mt. Tam. Apparently the Monterey cypress was over a hundred years old! No wonder it was so full of old man's beard.
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| Lily Lake's Namesake |
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| I'd seen this incipient chicken-of-the-woods as I biked past North Lake on Wednesday, when I didn't have a camera with me. Not even my phone. I snapped this shot when I rode by again on Friday. |
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| The flush of fungi probably needs more rain to grow out. |
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| This is a phone snap of the 100-year-old Monterey cypress in Hellman's Hollow from September 2022. |
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| This is what it looked like when I passed by on Friday. |
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| It was kind of beautiful to find flowers left on the stump when I went down there this morning. A lot of folks loved this tree. I measured 112 inches at what looked like its longest diameter at the cut (from roughly 7 o'clock to 1 o'clock). |
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| Foggy Autumn Scene This Morning at Pioneer Meadow |
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