Zig Zag Trail

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Pam heard about a wild edibles walk on Mt. Tam that left from the Mountain Home Inn at 1:00 p.m. Their destination was a natural spring I've never been to, so it sounded like an interesting hike (which we might try next week, in fact), but I never start a hike that late in the day and suggested we do an earlier jaunt of our own and explore a new trail. 

We headed down the Gravity Car Grade but somehow missed the trailhead. As we backtracked, we asked several people if they'd heard of the Zig Zag Trail (created in 1914), and no one had. I wondered if the trail had been decommissioned since the map came out. Luckily, though, the trailhead was much easier to find on the way back. It's just a short distance north of the Inn. 

The Zig Zag Trail might be the steepest half-mile of trail I've ever hiked on Mt. Tam. Luckily, we wouldn't have to hike back up it. The temperature was a cool 57 degrees on the way down, but even though the sun would come out by the time we headed back up, it never got hotter than 67 degrees thanks to thick fog on the windward side of the ridge.

Fat solomon berries.

I thought this plant was a strange form of elberberry until I learned it was called spikenard, or elk clover. It's in the ginseng family, Araliaceae, along with English ivy (which the canyon sported quite a bit of).

We explored a bit where the trail bottoms out in a residential area along Cascade Drive. Someone had tacked a couple of signs onto a redwood near a no-name dam. The signs read, "Progress Stops Here, For Here Nature Rules All".

I scrambled up to check out the no-name dam, and a kingfisher swooped up the canyon and landed on a nearby tree where it chattered loudly before swooping farther upstream and out of sight.

This is the bottom of the Zig Zag Trail, looking back toward the way we came down. The roof in the background covers a small water reservoir. The sign on the railing marks the Mill Valley Steps-Lanes-Paths trail #305.

From the bottom of the trail it was a short walk down the narrow, paved road to a spot along Old Mill Creek called Three Wells. I'll have to visit again after the rains get started.

Back toward the trailhead we took the short hike up to the falls at Cascade Park. It'll be good to see these falls after some rain, too. Instead of hiking back up the steep grade of the Zig Zag Trail, we took the much easier Tenderfoot Trail. There's a fork near the start of the trail, and you can take the thinner right fork (heading north) back to Panoramic Highway. You actually strike pavement before you get that far, since there are rich folks' houses built among the woods near the top. I thought a couple of the places must be resorts. One was a huge, multi-level unit, and another had a full-size tennis court. The road topped out right at the Mountain Home Inn, and we might have been tempted to stop for a beer, but Pam needed to get back to the city before the farmer's market closed at one o'clock....

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Oaked 'n Poked

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You know it's summer on Mt. Tam when you get home, take your shoes off -- and have to pull all the seeds out of your socks. You know you've been doing nature photography on Mt. Tam if your legs are tingling from stinging nettles and you're a couple of days away from itchy red bumps of poison oak: I call it getting oaked and poked. It's okay. It's all good -- and certainly preferable to having a couple of ticks buried neck-deep in your flesh....

I was out in Chicago for the wedding of my sister's eldest son last week, and today was my first chance to get up to Mt. Tam this month. After a week in Chicago followed by three days at work back in San Francisco I really needed a nature photography fix. Thank you, Mt. Tam! 

Even early in the morning it was sunny and toasty on the trail. I tried to photograph dragonflies in flight but had to settle for a butterfly perched on a twig of oak.

I had no grand hiking plans, so I just kind of mosied around and never got farther than maybe a half-mile from the Jeep. This scene of rocks and "weeds" (rosinweed and yerba santa, with manzanita in the background) struck me as appealing for reasons I can't really articulate. Something about the light and the green serpentinite, just an ordinary patch of Mt. Tam.

Rosinweed. It's what Mt. Tam smells like in the summer.

At one point a couple of mountain bikers passed by, heading north, immediately followed by a water district pick-up truck heading south. It must have been the five-minute rush hour because I hadn't seen anyone else up to that time or in the remainder of the time before I got back to the Jeep.

The Douglas fir trees are putting out new cones with fresh little mouse tails. The scientific name Pseudotsuga menziesii lets you know this isn't a true fir. One way you can tell it's a pseudo fir is that its cones hang down instead of standing upright.

What do you call a praying mantis that tells jokes? 

A shtick bug.

I believe this is our native California mantid. I've only seen brown ones, but they come in green as well. You can tell the male from the female by the length of the wings (the wings are longer than the abdomen in males), but I'm not certain I can tell where the wings end and the abdomen begins. I spotted this gal (?) in some brown grass near the ground and coaxed her into posing for a picture on this juncus stalk. I've only seen mantises in the summer, and it turns out they don't live through the winter. The species only survives because the eggs overwinter and hatch in spring.

It was mainly during my stalk of the leopard lilies 

that I got oaked and poked....

I was waiting for a junco with a beak full of bugs to take the meal to its nest when this sweet little guy landed on a nearby branch. If you know what kind of bird it is, please tell me. There were so many interesting bird songs out there, and several were a mystery. I had to wonder if it might be easier to identify birds by ear than by eye (but I doubt it).

I waited quite a while for this junco to take its loot to the (presumed) nest, but he wasn't having any.

I actually thought I could wait him out, but I started to be concerned for its little ones and finally gave up.

I made one last stop to check up on the "pet cemetery" site (which is no more critter-excavated than it was the last time) and was surprised to see this white Jeep parked up by the picnic tables. I thought it was a park ranger's vehicle at first, but then I noticed the citation on the windshield. Is this just a summer thing? I'd love to see the "police blotter" sometime to find out what other nutty stuff goes on up there.

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June Favorites

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His first concern was "the hills of home," especially Mount Tamalpais in Marin County. Part of the landmark mountain was parkland, but most of its lower slopes were in dairy farms. "Don't worry," Wayburn was told. "These people have been here forever and will always keep their ranches.... Three months later I heard about the acquisition of one of the ranches by speculators. That really got me going." Wayburn sat down and drafted an ideal future boundary for the state park, including the entire watershed of its major stream, Redwood Creek. It took a quarter century, but this vision of protection was finally fulfilled.

--John Hart writing about Edgar Wayburn in 

Legacy, Portraits of 50 Bay Area Environmental Elders

California Buckeye

Yellow Mariposa Lily

Stonecrop

Western Azalea

Common Ringlet

Oakland Star Tulip on Serpentine

Stinging Nettle

Yerba Buena

Collecting Thistle Down

Mt. Tam Jewelflower

Taking Cover

Wintergreen

Baby Hummers

Foxglove

  

Longhorn Beetle

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North Side Ramble

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I woke up at a crazy time this morning, one of those wee hours where I probably could have made it all the way to Yosemite in time for sunrise. But I had no intention of going to Yosemite, so I spent a couple of unproductive hours trying to go back to sleep before I finally got up and headed out to the north side of Mt. Tam by way of Fairfax-Bolinas Road. That's Mt. Tam's East Peak on the right, and Mount Diablo on the distant horizon.

(4-second timelapse)

I parked at Azalea Hill and stepped out of the Jeep into a mellow pre-dawn darkness, expecting to be slightly chilled -- but it was warm and breezy. I've been out there for sunrise before, but only in the winter, so I couldn't quite wrap my head around the warmth and ended up throwing on a longjohn top just in case, only to peel it off as soon as I reached the top of the hill.

I'd been on the lookout for animals in the road during the drive up but didn't see any. With my commanding view atop Azalea Hill I figured I'd at least see some deer or maybe a jackrabbit, but there was nothing but landscape. 

I stopped off at the Lily Pond but didn't do any photography. I couldn't help noticing a couple of gross patches of used toilet paper on the edge of the pond. Real neighborly. As I was hunkered down in the horsetail looking for an angle to photograph I heard what sounded like a gunshot -- CRACK! I looked toward the sound, which had come from the woods on the other side of the road, and the first crack was followed by more as a huge branch peeled off and crashed to earth.

My next stop was Cataract Gulch, where the creek was running fairly strong due to the rain we had earlier in the week. Once again, though, I wasn't feeling inspired to shoot any pictures. I drove up the hill, but the gate at the top was still locked, so I poked around and photographed the fern just to pass the time. Although I'd cooked a breakfast burrito before leaving the house, I was already hungry again and ate the PB&J I'd brought along. They opened the gate a little later, at about 8:30 a.m.

The light was still pretty nice on Bolinas Ridge, so it was a good time to start a mini-project of photographing the ridge from the same vantage point, with the same lens, at different times of the year. Sort of a longer-term timelapse. The green on the hillsides is not grass, but bracken fern, along with some coyote brush and Douglas firs.

I parked at Rock Spring and hiked a short distance down the Cataract Trail to stalk some leopard lilies. I'd hoped to photograph them being visited by a swallowtail butterfly, but as I was making this image with my macro lens a hummingbird swooped down. Unfortunately, the bird was too nervous to feed in my presence and buzzed away. I changed lenses and waited for the hummer to return. It did return -- several times -- but each time it lost its nerve and zoomed away when it realized I was still there.

While I was waiting for the hummingbird I snagged my first Grappletail dragonfly of the season. These guys are a bit of a nemesis. I've yet to get a shot of one that I'm really happy with. Grappletails and Pacific Spiketails were the two big dogs in the area, but I never saw a spiketail stop to rest.

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Mount Tam Jam 2013

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Until today, no one had been to a rock concert on Mt. Tam since June 1967.

That concert was the first outdoor rock festival in history and featured the likes of Moby Grape, Steve Miller and The Doors (more info here).

It was an unbelievably brilliant day on the mountain, and clear skies extended to the horizon. The San Francisco skyline rose in the distance in just a slight haze, and the Diablo Range was clearly visible well beyond The City. Oh yeah, the music was rockin' too. Just another great day on the mountain....

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Mt. Tam Mythology

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Three Views of Mt. Tamalpais from San Francisco

"By virtue of its hilly landscape, its redwood forests and eucalyptus groves, its wayward coastline, and its liberally bohemianized population, the peninsula of Southern Marin has attracted imaginative people from all over the world.... [I]ts geographical center is a mountain holy to the Indians, and named after their princess Tamalpa. Though not much more than twenty-five hundred feet high, Mount Tamalpais rises almost directly from sea level, and thus looks bigger than it is, and most of it has been set aside as a state park. Seen in the first light of dawn ... the whole mass of hills, valleys, and canyons with their forests, groves, meadows, and giant rocks confers an atmosphere of strange beneficence....

"Extraordinary people live upon it. Occasionally you may come across an order of Western yamabushi or Buddhist mountain-monks, with their rattling pilgrim staffs and conch-shell trumpets. There are a few true hermits, on the northern slopes, which are its most lonely and untraveled parts.... There is a psychiatrist who lives all year in a tent and uses astronomy to cure his patients by letting them see their problems from the perspective of the galaxy. There is a surgeon who heals people by doing nothing. There are also mountain lions, bobcats, and deer galore, and wild goats and eagles and vultures and raccoons and rattlesnakes and gophers....

"All these and many more wizards, yogis, artists, poets, musicians, gardeners, and madmen cluster about this mountain, largely unheeded by the orderly streams of tourists who dutifully inspect the vast redwood cathedral of Muir Woods and attend the annual play given in the enormous amphitheater just below the summit."

--From In My Own Way, An Autobiography, 

by Alan Watts, 1972

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