Hike at Leona

To get to the Leona staging area, you turn off Keller onto Campus and then immediately right into the "Ridgemont at Skyline" parking lot. The staging area is at the back of the parking lot. Just down from the staging area is a small pond, a great place for a dog to splash around, although Maggie actually prefers streams, as larger bodies of water seem to make her nervous. Luckily for her, Leona Canyon Trail follows a small stream much of the way, and she had many opportunities to get wet and muddy. We also ran into a park ranger, who asked me if I knew the name of the trail, and two different dog walkers. The second dog walker had two dogs enthusiastic for a run around with Maggie for a good five minutes. Poison oak intruded on the trail relatively little. The trail itself, a dirt road, winds consistently upward until it ends at a parking lot of Merritt College. There we turned back and returned to the trailhead, a total of 2.6 miles.

Traveling, home

Had a pretty interesting conversation with Mike at the marina. I was telling him about the completely appealing cottage in the forest that I visited yesterday, and he was telling me about his impatience for the end of June, when he will be free from his lease and able to leave for his van trip around the country with his dog. I egged him on by saying he doesn't have to wait for the lease to be up as long as he has already paid the rent. Of course, that goes against the grain a bit to pay for rent for a place unless he is living there, but then it goes against the grain to keep living there when he wants to be going, doesn't it?
Anyway, listening to him talk about how confined he feels in a house and how much he wants to loosen his ties to other people, be a bit more disconnected, made me feel a bit better about not having done anything toward my daydream of traveling around with my dog. 'Cause I don't have a desire to get disconnected; I'd rather be increasing the number of connections I have with other people, even though I don't want to get overly entangled with anyone either.
I have a significant yen for home, which I think will require me to plunk down somewhere and stay there for a while, get tangled up with a particular area. I don't think I want to do that in Oakland. Would rather do that in a woodsy part of Northern California. Preferably close enough to Rachel and Ben to see them fairly frequently.
That would narrow my options, which is good, but the remaining options look difficult. Housing is expensive everywhere in California, and the more beautiful parts are no exception, even though there are no jobs in those parts :) So here I am having found this wonderful place to live, but the rental cost is almost twice as much as I'm paying now to share a place with a guy who keeps his shit in heaps all over the house. (Much rather he'd get it together and put it in his own room). I have some fantasies about how I would generate some income in an out-of-the-way place such as Guerneville, but don't know how realistic my fantasies actually are with rent being as high as that.

And this afternoon I took an employment test at Berkeley Unified School District.

Another hike with Maggie

Went to Redwood Park again, this time starting at Redwood Bowl staging area. Took the West Ridge Trail to Fern to French to Tres Sendas back to West Ridge Trail and return. The West Ridge Trail is just a dirt road for its entire length in the park, but all of the other trail are footpath types. The French Trail is all through Redwoods, so very peaceful, hardly even any birds. Once you get past the Mill intersection, the ups and downs become quite steep, the shrubbier trees become fewer, and the poison oak becomes minimal. The heart of the Redwoods comes at the intersection of Star Flower trail and French, where Redwoods are almost all you can see. The entire trail was 4.09 miles, and since much of it was steep, it was reasonably challenging. Maggie was wearing her backpack with some water in each side, and she came home reasonably calm and able to bed down without a lot of fuss.

Number of dogs met on the trail: about ten. horses: two, on Fern.

HIke with Maggie

Hiked in Redwood Park today starting at Big Bear staging area. Took Toyon Trail to the West Ridge Trail to Baccharis Trail to Dunn and the Monteiro to Golden Spike, a total of 3.92 miles. The weather has been cool, so seemed comparatively easy.
The Toyon Trail, a fairly gentle, narrow, sheltered uphill, needs poison oak abatement, although not as badly as Chabot's Buckeye Trail, which still has the worst poison oak intrusion into a trail I've seen. The juncos were active in the shrubby trees, and one had fallen dead on the trail.
Once we reached the West Ridge Trail, a repurposed fire trail, we had fairly level and unsheltered walking. If the sun had been out, it might have been overly warm, but we were walking through a thick fog bank, and as we neared Baccharis Trail, we passed through a grove of eucalyptus that caught the fog and rained on the trail below, creating mud. Upon leaving the grove we were again on a dry trail, proving the rain in question was caused by the trees.
The Baccharis Trail was wide, gentle, often sandy and sometimes rocky. We continued through mostly shrubby trees and eucalyptus until we got a little way down the Monteiro Trail, where a grove of redwoods broke the trend. As we descended out of the fog on this wide, less gently sloping trail I sometimes walked backwards to alleviate the effect on my knees.
At the Monteiro/Golden Spike junction, I was confused, as the map showed the Golden Spike extending in both directions when we intersected it; instead there was only a downhill, and I wasn't sure if that was the westward or eastward direction. I guessed eastward and continued on Monteiro, and after a while we saw another, unmarked trail leading off to the left. I'm guessing that was the eastward part of the Golden Spike trail, but didn't go that way.
The Monteiro Trail descends all the way to the road near the Piedmont stables, and we picked up the Golden Spike trail there. As we followed this narrow, sheltered trail, we could see and hear the road for most of the way back to the car. The entire walk took about an hour and a half at an ambling pace.

Maggie weighs 54.6 pounds this morning.