Hiking to the Moonscape Pools
Posted on May 27, 2008, under Uncategorized.
The town where I live has a creek running through it. Most towns do, but often they cannot be seen or heard. Often, they’ve been turned into a system of underground raccoon highways. But in my town, the creek is visible and much considered, and it runs eventually into a beautiful estuary and then the Pacific Ocean. It’s a beautiful creek, and I love it, and this blog post (my first) is not about this creek.
It’s about a creek just over the hill, just two miles from my house, that runs not into a beautiful estuary, but through an abandoned gravel quarry, and eventually into a concrete channel and then into San Francisco Bay. But by hiking two miles from my house, I can reach a stretch of the creek near its headwaters, and I did that today, with my husband Chris.
To get there, we hiked up the hill where three new houses will replace Douglas fir forest and bay trees this year and over the grassy “Saddle” and into another watershed. Down a hillside covered with, through grey-green , nameless (to me!) scrubby brush dotted with monkey flowers and Indian paintbrush shouting their colors to the native bees in the midst of endless shades of green.
We noticed a rock wall and Chris wondered if it might be a stone road as others in the area might be. They we headed down the grass-covered hill and back into forest - but not before a surprise meeting, miles from town, with Todd my coworker and boss, his son Oscar and our organization’s intern Kevin!
