Here’s some pictures from another Saturday ride with MBoSC (Mountain Bikers of Santa Cruz) in Wilder Ranch. It was just a couple of us since most everyone else was at the Santa Cruz Bike Festival this weekend. Lots of poppies in bloom above the Zane Grey Cutoff trail. Even with the recent and welcome rain, most of Wilder Ranch tends to dry up pretty quickly but I was still able to find a few leftover mud puddles here and there! ;-)
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Here’s a handful of pictures and a video montage from a couple of Tahoe ski trips in March with Darlene and the Outdoor Adventure Club. Unfortunately, I didn’t catch everyone on camera on these trips. One weekend was with Greg and Erin but we never caught up with Bruce and Jane on the slopes and the other was with Stéphane, Evan, Richard and Jennifer but you can’t tell that from the photos. We also met up with Resi and Troy (and baby Aiden!) one day and foolishly I didn’t get a single shot of Aiden ripping up the slopes! At least I did get a shot of our massive Carcassonne game where we played with four of the major expansions at once.
Click on through for the gallery and video:
Here are my pictures and video from another great skiing (and gaming) week in Utah with Jon, Jim, Stan, Lewis, Bill, Brin, Rick and Darlene:
Just some pictures from taking our bobcat out for a walk from Waddell Beach into Big Basin State Park’s Rancho Del Oso last Sunday. We hiked up to the overlook at the top of the Clark Connector trail. Nice views!
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Earlier this week, Darlene and I made a little two-day, round-trip bike excursion to Monterey and back from Santa Cruz. It worked out to about 101 miles round trip from my place in the hills near Scotts Valley. We had actually intended to go down on Monday, hang out on Tuesday and return Wednesday but as we weren’t really ready to go until late Monday afternoon, with two hours of sunlight left…. oops! So, Tuesday morning we finally headed out.
It’s a common route and except for a couple of miles around Moss Landing, you stay off of Highway 1. And in fact, there’s a great bike trail that runs from Castroville all the way into Monterey which we didn’t know about until we stumbled on to it en route.
We had great weather both days and a lovely ride and stayed overnight at the inexpensive but nice Cannery Row Inn – across from San Carlos Beach and The Breakwater (a popular SCUBA diving spot).
Just a couple of pics from an afternoon last Friday checking out the Loch Lomond reservoir and park in the Santa Cruz Mountains. And yes, we were the proud crew of that fuchsia paddle boat! We also hunted for a while for a nearby geocache but came up empty.
Darlene and I camped out on the east side of Pinnacles National Park this past Sunday to watch the Perseids meteor shower. We had some fairly dark skies as Pinnacles is in a somewhat remote location. The glow of lights from Hollister and Salinas (about 25-ish miles away) were apparent to the north but the Milky Way was still quite visible. And the crescent moon set nice and early. We spotted probably several meteors per minute. There were a few clusters of four or five.
I made a little video of some time lapse images I captured during the night:
As it was a Sunday night, getting a campsite was easy – most of the sites were vacant — not so on a Friday or Saturday night! There was lots of wildlife though… of the more natural variety. We had multiple visits from human-habituated deer, rabbits and a coyote in our campsite. (I don’t count the yellow jackets!) We went for a hike to see the nearby talus caves and saw a couple of bats but part of the caves were still closed to protect the bat colony. (Talus caves are formed by rocks and boulders falling into a narrow area to form a ceiling and block out the sky.) On Monday, we hiked the High Peaks loop and happened to run into an old coworker from FileMaker. We also saw some turkey vultures and possibly some California condors.
Pictures and video from this year’s annual Pirates of Cache Creek event with the Outdoor Adventure Club – click through for the full gallery:
