Fires continued to close down much of the public lands in California, though
the air quality in the Bay Area had improved greatly over the past three days.
My last outing of any consequence was almost three weeks earlier, probably the
longest stretch of non-summiting I've done in a decade. I was getting antsy and
needed to do something. While poking around on the PB app, I noticed that
there were something like three dozen red dots in San Francisco, "summits" I
had yet to visit. I'd already done the ones found on LoJ, but PB with its
user-contributed silliness, showed much more work for me to do. Normally I
would just ignore these and get on with climbing more meaningful points, but
desperate times call for desperate measures. I decided to
take advantage of the newly-opened BART station in San Jose and take my bike up
to the City and basically ride around until I got tired. I managed 17 of these
red dots plus a couple of points I'd already done around Twin Peaks since I was
so close. I'm not going to put any of these new summits in my database since it
would look pretty pathetic, but for the curious I've added my GPX tract on PB
so you can
view it there.
While most of these are in dense urban developments
where the highpoint is on private property, probably a third are found in local
parks, some with decent views. There is also "Mint Hill", found inside the
heavily fortified US Mint. I went to the highpoints where I could, but didn't
bother trespassing anywhere. I've found riding a bike around San Francisco is
far, far more enjoyable than driving a car - in fact, I actually loathe driving
in The City because parking is so ridiculous. I probably shouldn't have
started as early as I did because fog hung around the highest points for the
first few hours, leaving poor views. It was blue skies before noon and even a
bit warm. All in all, a fine way to spend the day...