Apr 23, 2014
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With: | Jackie Burd |
The headquarters for Henry Coe State Park lies along Pine Ridge, one of the higher ridges of the Diablo Range inside the park. The highpoint of this ridge is located less than half a mile from, and 400ft above the parking lot, making for a rather easy outing. We got up early to get the hiking in while it was still cool in the morning - Spring was starting to warm up around here. The hills continue to be a bright green, but already there were signs that they would soon start to turn brown. The grasses had mostly gone to seed and the flowers were doing their best to bloom in many colors to attract insects, get themselves pollinated, and be down with it. We found there were two summits to Pine Ridge. The west summit, with a VABM we couldn't find and marked with an elevation of 3,009ft on the topo map, proved to be the lower of the two. The unmarked and unlabeled east summit, about 5min away, showed to be about 10ft higher according to the GPS. This east summit is just north of the Henry Coe Monument placed to honor the man for whom the park is named. In addition to the video footage Jackie was shooting, we did a little geocaching while in the area, finding three before deciding to call it quits. We spent a little more than an hour covering just over 2 miles.
Christmas Hill is the highpoint of Christmas Hill Park, the site of the World Famous Gilroy Garlic Festival. Held every summer, it has become a South Bay classic of 100F temperatures mixed with rampant public drunkeness. At other times, like today, it is a quiet little park west of Gilroy and Uvas Creek. It, too, has two summits, and again the east one was higher. We visited both in a meandering route starting from the more manicured part of the park, wandering through the "natural" area which turns out to be a pleasant enough mix of oak and grassy hillsides, poison oak waiting in vast quantities for anyone who might venture off the trail. The views take in parts of the Santa Clara Valley around Gilroy to the east and the Santa Cruz Mtns to the west. This proved to be an even shorter outing - less than a mile. It doesn't get much easier than this...
This page last updated: Wed Apr 30 21:11:30 2014
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