What’s so great about Spring Hikes?
A couple months ago I wrote a blog entry titled “Early spring hiking in the South Bay”, proclaiming how wonderful a time of year it is for exploring the parks and trails in the South bay area. Well, it is now mid-spring and the hiking experience is even better. You can expect green hills and valleys, mild temperatures, long daylight hours, and a moderate number of people on the trail, all contributing to making it a great experience.
Basket Dogs? WTF?
Twice this spring I’ve encountered women riding bikes carrying small dogs in an open basket on the front handle bars. If I saw this once I probably would have ignored it, but I saw this both along the Coyote Creek trail on a Saturday afternoon and again along the Los Alamitos Creek trail one evening. Now in both cases these folks were going pretty dang slow, but it still makes me shake my head a bit. What made them think this was a good idea? What keeps that mutt from jumping out? What if the owner hits a bump or falls off the bike? I have visions of the pooch getting catapulted out of the basket and run over by an oncoming biker. Next time I see this I’m going to try to get a picture.
Arastradero Preserve
My favorite location for hiking has become Arastradero Preserve in Palo Alto. Arastradero is only 10 minutes from where I work on Page Mill Road in Palo Alto. This makes it convenient for lunch time or after work walks. Arastradero is a great place to see wildlife. So far this spring I have encountered many species of birds, deer, a king snake, a red fox, and several lizards. The parking lot on Arastradero road is a busy place at lunch time with folks from the local high tech companies taking a quick break from their cubicle life for some hiking, jogging, biking or other activities. During one visit I noticed a couple of artists capturing the view on canvas. Here are some of my most recent photos from Arastradero.
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Other Places
Below are some other photos I’ve taken recently. The first two were taken during a Sunday hike from Coyote Peak in Santa Teresa County Park. Yep, that’s me in the first one. Obviously I need to get a haircut and to drop a few pounds. The second one is the view from the same location but looking towards Mt. Hamilton. I stitched together 3 separate images to make this photo using the The Panorama Factory software from Smoky City Design.
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The picture of the Damselfly was taken in Joseph D. Grant County Park, while the hawk picture was taken on the Coyote Creek Trail.
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Some changes and things I’m working on
I noticed that my main blog page had swelled to over 1MB in size! This was primarily due to including so many relatively large images inline. Starting with this entry it will be thumbnails only inline. Clicking the thumbnail will take you to the image within my section on the Flickr photo-sharing site. I started using Flickr last month and I’ve been very impressed with it’s capabilities.
I’ve also become interested in digital panoramic photography. I already mentioned the Panorama Factory software. It’s very cool and I’ve been very impressed with it’s capability to seemlessly stitch together multiple handheld images that were less than optimally aligned. You can create a simple jpg from a few images such as I did above, or combine multiple images into a Quicktime VR presentation. I also invested in a low cost panoramic head for my tripod – called of all things The Panosaurus. I’ll let you know how well it works and include some example images and VR presentations in my next blog entry.