Category Archives: health

Yesterday was lovely. Met my sister, Tracy, for lunch and then we walked the lakeside trail at the Lafayette Reservoir. The weather was beautiful, though both of us lamented the fact that it’s Winter and there has not seemed to be Winter weather. I suspect that come Spring, when we’ll be expecting the Spring-like weather, the Winter weather is going hit. After our walk, we went to visit our parents. All-in-all, a really nice and relaxing day.

• Weather: Another beautiful, Spring-like day
• Distance: 2.7 miles
• Time: 1 hour
• Highlights: Time to catch up with my sister.

Today, we went looking for Claremont Canyon Regional Preserve. After reading about it, I was intrigued to learn of a regional park behind the Claremont Hotel. We followed the road up the hill and I was so distracted by discovering the environment above the hotel, I completely missed the turnoff to get to the park.

We kept driving up hill on Claremont and made it up to Grizzly Peak before we confirmed we’d messed up. Coming back down the hill, we spotted turnout and the entrance to a firetrail and decided to park and start climbing. Once we were done and found a map, we discovered we were hiking on University of California land, rather than East Bay Regional Parks land, and we ended up on the Panoramic Ridge.

We didn’t have too much time to explore, but we found some sweeping views of Oakland and spotted a number of trails worth exploring. On the way back down the hill, we did actually find the turn-off to Claremont Canyon. At some point, we’ll go back to where we intended to begin and see if we can make our way up to where we ended up.

• Weather: Beautiful day, you’d think it was spring.
• Distance: Unknown
• Time: 30 minutes
• Highlights: Quiet, peaceful, no one around. All you could hear (besides our kids) was the creaking of the eucalyptus in the wind. Reminder of how easy it is to “get away” without even leaving town.

On Saturday, during the break in our weekend storm, Ethan and I went out to Point Isabel in Richmond. Given all the rain on Friday night, I went looking for some place with a paved trail and Point Isabel seemed like a nice choice. Since the park sits right on the Bay, there was quite a breeze and my ears were cold. The park is a well known local dog park, so I was treated to a full hour of Ethan sharing why we should get a dog and what kind of dog we should get (yes, tactical error on my part).

Running parallel to one of the trails is part of the San Francisco Bay Trail – so much more to explore.

• Weather: Very chilly, but not raining
• Distance: About 3 miles
• Time: 1 hour
• Highlights: Great views of San Francisco and the opportunity to check out every type of dog imaginable

As part of my New Year’s Resolution, I’ve set a personal health goal of completing one new hike each week. My hope is that the hikes will not only infuse much lacking physical activity into my life, but also remind me how lucky I am to live in such a great part of the world (or at least appreciate wherever I am traveling in a given week!).

To keep me honest, I plan to share my walks here. Today, Ethan, Jeff and I went up to Tilden Park (a 15 minute drive from my house)  and walked the Quarry and Big Springs Trails.

• Weather: Crystal clear day, about 65 degrees
• Distance: About three miles
• Time: One hour
• Highlights: Beautiful views, particularly of the San Francisco skyline and Golden Gate Bridge (see photo). We also spotted a bird of prey, likely a golden eagle.