A very San Francisco weekend

...includes a successful afternoon of frisbee golf in Golden Gate Park¹, followed the next day by hiking among the redwood trees in Big Basin State Park, which is part of a spectacular range of wilderness, forests, and open space that follows the peninsula from Half Moon Bay to Santa Cruz.

The approach to Big Basin snakes through these regions, narrowing at times to a single lane and balancing alongside steep descents, factors which make the park one of those places that is farther away than it appears on the map.  I didn't have a lot of knowledge about the park before arriving, but upon stepping out of the car I felt immediately that I'd made a good decision.  Redwood trees thrive along the Pacific Coast in large part due to the abundance of fog, which provides both water and nutrients.  On this particular day, though, it was clear, warm, and still.  It might have been enough to just sit and take in the air for a little while, but I decided to hike one of the developed trails, a four-mile loop through the Big Basin core area.

With Monday being a holiday, I imagine that plenty of people were embarking on similar adventures this weekend, but I didn't encounter many of them on the trail while I was out.  However, at a certain point, I heard the voices of a group of college-age hikers barreling down the trail behind me.  Their pace had almost an urgency to it, and as they caught up to me I wanted to tell them, "You guys, forests are in some ways very disorderly places.  The ground here is littered with sticks and with alder leaves.  Trees sprout up almost haphazardly in their arrangement.  A stream might flow through here in the spring, only to be dried up by summer.  There's so much going on and there is so little pattern to it that to really see things you need to look slower, and from more angles.  When you think along those lines, and really take the looking seriously, there may be moments when you get a better sense of the harmony of a forest, how it sustains its life with an incredible measure of balance, how the light that wriggles through the trees is always changing.  Maybe you will find patterns, or maybe you will find things or moments that you cannot define but that define your own experience."

But I didn't tell them that.  They passed me by, and eventually the forest grew quiet again.  

 

 ¹Successful, in that I retained possession of the Cat Cup, a piece of fine handiwork that we found in a tree several years ago during another frisbee golf round.  From that point forward, the Cat Cup has been awarded to the winner of the round.  I've held it for a couple of years now...yet another testament to my uncommon athletic prowess.