Candlestick Point - July 8, 2013

Walking Distance: 3.2 mi.
Walking Time: 2 hrs., 19 min. (10:26 a.m. - 12:45 p.m.)
Start and End Point: Candlestick Point State Recreation Area (SRA), picnic/day use area parking lot, San Francisco, CA

This morning I went "backwards" and walked a stretch of Bay Trail in southern San Francisco that I skipped last year. Thank you to Ellen, Betsy and Susan for their good company. We had beautiful sunny weather, during today's walk at Candlestick Point State Recreation Area in San Francisco. We walked on both paved and packed dirt areas (solid green lines on Bay Trail map), and enjoyed a day with no wind (unusual for this area).

We parked in a day use parking lot and walked south along the bay shore (Jackrabbit Cove). We stopped to investigate some purple flowers that were growing by the water line, and were approached cautiously by a few ground squirrels.

We walked out to Sunrise Point and back. We continued southeast, stopping to walk out to the end of a public fishing pier and back.

We followed packed dirt trail(s) along Hermit's Cove that ran in parallel to Hunters Point Expressway/Jamestown Ave., then along Harney Way (the roads that have historically been jammed with traffic on game days for the 49ers and other football teams playing in nearby Candlestick Park stadium). We passed several picnic tables (many with wooden walls to help shelter picnic-ers from the wind).

We paused to try out some exercise course equipment/bars (part of an old Par Course perhaps?), and then continued east. We enjoyed walking on a very creative, multi-colored sidewalk (visible from Harney Way, and accessible by foot). The design was one of a large primary-colored mosaic along Candlestick Cove.

We walked as far as possible, to the end of Harney Way, getting close to the hum of traffic on  Highway 101. We turned around at a cement utility tower and enclosure, north of the San Mateo County boundary, and then we back to the car.

Wildlife Sightings: 

35 ground squirrels; 3 crows/ravens; 2 white butterflies; 102 sea gulls (about 100 were on the beach area by highway 101); 3 cormorants; 2 little brown jobs (LBJs); 1 robin; 1 lizard; 1 rusty screw; 2 mockingbirds

Hunters Pt. - March 25, 2012

Walking Distance: 2 miles (estimate)
Walking Time: 1 hour, 6 min. (9:49 - 10:55 a.m.)
Start and End Point: Street parking space on Jennings Street, (Hunters Point), San Francisco, CA

It was a beautiful, but gray morning. The rain had cleared up in time for this walk. Due to construction, I couldn't park near the Heron's Head Park EcoCenter entrance, but close enough -- I found street parking on Jennings St., and then walked up a short sidewalk that was hemmed in by a fence and a long row of sandbags on one side to get to the Park.

The EcoCenter looks more complete than when I passed by here almost two years ago. It was ecologically designed to capture rain water runoff. However, parts of the trail leading out to the Bay were blocked off, and the trail may have been closed altogether. No one was around that I could ask. I walked out to the end of Heron's Head point and back. I'm enclosing an aerial shot of this point from Google Maps. It's not hard to see how this park, extending into the Bay between Lash Lighter and India Basins, got its name.

I then cut over to the packed dirt/sand trail that dead-ended in a fence -- the site of a former power plant site that was being remediated. (De-polluted?)

If this sounds a bit gritty, it was not that bad. I turned around at the fence, and walked back to a bridge that crossed over the channel and walked south to Whale Tail park. I call it that because of the whale's tail that was incorporated into the design of the playground. I followed the trail to its end (a tiny asphalt cul-de-sac with a faded red/pink anchor symbol painted on it, and I turned around to head back the way I came.

On the way back to the car, I walked across the street to the intersection of Jennings St. and Cargo Way, to visit "Bay Natives" -- a nursery specializing in native plants. I bought a few for my upcoming "Walking the Bay" photo exhibit. I may not be able to invite any shorebirds to attend, but plants have no choice; they sit where I haul them -- in this case to Canessa Gallery in San Francisco, for the month of April.


And now, I will proceed to add too much text, just so I can get the large number of pictures I took to load and fit properly on this page. Ever since Google "upgraded" blogger a few years back so that it could accommodate fancier HTML schemas, arranging pictures within a post became somewhat of a nightmare. I'm delighted to have a blogger-based site, but I wish they'd fix this issue.

Wildlife Sightings:
31 ducks; 2 Canada geese; 46 sea gulls; 15 coots; 6 little brown jobs + 8 finches; 3 killdeer; 8 unidentified brownish shorebirds (3 medium, 5 smaller size); 1 Western/Clarks grebe; 1 American avocet; 3 black-necked stilts; 1 snowy egret; 9 cormorants; sound of a clapper rail; 3 pigeons; 1 mockingbird; 2 crows; 2 snails; a few characters.