Life of Wry

A new hiking place today… quite fun! Never knew about Lake Chabot, which is partly within the city of Oakland and partly within an unincorporated section of Castro Valley. Wikipedia says: “The Lake Chabot dam was built in 1874-1875 as a primary source for water in the East Bay” … so it’s a man-made reservoir/lake thing with tons of trails, and tons of visitors, even on a Wednesday (can’t imagine what the weekends look like there).

Mostly what I saw were kids at summer day camps, bikes, and dogs (a $2 dog fee is charged at the gate). But as soon as we left the shore and headed up, we lost most all of the folks. We hiked a little over 9 miles, approx 1800′ of gain and spent 4 hours doing it. We didn’t stop for lunch and I didn’t drink enough water (say my cramping legs this evening), but it was a great hike and a great workout.

In my new boots!

I hiked with Dede — a friend of Jim’s from high school whom he’s developed more of a friendship with post HS, who is an avid (AVID) hiker. She hikes several times a week, never anything shorter than 6 miles (usually longer). Her groups take their hiking seriously… in addition to the minimum length, they keep a certain pace (one group 17-min miles, another 22-min miles) don’t break for food (can’t even talk about food for the first 90 mins, says their informal rule) and other such funny (odd?) things. She didn’t impose the rules on me, but seems like we observed most of them anyway.

I’d have to study a map to see where we went, but I remember a Cameron Hill, a Lookout Point and that’s about it. Some pics on a very hazy, 70-degree-ish day:

I’d have gotten more pics but my phone ran out of juice early (left nav on and also managed to record some long pocket videos!).

So.. we hiked for 4-ish hours and the commute was about 4-ish hours (2 coming and 2 going). Worth it.. but god, the traffic on 1-80 at rush hour just sucks… plus a going home rush hour crash to further mess with the flow…

All in all: excellent.