California

This was our second weekend hiking in Cali. We started thinking that the nice weather and almost zero mosquitos were not a one-time good luck thing. Unfortunately the same goes for the long traffic lines on the way back to the SF area, not a one-time bad luck event. The hike was quite enjoyable and not very challenging, even though the elevation gain was around the 3000 feet spread out over 15 miles distance. We could see why someone described Mt Wittenberg summit as creepy. Only the last 2-mile section was annoyingly crowded, most of the people going in the opposite direction. We decided at some point to just ignore the crowds and not say hi anymore. They did not say hi either, so I guess the trick is to avoid eye contact :).

We redeemed ourselves from all the broken rules pretty quickly just one day after our first hike in San Francisco. This time we did a loop hiking part of the Ben Johnson and part of the Dipsea Trail. We learned that the Dipsea route is the oldest cross-country race in the United States, it started in 1905!! And here we were, thinking that cross-country races were something relatively new, ha! We were very well prepared for this hike with our camelbacks filled out with water, sunscreen, bug spray we surprisingly did not need, emergency kit, no cotton clothing, snacks and what not. This was definitely not a baby-hike considering the 10.4 mile and overall 3048 ft elevation gain. Very different from the east coast hikes in New England: during this loop we almost did not encounter any rocks, there were plenty of switch-backs (barely seen in New England), only one mosquito made contact, the creek trail was very dry (and no creek in sight).

During what would be our first hike in San Francisco, we definitely broke some very basic hiking rules -hopefully I will not get banned from AMC a.k.a. Appalachian Mountain Club and not to be confused with AMC Theatres. To be fair, we started the day at 3:30 AM EST for a 6AM six-hour-long flight from Boston to SF and went directly to the hike after a brief stop at the hotel just to leave our big bags at the lobby (it was quite early to check in and get our room). Also, we had previously decided to do a hike we would categorize as baby-hike: 4.3 mile loop and 603 ft elevation, so the broken rules had barely any impact;)

On the weekend of the Feb 12th we have a chance to explore the https://squawalpine.com/ Squaw Valley ski resort a little bit. It was rather crowded, with rumors of them hitting 12000 visitors on that day, which apparently was their biggest of this season so far. It made skiing rather annoying, because there were so many people. The mountain itself was really nice, and on Sunday we had another day there which was much less crowded.