Sunol Regional Wilderness is a great park. I mean, I’ve seen a bobcat AND a Northern pygmy owl (and a tarantula!) there, it’s got to be great! It’s also pretty easy for me to get to, even after work. And there is even a small waterfall. The one problem with Sunol is, like many of the parks around here, is it gets very hot in the summer – there’s just not a lot of tree cover. This summer in the Bay Area was very mild – in fact I had to run a space heater in my home office nearly every day because it was freezing in the house (and we don’t even have air conditioning). There was a report that came out recently stating this year has been the hottest on record in California and I know my friends in Southern California endured a lot of intense heat waves, but the weather in this area is somehow simultaneously wacky (to my East Coast sensibilities of actual seasons) and always perfect. Even when the forecast is in the 70s, though, which it was nearly every day of this summer (except when it dipped into the 60s), going to one of the open parks here will feel like the 80s or 90s, especially when you start climbing those steep hills. Also, I live relatively close to the bay itself, and at a higher altitude, which keeps the temperatures fairly cool here, but further inland, the temperatures did climb into the 90s pretty regularly this summer, making the parks out that way feel even hotter than that. ANYWAY, the other day the temperatures weren’t supposed to get out of the mid-60s, which was going to be followed by a warming trend, so I decided to take advantage of the cool weather and hit up Sunol, which I had been avoiding most of the summer. It was a smart move, Sunol was absolutely gorgeous that day, and shortly thereafter Indian summer set in and it got hot. The weather here is so weird.
These are from Flag Hill in Sunol:
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