Potrero Hill: From Water Tower to Library

My mom called this morning and mentioned Potrero Hill Library was having its grand reopening. “There’ll be a lion dance,” she said, “but I just want to get some books.” She’s had to use other libraries for years, it seems, while the Pot Hill Library underwent major renovations. I said I’d come over to her house, and walk to the library where I hoped to catch the Chinese lion dance, curious about my baby’s reaction to the leaping lion costume and the pounding drums.

It’s been a while since I’ve walked across the top of Potrero Hill from my mom’s house to the library. Today I rediscovered one of my favorite routes.  

The big blue water tower on 22nd Street, between Carolina and Wisconsin, is my first reference point. A good decade and a half ago, there was a crappy fence around the water tower and my teenaged self clambered up it like a monkey and I trespassed the grounds around the tower, climbed the trees, and never encountered anyone else. Now the fence is new, tiny chain link, and the tower is off-limits. Ah well, my interests have changed.

At Wisconsin and 22nd Street a long staircase cuts through the block in an easterly direction, leading to Arkansas Street and a park. I’ve always loved San Franciscan staircases that work like “secret” shortcuts between blocks. This one was a favorite since childhood, back when I regularly walked across Potrero Hill to get movies from Dr. Video, or ice cream from the Daily Scoop. I love the wide steps of the staircase, framed with sour grass and funky houses, the tall, dark trees, and the view of the San Francisco bay and Oakland hills.

At the bottom is Arkansas Street, and across the street is the park, simply named the Potrero Hill Recreation Area. There’s a trail there, running east-west. I could still see a glimpse of the bay. Uphill were tennis courts. Further east were the Potrero Hill Projects. I left the trail at Connecticut Street to get to the library, passing a community garden where people were hard at work, preparing their beds for spring planting.

So when I got to the library, I missed the lion dance, but ran into some very good friends, munched on free veggie sandwiches and a slice of cheese pizza (courtesy of Goat Hill Pizza and Klein’s Deli), listened to a funky folk band, and watched a group of kids from my high school alma mater, International Studies Academy, give their first choir performance, a hand-clapping, foot-stomping show where they even sang a Coup song.

The Potrero Hill Library used to be a bleak sort of building, single-story, post WWII construction. The bathroom was up a creepy, long, dark staircase. Now it’s two-stories, clean, well stocked with books, and full of light from floor-to-ceiling windows. And it was packed with people, a good reception. I meandered about with my baby in her sling, checking out the art hanging from the ceiling, peering out windows, inspecting the family bathroom (which I am bummed to report has NO baby-changing table, just a lipless countertop next to the sink, already sloppy and wet). One of the best physical aspects of the new library is its view of downtown from the Children’s Area where benches face the windows. I overheard a girl remark to her mom, “This is the perfect place to sit and read a book!”

Three hours later, I trekked back to my mom’s house the way I came. If I had taken regular streets, the climb would’ve been pretty intense, especially with a seventeen-pound baby in a sling and a diaper bag. The trail and staircase made the walk easy, and the baby, kicking her legs and drooling, was thoroughly entertained.  

Potrero Hill Library

1616 20th Street (near Connecticut)

415. 355.2822

www.sfpl.org

Family Storytime

For infants to 5 years old, with parents.

Thursdays at 10:30 a.m.

March 11, 18, and 25

Fratello Marionettes: “Carnival of the Animals”

Saturday, March 27

3 p.m.

All ages

Hardcore Walking Momma

I wondered if anyone read this blog, except for the folks I’ve sent it to, when I received a surprise email a couple of weeks ago from an old housemate of mine, Jeannie Leslie. We used to hike the San Francisco hills—always the hills for their vantage points—and sit on the top, often at sunset because we both worked during the day, and we'd look at the City in the purple and gold light. Seven years passed since we’d been in touch. And then she found me through Hill Babies, perhaps the best thing about this blog for me.

Now she has two children, a five-year-old boy and a three-year-old girl, plus one in the oven. She walks all over the place, choosing not to have a car. Her kids prefer hills and staircases to flat lands. “Stop at the next tree,” she tells them as they run up a hill, and they listen. Then her little girl wants to be carried, so Jeannie squats down, lifting her daughter and her four-month-old, unborn baby up the steepest part of Dolores Street. And she's able to continue a conversation, while I huff and puff with only one fat baby to contend with. 

Jeannie’s a tremendous mom, aside from being a hardcore walker, just unlike any I’ve met. She birthed her two kids at home—her man Duncan delivered the second one before the midwife arrived. She befriends the fruit sellers at the farmer’s markets, gathering bruised produce to make marmalade to spread on homemade muffins. She raises two fat chickens in her backyard of her rented flat in Noe Valley, eating eggs on Wednesday with the neighbor kids. Finally, she and Duncan homeschool their oldest child, one of the smartest and most nature-aware kids I’ve met.

Here’s to many good hikes in the City with my old friend, now a fellow mother, Jeannie Leslie! I look forward to our conversations, the lofty feeling of being on top of a hill with the City spread out below us, and seeing our children play outside. 

The Mastic Trail, Grand Cayman Island

Writing about a foreign trail goes against the premise of this blog—hikes with children in the San Francisco Bay Area—but I just came back from the first international trip with the baby, and we had a great hike on the Mastic Trail of Grand Cayman. We arrived on Valentine’s Day and stayed with a family friend, Lois Blumenthal, who happens to be a major advocate for the conservation of bats in the Caribbean, and a self-taught ecologist about the flora and fauna of the delicate ecosystems on the Grand Cayman.

 

One of the best parts of our visit was walking the Mastic Trail with Lois. We plopped the baby in a carrier on the husband’s chest, grabbed a water bottle and sunhats, and set out. The sky was overcast, perhaps a great thing since the temperature felt perfect and the humidity was low.

 

Up until we had hiked the Mastic Trail, the island seemed largely developed with houses, some in a colonial style with gingerbread trim, but most just boxy. The land seemed somewhat dry and scrubby except for long-legged tangles of mangrove trees along certain watery edges. The Mastic Trail opened us to a whole new world, one teeming with biodiversity.

 

The trail is a one-way trek—we started at one end and walked to the other, where we had a car waiting—of about two miles. The terrain changes form: rough with jagged limestone, muddy, and sometimes soft with a red dirt that supposedly comes from Africa, borne on high winds over the Atlantic.  The path traverses several island habitats—mangrove, an ancient forest, and stands of native palms. It was made a couple hundred years ago when people needed a north-south route across the island, carrying goods by foot or donkey; now the National Trust of the Caymans owns the land.

 

The ground beneath our feet became muddy shortly into the hike as leggy mangroves, vines, and ferns rose out of the brackish water. We crossed a mahogany bridge made perhaps over a hundred years ago, the logs still firm although they lay partially submerged in goo.

 

Further on, the terrain became dry and Lois pointed out a tamarind tree, bushy looking and with feathery, pinnate leaves. In the old days, hunters nailed boards horizontally across the trunk; they would wait up in the tree for the agouti, a fat rodent, to snuffle around where a lure was set.

 

Lois showed us a well dug into the limestone-studded earth. “There used to be a little cup next to it, but I guess someone took it,” she noted.

 

“Don’t move, Jessica!” my husband barked. A two-foot long snake poised on the limestone, smooth head raised, eyes coolly observing us. The grass snake (Alsophis cantherigerus) is harmless—there aren’t any poisonous snakes on the island—and we admired its smooth scales before continuing down the trail.

 

We trekked on, passing Silver Thatch Palm (Coccothrinax proctorii), the national tree, endemic to the islands. The fronds were used for thatch roofs. We walked under strangler figs and giraffe trees, royal palms and buttonwoods, red birch (not a true birch) and calabash and ironwood. Elegant bromeliads clung from branches everywhere. A couple of the trees had termite nests on them, thick crusty balls of dried frass, several feet long. Birds sang and chirped and skreeed and cawed everywhere.

 

We passed a fissure zone where there were huge clefts in the limestone, evidence of the plate tectonics that's still lifting the island above sea level. A soldier crab without a shell came scuttling down the trail, and a rainbow colored lizard called an anole perched on a tree limb. 

 

As we walked on, I saw something snuffle on the side of the trail. “An agouti!” I cried.

 

The animal shuffle-hopped through the underbrush about five feet from us. It was maybe twelve pounds, compactly built and colored like an American football, a tawny brown, the Central American version of a guinea pig. Settlers brought agoutis (Dasyprocta punctata) to the Caymans as a food source, although they’re not eaten much today, I believe. The fellow regarded us quietly then slipped into the forest.

 

We encountered a large Mastic tree about two-thirds of the way into the hike. It happened to be at highest point on the island, a mere sixty feet above sea level. Shipbuilder’s used the Mastic (Mastichodendron foetidissimum) for their masts, and people cut down so many of the trees, they almost eradicated them from the island.

 

Lois pointed out where the ancient seashore was, a craggy area where we could find sea shell fossils if we looked. The land there rose above sea level two million years ago, she told us, and had slowly evolved into the forest we walked through, with 100 different kinds of trees and over five hundred other plants.

 

At the end of the trail, the dirt became that ruddy soil from Africa, called “red mould” by the locals. A fire had recently burned small swathes of land on either side of the trail; perhaps farmers were clearing land as it looked like a controlled burn.

 

Three hours later, we reached our parked car and Marshall peeled an orange, the sweetest fruit after a good hike, I nursed the baby in the backseat with both doors wide open, and Lois talked to some travelers with children who had questions about hiking the Mastic Trail. They were a family and, seeing the baby, asked if their kids (four years old?) could handle the trail. Without a pause both Marshall and I assured them it was definitely something to experience, but perhaps they’d need to carry their children part of the way.

 

 

 

Last Hiked:

February 2010 

Directions:

-Make your way to Grand Cayman. Cayman Air is about $200 roundtrip from Florida.

-From the capital of George Town, go east on the Queen’s Highway for 14 miles.

-Left at Frank Sound Road

-At the Fire Station, go left on Mastic Road

-Parking lot is a quarter mile on the right

 

-If you have two cars, park the second at the other end:

-continue on Frank Sound Road to Old Man Bay

-Left at the crossroads, travel a mile

-Left on Further Road

-Park at the dead end

 

 

Cayman Wildlife Connection,

Including several articles written by Lois Blumenthal:

http://www.caymanwildlife.org/press.html

 

National Trust of the Cayman Islands,

Mastic Trail information:

http://www.nationaltrust.org.ky/info/mastic.html

 

Bat Conservation International,

Article about Lois Blumenthal:

http://www.batcon.org/index.php/media-and-info/bats-archives.html?task=viewArticle&magArticleID=19

 

Wildlife of the Caymans:

http://www.discovercaymans.com/guides/caymanadventureguide/wildlife.cfm

 

The Mastic Tree:

http://www.sfrc.ufl.edu/4h/Mastic/mastic.htm

 

 

Bernal Hill and Cortland Avenue

Bernal Hill

            There is something about Bernal Hill that has always made me happy since childhood, whether in the summer and fall when the hill is golden as any northern California hill, or in winter and spring when grass turns the hill a luxurious green in contrast to the valley of concrete, mortar, and glass that the city appears to be.  Bernal’s thirty-something acres are almost in the nucleus of the city, more or less hemmed by Mission Street to the east, Cesar Chavez Street to the north, I-280 to the south, and US 101 to the east; these coordinates place it in the banana belt where you will mostly encounter sunny weather instead of fog. 

           

The Baby Factor

            Bernal Hill is a hike for any age: babies sport strollers can cruise Bernal Heights Boulevard, a pedestrian-only one-mile road that winds up the hill; babies in slings and older children can traverse the Boulevard with their parents, as well as explore the very top of the hill and walk along the crest on a dirt path that runs east-west.

            There are a plethora of shops and restaurants on Cortland Avenue but most do not have baby-changing tables in the restrooms; if you need to change your baby, patronize Progressive Grounds Café or Maggie Mud Ice Cream Parlor. While on Cortland, check out Chloe’s Closet, a fantastic second-hand baby gear and clothing store.

           

History

In the early nineteenth century this land belonged to the Spanish cattleman, Don Jose Cornelio Bernal, and then passed hands to a Frenchman who sliced it into lots that Irish immigrants bought. Its bedrock was virtually unaffected by the 1906 earthquake, and its stability lured folk to build cottages for survivors and construction workers. World War II brought black home-owners who worked in the naval shipyards, the 1960s brought political activists and hippies, and currently there is some amount of gentrification as evidenced in some expensive restaurants; Bernal’s blue-collar tradition remains at its foundation.

Your Day Begins

            Start your day on Cortland Avenue where you can stock up on picnic foods or enjoy a drink and a meal on the sunny patio at Progressive Grounds Café, one of the few businesses on Cortland with a baby-changing table in the restroom.

            Walk north up Anderson Street for a quarter mile until you reach Bernal Heights Boulevard, a circular drive with small, free parking lots on the north and south sides. You have about a mile to walk on the circular boulevard, half of which is pedestrian only. People let their dogs off leash here; on the weekends the place boils with mutts as they scamper and pop and gallop everywhere.

            At the very top is radio tower among a clump of trees on a windy hump; perhaps you’ll find the owls that live there, or see kestrels and hawks gliding on the breeze. This is a perfect place to sit and identify landmarks from the Golden Gate to the Bay Bridge, Mount Diablo to Mount Tamalpais, and a score of San Franciscan neighborhoods. If you are goat-footed and sure of your step, and have either a walking child or a baby in a sling, traverse the hill’s rocky spine extending to the east onto round, grassy lumps that remind me of the cover illustration of a boy standing on a desolate planet from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s book, The Little Prince. Take care with walking on the dirt trails—they can be slippery even on a sunny day.

I’ve never encountered mammals besides humans and dogs on the hill, but Bernal is home to raccoons, opossums, and skunks. For a while, folks sighted a coyote and perhaps he’s still there. At least one pair of Great Horned Owls nest in the clump of trees at the apex, and one frequently spies hawks and kestrels soaring above.

Sunset is one of the loveliest times on the hill as witnessed on the very top where the panoramic city is spread out at your feet. Notice the changing colors of sky and hill, the emergence of stars and moon, the temperature change, the arrival and departure of birds.

            At the end of your day, treat yourself to ice cream at Maggie Mud’s where the spectrum ranges from dairy free to full fat goodness. If you and your child still have energy to burn, cross the street, go behind the library, and check out the Bernal Heights Playground.            

OTHER ACTIVITIES

Ø Farmer’s Market and Flea Market

If you visit on the weekend, take a jaunt to the southern flank of the hill so that you can buy fresh produce at the Alemany Farmer’s Market on Saturday (6 am to 3 pm), or look for an odd bauble or collectable at the Alemany Flea Market on Sunday (7 am to 3 pm).

Ø Bernal Heights Outdoor Cinema in October

In October you can watch a movie at the outdoor cinema; not all films are child-appropriate, but some are, like this year’s documentary on a pair of owls that live on Bernal Hill.

Ø Fiesta on the Hill

Also in October is the Fiesta on the Hill, a no-booze party lasting several days. Even if you hanker for a cold beer, your child will be drunk with happiness to ride ponies, dance to live music, get touchy-feely in the petting zoo, convince you to buy a pumpkin from the patch, and laugh to see you volunteer for the dunk tank.

Ø San Francisco Illegal Soapbox Society

Around Halloween weekend you might find the soapbox derby going on from 1 pm to about 5 pm. I’ve been once as a member of the holler-happy crowd, and marveled at the crazy speeds the soapboxes reach; I imagine an old-enough child would thrill at watching the wild race (and promptly beg the parents to build a soapbox derby car in the garage). This is a booze-friendly event—in fact one of the rules for car construction demand at least one beer holder per soapbox.

WHAT AND WHERE?

Maggie Mud (903 Cortland Ave., 415.641.5291)

Progressive Grounds Café (400 Cortland Ave., 415.282.6233)

Good Life Grocery (448 Cortland Ave., 415.648.3221)

Bernal Heights Outdoor Cinema (http://www.bhoutdoorcine.org/)

Fiesta on the Hill (http://www.bhnc.org/fiesta)

Farmer’s Market and Flea Market  (100 Alemany Boulevard at the junction of I-280 and 101 on the south side of Bernal Hill; 415.647.9423)

San Francisco Illegal Soapbox Society (no specific website, but here’s an article about it: http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/304454)

Bernal Heights Playground (Cortland Ave at Moultrie Street, just behind the library)

Businesses WITHOUT a baby-changing table: Martha & Brothers Coffee, the Moonlight Café, Liberty Café (as of 10/2009, they have plans to add one, date yet to be determined), Little Nepal Restaurant, and Good Life Grocery.

DIRECTIONS

Public bus: 24 Divisadero; 67 Bernal Heights.

By car northbound: From US 101, exit Alemany Boulevard; left on Bayshore Boulevard; left on Cortland Avenue; continue to the top of the hill. Parking is metered on Cortland but free on side streets.

By car southbound: From US 101, exit Cesar Chavez Street; go on Bayshore Boulevard lane; travel south on Bayshore to Cortland; right on Cortland; continue to the top of the hill. Parking is metered on Cortland but free on side streets.

Free parking: If you park near Cortland, you’ll have a quarter-mile of an uphill walk before getting to the grassy hilltop.  There is a parking lot on the south side of the hill, at Anderson Street and Bernal Heights Boulevard. The parking lot on the north side, where I prefer to park and then walk in a large circle, is at Folsom Street and Bernal Heights Boulevard.

Junipero Serra Park: A Mycological Wonderland?

  

   

I’m thankful for large unruly parks in urban settings, but I had hoped this one was truly wild. “What is that buzzing?” I said and swiveled around. Ah, the freeway. Still, Junipero Serra Park was a fine place for a mile and a half loop, taking my husband, our baby, and myself from a soggy flatland to the peak of a hill with awesome views. We explored the Quail Trail Loop, wishing to see a variety of landscape, which we did: snaggled, twisted limbs of oak trees branching over the trail, patches of grassy meadows, a forest of blue gum eucalyptus, a copse of redwoods. Almost immediately we saw scads of mushrooms.

Marshall, like our good friend Brett who introduced us, loves mushrooms and the hunting of them. Old World blood flows in their veins, the sensibility of foraging and gathering, of sustaining themselves with things of the soil. And rainy season is a delight to hike in for these men, given the quantity of mushrooms.

“It’s a mycological wonderland!” Marshall exclaimed about Junipero Serra, grabbing the camera to take a macro shot of antennaed, alien spores swiveling off a pile of dog poo. Then he was off, pointing this way and that at the mushrooms he saw.

There were Amanita muscaria galore, those awesome fairytale mushrooms with large red caps and white splotches, poisonous for sure, but pretty cool to look at. As a high school student fascinated with the history and lore of psychedelics, I read that Siberians made a tea of this mushroom from which they'd hallucinate, then pee out most of the liquid, and then drink the pee, which apparently retains up to 80% of the psychoactive compounds. Who knows if this is a babushka tale or not. I didn't experiment, by the way, with Amanita muscaria, and don't recommend it.  

There were mushrooms that looked like turkey tails, others like shelves. Some were like rotten piles of blackened snot, others like tiny perfect brown mushrooms, another like a white penis rising out of the mulch. Another was like a big, ugly, exploded, orange colored football, twice the size of my shoe.

Marshall loves culinary mushrooms but doesn’t eat them without a friend around who really knows his stuff, yet he did jump off trail, baby bouncing in the carrier strapped to his chest as he sought proximity to the endless display of fungi.

“Please don’t touch that,” quickly became my mantra.

Junipero Serra Park is 108 acres and nestled so close to the 280 freeway that one can hear the persistent hum of cars and human activity for a ungoodly portion of a hike. It is awfully close to Millbrae and San Bruno, so you get the best view of the SFO airport you’ll ever have on terra firma. (“Airplanes are cool!” Marshall tells me as we gaze at a UNITED AIRLINES hangar in the distance) There weren’t too many people about, just a group of teens ready to get drunk and fall down the slides built into the hilltop. 

Virtues of Junipero Serra Park include a diversity of flora, as mentioned earlier, which in turn create homes for the bird population. We saw hawk and maybe vulture above, heard the jabber-jaw of blue scrub jays, and noted a flock of unidentified birds that looked like chubby mice with wings. Trees in the park include Monterey pine, Coast Live oak, Monterey cypress, madrone, laurel, and willow, which had bright yellow leaves for the season. Soap plant with heavy raindrops on their long leaves hugged the trail edges, and poison oak webbed through the bushes just off the path. We walked virtually alone. Two playgrounds look fabulous for kids with sturdy state-of-the-art structures.

It was a good jaunt. Worth the $5 parking? Sure, I’m definitely in support of California parks. And if you know your culinary mushrooms and can pick as you walk, a bag of chanterelles in the organic market costs a goodly amount more than five clams.

Victuals: No stores seen between freeway and park entrance. Pack it in and out.

Facilities: The loo is at the parking lot, and there’s even one at the playground near the peak.

 

Directions:

--Southbound on 280, exit Crystal Springs Road

--Right onto Crystal Springs Road

--Proceed a half mile to the entrance on the left

--Northbound on 280, exit Skyline Blvd 

--Right at the stoplight onto San Bruno Ave

--Right onto Crestmoor Dr. 

--Park entrance on the right

Last Hiked: Early January 2010

Sawyer Camp Trail

Just before New Year’s eve, my friend Brett and I, with baby Genevieve in sling, ended up at Sawyer Camp Trail alongside the Crystal Springs Reservoir in San Mateo County. It’s probably one of the easiest hikes as it is simply a meandering paved trail that runs alongside the water, one of the prettiest manmade lakes, made pretty by the simple, ironic fact that humans are not allowed to swim, boat, or bathe in its slate blue Hetch Hetchy waters.

If it weren’t for the cyclone fence topped with barbed wire, I could imagine great things, like being in the wilderness. (I wholeheartedly appreciate the lack of boat pollution, or the big summer bodies covered in coconut oil, flounder-swimming and making a racket, scaring the bejeezus out of fish, fowl, and doe.)

As it was we walked with other joggers and bikers and strollers of babies beside the rusty fence that kept us from the water and the thick forest along the western shores. Deer nibbled grass on both sides of the fence and looked askance at us like the trespassers we were.

            Sawyer Camp Trail is 6 miles long, and apparently was once the main wagon trail connecting San Francisco and Half Moon Bay before cars existed. A fellow named Leander Sawyer used to live along here back in the 1800s, and kept a little place with beds for rent and hot meals for wayfaring strangers heading north or south (he was a man of multiple talents, raising cattle and training circus horses on the side).

            One great aspect to this particular walk is the fact that Brett is in love with mushrooms. He was like a hog on the scent of a wily truffle, scrabbling through rusty barbed wire, jumping forward to grab a chanterelle that sadly turned out to be curled orange peels someone dropped. He knows his stuff, he read his mycological guides by David Arora, he attends fungus festivals, and one of his best friends has taught him much in the ways of mushrooms and the careful picking of them. (In fact, when Brett showed up at my house before the hike he gifted me a big bag of dirt-covered chanterelles that he found in the Oakland hills.)

Brett identified a plethora of milk caps alongside the Sawyer Camp Trail “but they were the poisonous ones,” he tells me. “You can tell this by breaking off a piece and seeing what color latex it exudes. The poisonous ones start by exuding a white latex, but this turns yellow after a few moments. I believe the common name is yellow-staining milk cap. The genus name for milk caps is Lactarius.” Sure enough beads of milk formed on the mushroom where the gills broke in Brett’s hands.

“I think we also saw a member of the Suillus genus (very spongy on the bottom with holes instead of gills),” Brett continues. “Most of them are also really slimy on top. We probably also saw a few russulas, but I don't remember the exact species.”

            It was a fun to walk after a recent rain with a mycological enthusiast; I see fallen leaves and big-eyed deer, the baby sees fuzzy shapes of bicyclists retreating into the distance, and Brett sees the fruits of the mycelium-webbed soil.

Brett, the baby, and I didn’t get too far, maybe a mile and a half out max, what with evening plans and an unavoidable late start to the day. Next time I return to Sawyer Camp I want to make the three miles to the Jepson Laurel, the biggest darn laurel tree in all California, I’m told. It’s a whopping 600 years old; it was a seedling when the Plague continued to ravage Europe. 

And if it’s a rainy, misty day, I just might keep a look out for mushrooms thanks to Brett's mycological teaching.

Driving Directions:

--Take 280 (aka “The World’s Most Beautiful Freeway”) and exit at Bunker Hill

--Go west and turn right at Skyline Boulevard

--Proceed over the Crystal Springs Dam

Victuals: There are no stores here. Pack it in and out.

Bathrooms:  Port-o-potties are located at the start and subsequent points on the trail.

Last Hiked: Late December 2009