Shoreline Park to Polehenge

SUMMARY: Wednesday night hike with the Sierra Club.

Went out to Shoreline Park in Mountain View, starting at the north end of San Antonio Road. A chilly wind encouraged us all to bundle up, but the amazing patterns and colors of the clouds made up for it. Plus we got in a good, really brisk 5.2 mile conditioning hike among the marshes and sloughs and levees at the south end of San Francisco Bay.

Some highlights:

At the entrance, native flower shrubs were happily flowering, and this bee took advantage of this ceanothus right in public.

I looked up the park online and they asked that "domestic animals" be left at home, but in fact they're allowed on the main road, which is where we hiked. Here these hikers come past an art installation--meaning the birds, not the poop-bag dispenser.

I kept falling behind to take photos. Amazing sky.

Loved how the pattern in the mud flats was the same as that in the sky.

At the far end of our out-and-back hike, we crossed into Byxbee Park, where we encountered the Pole Field. You might or might not care for this kind of art ("environmental art"), but when rays of sun shot under the clouds and hit the Sierra Clubbers passing among the poles, it seemed mystical.

Here's what it's like to walk through the Pole Field.

On the way back, the sun behind us under the cloud cover, I couldn't resist this shot--the long shadows, the golden glow, the high wind-blown waves on the water, the white towers and Moffett Field lit up in the background... oh, wait, you can see all that just by looking at the photo.

All thirty photos, with captions, are on my photo site.