Date Added

Wednesday, June 15th, 2011

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California, Danielle Brown, Featured, Landscape, Photography, Plants, Uncategorized

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california California hills Danielle Brown green HDR hills landscape photography Windy Hill Open Space Preserve

Windy California Hills

Simon and I are always looking for places where we can go that also allow dogs. So I was super excited when I stumbled upon a handful of preserves a little north of us that are canine friendly! On Sunday we decided to explore Windy Hill Open Space Preserve. None of us had any idea of what we were in for. We started at the top of the beautiful California hills with panoramic views of San Francisco Bay (more on that tomorrow) and continued for a little over a mile on a nice open trail. Eventually the trail hit the forest and even though it hadn’t rained in awhile the canopy of trees had collected a lot of water from the fog, making the trail pretty muddy. I would have been fine with turning around at that point and calling it a day, but after looking at the map, Simon pointed out that a couple of trails meet back up where we started in about 7 or so miles. No biggie! And so it began through miles of squishy, muddy paths, but beautifully green forests, through to the bottom of the hills from which we started at the top. This shot was taken at the bottom of those hills, about half way through our journey. At this point we had been on a downward path for quite sometime and things were about to change. You see we needed to get back up to the tippy top of the highest hill in this shot. While the path downward was a gradual decline, the path upward was in short bursts of huge inclines. By the end even Bender was walking behind Simon – a behavior that has never been documented in the case of Bender. In the end we were all exhausted, but after it was all said and done, it was a really beautiful and rewarding hike, especially because we got ourselves some slurpees upon returning home!