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| Santa Teresa County Park |
Trails used on this leg:
http://ridgetrail.org/penitencia-creek
http://ridgetrail.org/santa-teresa-county-park-and-los-alamitos-calero-creek-trail
Donna, Richard, Ket, Buddy, and I ambled over hills and along creeks today on a sunny day between rainstorms. As we finish up our beloved Ridge Trail project, Donna and I are scheduling in our walks as efficiently as we can, which means we have deviated slightly from our original clockwise plan. Today we checked off two non-contiguous maps from the Ridge Trail circuit, and wound up with yet another perfect day on the trail.
Penitencia Creek is a tributary of Coyote Creek, described in our last post, and was well known to the the mission residents in the 1700's, although the name itself might be from the 1800's. Here is an oak tree along the creek. It looks like it could be at least 300 years old.
Some of the Penitencia path is paved; all of it is urban.
Beautiful Santa Teresa County Park in San Jose was a surprise -- we had never seen it before, and it is instantly inviting with its long views and vast tracts of undeveloped open space. We watched a nearby coyote stalking something in the grass, and we climbed the park's Coyote Peak (1155').
We walked over lots of serpentine on the trail, and passed greywacke outcrops, such as this one on the Stile Ranch Trail. Greywacke is an indicator of submarine avalanches or turbidity currents; serpentine is an indicator of tectonic plate interactions along the edge of an ocean.
This is the view from the top of Stile Ranch Trail, looking southwest toward Rancho San Vicente, a future county park.
A few more photos of our scenic 10-mile day in the January sun are here:
https://photoenthusiast.smugmug.com/Other-1/Santa-Teresa/
Here are photos of the whole walk so far:
https://photoenthusiast.smugmug.com/Other-1
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