Welcome back to a monthly column focused on local day hiking destinations, that– with a little imagination– will take you back in time to when our local Native Americans lived in a garden of Eden we now call home. I hope you will have fun exploring, discovering, educating others and protecting our Native Village sites. […]
Hiking Back in Time: Sogorea Te
Welcome to my first monthly column focused on local day hiking destinations, that with a little imagination, will take you back in time to when our local Native Americans lived in a garden of Eden we now call home. My friends and I grew up hiking the hills around Orinda, Moraga and Mt Diablo. Dad […]
A Different Drummer: Leg two of seniors hiking in Yosemite
This story picks up in Yosemite on the banks of a lake in the Ten Lakes Region 6.5 miles from Tioga Pass Road. I was out there with Susan and fellow Benicia senior retirees Bud Donaldson, Carl Kittrell, and Deb Kittrell. That was the evening of our first full day of primitive living. We had […]
A Different Drummer: First leg of a Yosemite hike for the aged
Five of us in our 60s hiked the Yosemite backcountry and lived. I want to thank my hiking companions for their perseverance as I hiked with healed back injuries, a flat foot, and diastasis recti requiring me to wear a truss to hold in my gut in: my lovely wife Susan with her sciatica and […]
A Different Drummer: Hiking in preparation
A few of us in our 60s are intending a four-day hike to 9,700 feet in the Yosemite backcountry to reach Ten Lakes. It’s coming up soon. To build stamina, we and the Kittrells drove to Yosemite during the Detwiler Fire to take a couple practice hikes. We didn’t know about the fire, but a […]
A Different Drummer: A new old experience
If you’ve been reading this column weekly for 32 years, wow, and you know that I was once a backpacking mountain man. For 15 years I hiked teenagers over 100s of miles of California wilderness up to 10,000 feet and as low as 140 feet underground in caves. I’ve been to the top of Half […]
Exploring Benicia’s open spaces
By Kevin Nelson Special to the Herald Benicia is a port city, its identity and history defined by water. But it is also a city of hills, and the parks and open spaces in the hills provide rich recreational opportunities for hikers, families with strollers, dog-walkers, bicyclists, skateboarders and even fishermen. One of the best […]