Briones 5-26-14

Starting up Pereira Trail

It's Memorial Day, and Maureen is going for her weekly horseback riding lesson. She suggests that I could go along and do some hiking while she rides. Her teacher, Jessica, recently moved to a ranch on Bear Creek Road near Briones Regional Park. Sounds like a good idea to me, but since her lesson lasts an hour, it would have to be a relatively short hike. Looking at the map, I noticed that the park has expanded west a bit sometime in the last 30 years and there are some trails I haven't been on yet.

I start off by finding a gate about a half mile north of the Bear Creek Entrance and park on the road shoulder. The gate is locked and there are no signs indicating that this is a legitimate entrance to the park, but I climb over the gate anyway and start up the Deer Creek Trail. The hills have just turned from green to golden in the last week or two, so there are still a few nice green patches. It is an easy walk up this little canyon, and soon I come to a trail junction. I turn left on the Pereira Trail. A right turn would have been on the Briones Crest Trail which circles the whole park. I'm soon on a ridge heading south again. I come to a trail branching right to the Ivan Dickson Memorial. I follow it to the next little hilltop where I can see that it goes down the hill a bit to some kind of stone monument. Since I have no idea who Ivan Dickson was, I didn't bother going all the way down to it. When I got home, I looked it up and found that he was a member of the Berkeley Hiking Club who cared a lot about parks and trails, and left the park district funds to establish a volunteer trail maintenance program, which has continued since his death in 1993. Sounds interesting, and maybe I'll check it out. I continued down the ridge to complete my loop, and almost to the road walked around a little pond with lots of bullfrogs jumping into the water ahead of me.

It was a nice little hike, although I would have liked to go further, but I didn't want to keep Maureen waiting.

2.0 miles, 500 ft. climb