This is the Oakland Hills looking toward the Bay Bridge. Oakland Hills is a beautiful spot in the Bay Area, wild, remote, mysterious…prone to devastating fire tornados (fingers crossed, I feel Santa Ana winds coming on - wikipedia gets their info wrong on this, it’s still colloquially called Santa Ana winds up here not Diabolo). In 1991 a really bad fire killed a bunch of people and burned the entire place to the ground. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oakland_… Seems to be a feature of canyon living in California. I always wonder about the terrain up here, these winding twisty canyons like in Oakland Hills are very difficult to travel through on a good day, much less if you’re trying to escape a raging inferno. The Napa guys had a hard enough time making it out of the path of that big fire a year ago, and they’re mostly on much much better ground to escape. Yet Oakland Hills building permits continue to be issued and the residents are really bad at keeping fire hazards away from their house, and a simple drive down those winding roads back into the hills is enough to show that very clearly. It's a tough battle against those trees.

Anyhow, it’s a haven for UC Berkeley professors, complete with nice golf courses and some weird stuff like a Mormon temple which was, far as I can tell, deliberately built on top of the Hayward fault. Why would anyone do that? The Oakland zoo is up there too. There’s lots of bike accidents, like you might expect when you combine professors and windy narrow forested roads. (n.b. stop signs are for everyone) The local cemetery has a bunch of people buried in pyramids: Bill Gwin state senator who tried to duel a congressman in Paris but ended up shooting a donkey instead. COG Miller of PG&E, who i’m sure I’ve mentioned before and his wife Einnem (Eminem- says my brain), and Lewis Bradbury, a millionaire goldminer who married his parlormaid (paging Arnold). It’s a great place to visit, have a picnic, enjoy the bay breezes, but plan your trip to not occur during fire season. And it’s always fire season. Nice place, but wouldn’t want to live there.

Eynhallow has really pristinely trimmed trees. And stuff.