98/365: Solitude and Sprawl

98/365: Solitude and Sprawl, a photo by doglington on Flickr.

Another hike with my Meetup group and another instance of the duality of San Jose. While it seems like the most sprawling mass of suburbia outside of LA, San Jose is surrounded very closely by open spaces, mountains and county parks where you can completely forget urban life. Well, some of the parks do that. This particular one, Santa Teresa County Park, had very few trails and areas that didn't include views of massing suburbia, large electrical towers and IBM facilities (their Almaden campus is nearby). However, it does has miles of trails that you can share with turkeys, bobcats, coyotes and deer about 1 mile from the nearest strip mall. It's the last vestige of one of Jose Bernal's land grants -- Bernal being one of the key members of the De Anza Expedition that marched up the coast of California in 1774 to claim the land for the King of Spain and eventually found San Francisco.