Run to the Dry Hills

 Silly city folk in their garish retro-80s workout clothes, their walking as loud as their outfits. The volume of some small, unseen device turned way up, sharing the musical noise with unwilling listeners. Thankfully I, even riding up the hill, can quickly pass the two and their intrusion fades behind me, disappearing around the next turn.

Sometimes we can take for granted the things, people and places that are closest to us. It had been months since I last spun around the Claremont Hills Wilderness Park and, ignoring one glaring exception, I had forgotten just how tranquil and beautiful the hillsides and shallow canyons could be, even when dressed in their autumn dry as they were this late day in October. I had forgotten just how fortunate we are to live in a place where people have had the foresight to set aside such an expanse of open space to be enjoyed by everyone.

road through the pines

pastoral 

on the edge

feather

view to the mountains

great arms sweeping the ground

view to the valley

when we get a little moisture up there, the mottled trunks of some of the

eucalypts are going to be amazingly colorful

"I can imagine someone who found

these fields unbearable, who climbed

the hillside in the heat, cursing the dust...

An easterner especially, who would scorn

the meagerness of summer, the dry

twisted shapes of black elm,

scrub oak, and chaparral, a landscape

August has already drained of green...

And yet how gentle it seems to someone

raised in a landscape short of rain -

the skyline of a hill broken by no more

trees than one can count, the grass,

the empty sky, the wish for water."

(Dana Gioia - California Hills in August - between 2015 and 2019

Gioia was California's Poet Laureate)

Escape to the dry hills this weekend