San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Twin Peaks trek starts year on high point
April is the cruelest month, the poet said, but I think January is the longest. The splendid holidays, are over and it is a long wait to springtime. All that is left to while away the January days are football and politics. Both are brutal.
Nonetheless, we start the month in optimism, which quickly fizzles out in reality. Mark Twain said it best: “Now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions,” he wrote. “Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual.”
Ignoring the sage advice, I have resolved to burn off the evidence of holiday feasts by exercising. I began with a resolute walk to start the year off properly. The destination: the top of Twin Peaks, which is pretty much the geographical center of San Francisco.
I headed down from the family manse on the slopes of Bernal Heights, across Mission Street and up 30th Street about a mile to where 30th dead-ends at the bottom of Billy Goat Hill.
This is a small park — only 3.67 acres — with a short trail leading to a viewpoint graced by a mighty tree where a kind of rope swing is attached. Brave souls can swing on it, out over the city, like Tarzan. Back in the good old days the space was a dump, where citizens disposed of old water heaters and trash. Now it’s been turned into a city park. Not all change is bad.
Upward ho, on a walk of discovery. At the top of Billy Goat Hill, a new foot trail leads up again through a mini urban forest to Walter Haas Playground, which has swings, a dog park and even grander views. But you ain’t seen nothing yet.
I turned right, walking along Diamond Heights Boulevard to Portola Drive, then a short way westward to Twin Peaks Boulevard. There’s a trail on the side of the road, then some steep steps, a pause, then more steps that lead to the top of the southernmost point of the twin peaks.
The last bit is steep — nine or 10 wooden steps. It’s like coming to the top of a very small mountain. It’s not Mount Whitney, or even Tamalpais, but Twin Peaks has that top-of-the-world feel.
San Francisco is at your feet in all its glittering splendor — tall buildings, the bay, the bridges, the hills beyond, Mount Diablo, like a miniature alp to the east, Mount Tamalpais in its feline splendor to the north.
It was mostly clear, a bit of haze in the air, like leftovers from years past. The afternoon sun gave the Pacific Ocean a coppery glow.
It was easy to see Southeast Farallon Island on the horizon with its high peak and lighthouse. And farther north, with binoculars, one could see two or three rocky islands, the rarely glimpsed North Farallones.
To the south and southeast, the cities of the Peninsula and the dark Santa Cruz Mountains, and across the south side of the bay, Mission Peak and Mount Hamilton.
In the very far distance to the south were some big buildings clustered together, Silicon Valley, probably, maybe San Jose. Or Oz.
The top of the twin peaks was crowded — maybe 20 people on the southern peak, more on the north peak. Most seemed to have foreign accents: I caught a bit of India, a bit of Japan, a bit of China.
Bob Weinstock. who lives in the Lower Haight, is a Twin Peaks regular. “I come up here all the time,” he said. “It only takes me 30 minutes from my house. You know, it’s different up here every time. I never get tired of it.”
The peaks are green now, but they turn brown in the first week of May.
You can actually see the weather change by looking up Market Street, most any day. In summer, the fog rolls over Twin Peaks like gray ocean waves. In the stormy days of winter, people in the eastern half of the city can see the rain coming down the slopes of Twin Peaks, a storm made visible.
There are some surprises on the peaks. One is that the reddish rock underfoot is radiolarian chert, formed from the shells of a tiny marine plankton called radiolaria and deposited when what is now the Bay Area was deep below an ancient ocean millions of years ago. Climate change is not new.
Another surprise is that each of the twin peaks has a name. The northern peak is Eureka, the southern peak is called Noe. There is a geological survey marker on the south peak, marking the elevation at 922 feet, only 6 feet lower than Mount Davidson, the tallest of the city’s many hills.
Twin Peaks has a rarity, too — the Mission blue butterfly, found in only a few places in the world. The Mission blue population on Twin Peaks nearly died out during the wet winter of 1998, but naturalists are attempting to bring the butterflies back to this part of the city.
Right now, they are in their caterpillar stage. They emerge in the spring to fly about and live for only a week.
Another lesson from the turn of the year: Time flies faster than a New Year’s resolution.
Carl Nolte is a San Francisco Chronicle columnist. His column appears every Sunday. Email: cnolte@sfchronicle. com Twitter: @carlnoltesf