Ring Mountain Hike

This weekend was bright, breezy, and beautiful - a nice contrast to the usual fog and cold.  After a relaxing day of shopping for necessaries (and birthday presents for all those September-born friends and family!), we decided to go for a hike in Marin County on Sunday.  We picked an "Easy/Moderate"-designated 4.5 mile hike out of our trusty Bay Area hikes guidebook.  The Phyllis Ellman/ Loop Trail traverses Ring Mountain in the town of Corte Madera.  It is a spectacular place surrounded on both sides by glistening expanses of sea dotted with islands large and small, the port of Tiburon bristling with sailboats below, and the sun-baked skyline of San Francisco far away in the distance.  My camera ran out of batteries and Todd's was missing it's memory stick, so I found some great photos of our hike on the web!

The beginning of the trail: live oaks, and plank bridges over trickling streams.

At the top of Ring Mountain, there are several huge boulders, some of which have petroglyphs on them from the Native Americans that lived in the area over 3,000 years ago.  We saw some amateur mountain climbers practicing on a few of the rocks :-)
What's wonderful about Ring Mountain for two (let's face it) directionally-challenged people like us is that except for a few groves of oaks, the whole expanse of the preserve is just low, honey-colored grass, making it very difficult to get lost (and therefore very difficult to have another death-defying experience - as on our last hiking excursion!).
It was such a magnificent feeling walking together, not saying much, holding hands and feeling the wind blow through us.  There were some pretty challenging uphills but the payoffs at the top were great.  On one summit, we could see the low-slung clouds on the Golden Gate Bridge in the distance and it felt like we were looking down from Everest on the Himalayas (albeit much warmer...).

Once the hike was finished, we drove to Sausalito and had a lovely eggs benedict lunch at the nautically-themed Winship Tavern.  We wandered around the town, enjoyed the rest of the afternoon, and got home in time to unwind as the weekend came to an end and another week opened up  before us.