Yesterday, Satise and I hiked around the Sibley Volcanic Regional Preserve, one of the many amazing local parks in the East Bay. It was such a lovely hike that included two amazing labyrinths.
I knew it was going to be a great day when we encountered this sign welcoming us to the park:
Robert Sibley Regional Volcanic Preserve is not a brand of celebrity hot pepper jelly. It is a bastion of basalt and a collection of crusher rock and “road metal.”
It is a machined, blasted, and hand-made landscape.
It is a locale of leveled, pitted, loose rock debris, of promontories bristling with antennae, and a collection of exotics sheltering an understory of indigenous plants.
It is a fine place to see a single Golden Eagle move beneath a wheeling flock of Turkey Vultures or to watch a mating pair of Red-Tailed Hawks tumble from the blue sky.
In short, it’s a fascinating place to see what happens where the city comes slamming into the countryside, where the new elbows-out the old, where remote geologic events drive present land uses and where the ageless rhythms of life persist despite it all.
Ironically, this plundered landscape is named for Robert Sibley, a life-long protector of open space and an early director of the East Bay Regional Park District.
How amazing is that? Whoever wrote this text went way harder than they had to.
I had to make a video of the text, using the Descript captioning tool.