Looking north-east from Mt. Umunhum. San Jose directly ahead with the San Francisco Bay off to the left.
View from Mt. Umunhum
East Williams Street Murals
Uvas Reservoir
This photo was taken from “inside” the Uvas Reservoir just before last week’s rain. many things are interesting about this and about the time spent standing “in” there, thinking. One neat thing about this was this tree stump. The dam was built in 1957 and this tree has presumably been submerged ever since. Or, at least, most of the time ever since. Maybe it was exposed in other droughts? Certainly it was submerged every time I had happened to ever visit the reservoir here in the Santa Clara County Park. Either way, this tree was once a tree along Uvas Creek before there was a reservoir about it. This tree has been sitting under water for most of 64 years, brushing up against fish and snails and water molecules for decades.
Sunflowers
The sunflower stocks have since dried and are now removed from the garden bed, breaking down in the mulch pile. The seeds have all gone to feed the local squirrel. That was not originally the plan, though it worked out just fine that way. Looking back over these photos from June before the seeds developed.
Sanctuary Sculpture
“Sanctuary” is a 65 foot tall sculpture by artist Bruce Beasley (http://brucebeasley.com/) located at the entrance of the Santa Clara Valley Medical Center in San Jose. It is huge. You get to walk under it by a path and besides looking for different ways that the giant rings play as I walked through I kept getting this ideas of motion imposed on my mind with flashes of the time/space traveling machine from the movie “Contact.”
Not captured in these photos which look east towards the street entrance to the hospital are the buildings that form a “U” around the sculpture and its park like settings around the north, west, and south sides of the art. These are hospital rooms that look out onto this beautiful scene called “Sanctuary.”
New Mural on New Construction
Looking forward to walking up close when this area is opened. What is it about these colors and patterns that makes them so attractive?
RBG on a Beautiful Day
Mural by artist and scientist Chuba Oyolu (https://chubaoyolu.org/about/).
Pinnacles National Park
Do you see that large exposed rock? Once upon a time, nearly 23 million years ago, that was a lava flow. A whole lot of hot lava came flowing out of volcanos that happened to be situated on a fault, a crack in the Earth’s crust, where the west side of the fault moved north slowly but surely in fits and starts punctuated by earthquakes in California. Today, this now solid rock is in northern California, less than 90 miles by car south of San Jose. The volcanoes themselves, mountains made of softer rock, have eroded away leaving these giant hardened and ancient lava flows to stand out and be explored and appreciated. What about the rest of the volcano flows that happened to land on the east side of that fault millions of years ago? Well, those hardened flows are in southern California, 195 miles away near Los Angeles.
Yes, that giant rock pictured, and there is a WHOLE lot more not pictured – the lava flow area was huge from several volcanos, has traveled north 195 miles since it formed from cooling lava, along with much of coastal California. I told my children that in a few million years more, it will only take a couple of minutes to drive to Pinnacles National Park from San Jose.
Mural at the Pink Elephant Market
Ok, it’s no longer called the Pink Elephant. Though one of the Pink Elephant signs is still up, the rest of the signs are replaced with the new market’s name. There is a Pink Elephant Bakery still in business across the street. This grocery store is where my grandpa worked when I was little. Now, the side of the grocery store has this “Zona Rosa” mural on it by artist Aaron De La Cruz. (https://www.aarondelacruz.com/#/works)
Pacheco State Park
