With nowhere to go on Christmas (and a lack of desire to celebrate it this year) my friend Jim and i decided to go hiking. He came over to the East Bay from SF and we decided on a place we have been wanting to check out for a while.
The Black Diamond Regional Preserve is just south of Antioch, CA and is known around here for being a former mining site of coal. Those days are gone and now it is a preserved area which is important in this heavily populated area.
These photos show how dry it is this year. Typically a December hike around here would find the hills completely carpeted in green, but this year we really haven't gotten much rain until March.
This egret may look out of place but we are only a few miles south of the Sacramento River which drains into the Bay.
Info about the mining town that once stood here.
Manzanita trees are common in the East Bay.
The cemetery where locals were buried when a town existed here.
