Knob Hill - Uvas Canyon

No. of days: ½ day

Difficulty: Easy

Distance: 4.4miles (Out and back)

Trail: Uvas Canyon County Park -> Knibb knob Trail -> Summit Rd -> knibb Knob Trail -> Knob Trail -> Knob Hill -> Knob Trail -> knibb Knob Trail -> Uvas Canyon County Park parking.

(Original plan: Out and back hike to Loma Prieta- knibb Knob Trail -> Summit Rd -> Avenue -> Loma Prieta)

Indian experience: book lunch at the Hanuman temple on summit road which is about 2 miles left from the summit road and knibb knob trail intersection when coming from the knibb knob trail.

So temple + lunch at the top :)

(From left: Tissa, Pradeep, Srinath, Nilofar, Vandana, Vijaya, Keerthi, Pedro, Rajath, Nileema, Shyam, Praveen). Missing: John and I. I'm just guessing the spellings and the names :-D

Picasa web album link: here

After a lot of planning and not having met Tissa and the group for a while, I was looking forward to this hike. A week or two ago right after Mt. Manuel hike, I suffered a strange type of sports injury (ITBS) to the right knee which brought about decline in my physical activity over the weeks. Having given my leg about a week’s rest, I thought I was ready but the reality was far from it. Before diving straight to the end, lets start from the beginning and go along with the treklog :-D

My roommates also decided to join me on this hike so we were up by 6:00am and reached Cisco parking lot at 7:19am (4 minutes off target time). It was a delight for me to meet the group – Tissa, Srinath, Pradeep, Vijaya, Keerthi and others. A quick chat to get to speed and we were all set to go. Just when we were about to leave, Nileema and Praveen arrived as well. We exchanged directions and sped out of parking lot (Bldg. 6) towards the Trailhead at Uvas Canyon County Park (Croy Rd). There wasn’t a lot of traffic southbound on US-101. We reached the parking lot at 8:15am. Adventure is at the core of any outdoor activity and as the trend goes the first adventure for this hike was that the gate to the county park was locked. Upon confirming that the gate should indeed be open by 8:00am, Keerthi luckily was able to call 911. A ranger was immediately sent to assist us with the entry. It was a beautiful 10-minute wait in which people quite got to know each other and I took that time to stretch my leg before the hike.

We started the hike at 8:50am after wandering around for a while trying to figure out where the trailhead was. I immediately slowed down as a precaution. I did not want to add stress to my leg. We slowly moved up. Keerthi was himself trying to help others motivating all of us to move on faster. Tissa, Srinath, Pradeep, Nileema and others had already moved ahead quite swiftly. At one point there was even a human train chain. It was pretty amusing me to. Keerthi next time I want to be a part of the chain :-D. I spent a lot of time resting, capturing the panoramic views that filled both my mind and physical essence with energy and freshness. By 9:15am we were high enough for good long distance views of the mystic clouds, mountains and the void. The trail climbs quite steeply all the way to the end hitting Summit Rd. It’s a 2-mile trail and it took us some time to go up the hill.

We reached the intersection after 1.6miles from where one trail goes to Knob Hill (0.2miles) and the other to Summit Rd (0.4miles). Since Tissa and the others were waiting there, I wanted to reach Summit Rd before turning back. I did not want to add more injury to my leg. We reached Summit Rd at 10:20am. It was time for a group picture since I decided to head back down. We captured a picture or two and Rajath, Shyam and I bid adieu to the group started our journey down. We reached Knob Hill and spent a couple of minutes there before heading down. We ran into John who said would be going up and catching up with the group. After that the journey down was a very painful one for me. My leg gave in again to the pain and I literally had to walk down in reverse. (Someone who saw me would think why I was moving down even though I was walking up :-D). So it was pretty slow. We reached the parking lot at little after 12pm. Oh and yeah, I did forget to mention that I forgot my water bottle up at Summit Road. Figure that!! :-D Hope John got it back for me ;-)