Purisima Creek Redwoods Open Space Preserve

 Two weeks ago, it was rainy weather at Saturday, so I could not go outside for hike, but the following day looked fine as far as I could see around the area where I am living. When I look at sky, it was totally fine weather, so I could not help but go for hike at new place immediately. Every weekend, I try to walk at new place to explore the Santa Cruz mountain running from south of SF to Santa Cruz. This time was Purisima Creek Redwoods open space which is close to Half Moon Bay. There are manly two gates available. One is at the high way 35, in other words, Skyline blvd. Another is located at side of Half Moon Bay. I, off course, headed for the closest gate at the highway 35 from the distance point of view. I took highway 280 at first, but I came to have bad feeling as I approached to the destination. It obviously looked foggy along a ridge of  the mountain. However I still wanted to go there to see what was going on actually while thinking that I never know until I get there because this open space is at other side of mountain. When I actually got there, It was slight foggy as less as sun shine can come through fog. So I decided to try this trail with some expectation that fog goes away gradually as I walk. As I mentioned before, my start point was at the highway 35, and my plan was that I go from the start point to the gate of other side which is a middle point and return point coincidentally, and come back to the start point by a different trail clockwise. I was noticing soon that it was difficult to walk that day because ground was really mad due to the rain of the previous day, but I could manage to do that by trying to step one by one on less mad ground. On the way to the middle point, it is downhill all the way from 2000 feet to 500 feet, which shows me flat way and steep way. Especially at this day, it was really difficult to walk at steep down hill because it was easy to slip, so I had to pay attention to that one step by one step. On the way, surprisingly, I could see a banana slug at first time which is unique  at North America pacific coast. This is large type of slug, and the color is really bright yellow which is the reason why it is called banana and also I could fined easily in the forest. The size of which I saw was amazingly more than 20 cm. On the return path, as you can know easily, it is obviously uphill all the way. At this time, it was already 4pm, and it was dark due to fog, which was against my expectation. So I tried to walk briskly to get back earlier while fearing of darkness even though it was really hard to go up along steep uphill. On the middle of way, suddenly, I could hear something approach us with some noise. At first I could not figure out what it was and I was really afraid to come across dangerous animals in the slight darkness due to fog. I finally recognized that they were a white and a black big dogs which were as big as their face is close to my waist and turned to be Labrador retriever later. At first, I was scared of those dog, but they were surprisingly friend with me by wagging their tail. A problem was that my wife is really scared of a dog because she has a trauma before. She actually saw her friend bit by a dog in front of her. So she still have such fear in her mind. Therefore what I did at that time was to attract dogs` attention to me and let her walk 3 meter behind me. As I walked by doing so, I say a guy come from the opposite direction, and I asked these dogs were his, but his answer was no. According to him, they were following him from the gate which were heading for. He noticed my wife was scared and kindly took them with him by calling "Common guys !"

Finally we got back to the gate which was starting point, and time was almost 5:30pm, and it was really dark. As far as dogs are concerned, I do not know why they were there. I figured out later that dogs are prohibited at the open space, so I guess that someone intentionally left them here because of some reasons.

Unexpected thing is that my wife was scared of a dog, but dogs I came across was friendly to us. It seemed so impressive to her, and she is starting to say finally that she wants to have a dog. For the time being, she has nothing special to do at weekdays, so it is good idea to have a dog for her, but we have not had a dog, so we definitely need to check and know a lot of necessary things.