It's only natural.

Daniel and I parted ways on day six, he for a seven-hour marathon down the 5 and me for my friend Steph's and a three-week bio class at her local community college.



The class is nature study and conservation, so we take multiple field trips. Our first was to Huckleberry Regional Preserve, a little place ensconced in the hills behind Berkeley and Oakland. We saw legions of bay laurels lining the ravine, trees that will fall over and yet continue to sprout new branches out of the horizontal trunk.



We hiked up to a higher level in the forest, into the manzanita scrub. This is alameda manzanita.



The view. When Steph first suggested I come take the class with her, I couldn't believe that it was true. A four-unit biology class with a lab that would fulfill my PLNU science requirement and was only three weeks long? How could such a thing be? And yet it was.



Our second trip took us to Mt. Diablo State Park. We saw lots of the aptly named rattlesnake grass.



Little mariposa lilies dotted the path.



The oak woodlands again gave way to manzanita scrub.



Chaparral peas blooomed in bunches.



We learned to distinguish between common manzanita and Mt. Diablo manzanita, a species that only grows in this area.



Grey pines made their ghostly coniferous presence. Each day in the class is roughly equivalent to a week (lasting from 9 am to 4 pm). Week one was mostly classroom work, but week two is a five-day trip to the Sierra Nevada.