The Prettiest Day in San Francisco

Now that the spell of Spring-in-January weather seems over, I can post this without jinxing it… I wanted to talk about the 17th of January. The day dawned bright and blue, and  in the afternoon, I went out to Glen Canyon.

Most of the year, it’s dry and brown, punctuated with hillside bushes and rock formations. Not now. The winter’s rain has transformed it to a vivid green.

The sun slanted through the trees. A few people sat around, gazing at the beauty of the place, the sea of eucalyptus trees below.

And then the fog started to roll in, rather like the Sandburg poem. The light softened, became pinker. The view through the trees took on a magical tint, like a portal to a fantastical world.

I drove home via Twin Peaks,  and this was the view:

And this was the view from the other side…

It may have been the prettiest day of my life (which has encompassed many pretty days in many pretty places). Of course the photographs don’t begin to do it justice.

But it wasn’t just me. A few days later, I mentioned it to a friend. “You’re telling me!” she said. She’d been driving to Cavallo Point that evening, and behind her saw San Francisco under the fog. “I couldn’t sleep that night. The intense beauty of that image…” She sighed.