Found And Lost In Sycamore Grove

This is a lost and found story but not the kind that you might think of. It’s more a ‘found and lost one’ — a post about some manmade art and natural art that I found during my hikes in Sycamore Grove Park in Livermore, California. And we’ll leave the ‘lost’ part for later.

Let’s look at the finds and let’s start at the very beginning. At the park entrance, and just by the parking lot of Sycamore Grove, I found an eye-catching box (when I was first there). Painted in green, it turned out to be a donation box and it also serves as a canvas. On it were small figures of birds and animals.

On the donation box, I spotted a squirrel, butterflies, a weasel, a small and a big bird, some deer, a mountain lion, a bobcat, a snake et al. I’m guessing these are critters of the East Bay region of the San Francisco Bay Area.

I’d like to link this part of the post to Monday Murals on Colorful World.

If you’d like to see more of my Sycamore-Grove-finds, read on —

Eye-catching Trees

As we went into the park, I found that there was more art in there, these, in the form of trees. I’m not too sure about what trees these are (I’m guessing that Tree 2 and Tree 3 here are American Sycamores) but I couldn’t help taking pictures of them. Look at these natural sculptures:

Would you know what these trees are? I’d love to learn about them. If you have any information about them, please let me know in the comments.

And this part of the post, I’d like to link to Thursday Tree Love.

Sycamore Grove Park

Sycamore Grove lies in the southern part of the city of Livermore and just northeast of the more famous Del Valle Regional Park (and lake). It’s a lovely green area of close to 850 acres with several trails in it. You should be able to find easy and moderate trails within it. I’ve been in the park two times and both times, it was in the morning and both times there wasn’t a lot of traffic on the trails. And both times were very memorable. I think I’ll be returning there and will be using my maps the next time I’m there.

The two times that I was in Sycamore, I was there with friends. The first time we were there, we got onto a trail, took some missteps and kind of lost our way. As such, we couldn’t complete the loop we were on. To be more precise, we’d strayed away from the trail and after a bit of fumbling around (and taking a detour to a vista point), managed to eventually retrace our steps. It turned into an out-and-back hike, a fun one at that! We were there for some girl time in the Californian outdoors and that we got!

The second time, there were just three of us, and we had actually ended up there by accident. We were hiking in another area not far from this park and just decided to venture further out because we felt we needed to walk more that day. We went from trail to trail, and found ourselves in a part of Sycamore Grove. We found a trail in the park that seemed to run parallel to a road. The trail seemed to go on and on and then at one point, it seemed to leave the roadside and go further into the park but we had planned to follow the road and get on to it when there was an opening in the fencing. That way, we could loop back to where we’d parked. Seeing that there was no way to leave the trail and get onto the road as a couple of exits from the park were closed off, we finally decided to jump over a gate and hike on the road. We ended up hiking more than 2 times the distance we normally did but it was fun getting lost and finding our way out of the park and back to the car.

Two times — lost in the same park! 😁 It’s time to go back and break that jinx. However, this time, I think I’ll use my favorite trail map app. We’ll still have fun though (of the regular type, I hope).

Do you have interesting stories like this from the trails?

If like hiking and you’d like to make hiking a part of your week, try doing 52 hikes ie. a hike a week for a whole starting, now. You can sign up here 52 Hike Challenge.

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from the Livermore Area
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