Beautiful acorn, 2″ long, with a great cap.
On warm autumnal morning I went for a run around the trails at the American River down at Ancil Hoffman Park and the Effie Yeaw Nature Center. While it isn’t a challenging run, unless you decide to run across the cobbles by the river, there is enough diversity in landscape to make 2 or 3 loops and see something new each time.
Many trails interconnect and cut across meadows. I think I even ran on a few deer
One of my new deer friends I met.
trails. Either way, you can’t get lost and you never know what you are going to stumble across. On one pass I joined up with 3 deer out for their morning breakfast. They are obviously used to see people, maybe even runners, as they didn’t really spook. I felt as if I started munching on the grass around them they would have let me hang out with them all morning.
Like so many areas of the dry river channel along the American River, there have been several past
Gravel hopper box or did it have some other purpose?
inhabitants and operations. I stumbled upon a large steel hopper that I think was used in gravel mining. There were the remnants of an old road that went to the base of the hopper. The sides of the hopper were not welded, but fastened with nuts and bolts. That is usually an indication of construction before the 1920’s when arc welding started to become prevalent.
As I trekked the narrowing trail as it ascended the bluff, I came across a slab of concrete sticking out of the side of the bluff. I am thinking the concrete may have tumbled down from above and just happened to land up right. If you look closely at the flat rectangular slab, you will notice a variety of rock sizes in the mix. It looks as if they used the local cobble as the base in the form before the poured the concrete slurry.
Concrete slab in the bluff. Was this original or did it fall from above?
The morning I was there, Effie Yeaw was hosting training on how to gather acorns. I found a beautiful Valley Oak acorn right in the court yard. To think that in a good year one tree can produce 2,000 pounds of acorns, it is no wonder the Native Americans found a way to incorporate this nut into their diets. A couple hundred years ago, indigenous people were gathering acorns for food and now I am running around the trails trying to burn off too much food.
Whether you walk or run around the trails, you can spend hours talking to the deer, finding old historic junk, or think about the area as it might have been before all the suburban development.
