San Francisco Days with an Airshow and a Redwood Hike

Fleet Week means the Blue Angels, and the best free seat was the Marina Green with a few thousand other people, a hot dog tent, and the Golden Gate for a backdrop. The Navy's squadron ran passes over the bay all afternoon, red and blue smoke streaming behind them, and on one pass four of them slid by the bridge tower low enough that they looked like they were threading the suspender cables. Half the crowd had their hands on their heads.

Downtown on another day: the big tree was up in Union Square, skaters circling the rink below the Dewey monument, the St. Francis behind it all.

The redwood hike was Muir Woods, across the same bridge the jets had been using as a landmark. The trail runs between split-rail fences with trunks on either side too big to take in from underneath, and ferns filling every gap the trees leave. A couple ahead of us on the path gave the only workable sense of scale, and even that stopped working past the first bend.