Yesterday's hike was in the Hood Mountain Regional Park. I think this was not only a pretty new trail, but a new ROAD to the trail. It cost $3.00 to park at the end of Los Alamos off Hwy 12 east of Kenwood. I call it a rip-off; you don't get anything but the right to park for your $3.00 - not even a rudimentary Xeroxed map (nor more than a few signposts on the trail, none showing distances in any direction).

But I don't know all of the numbers. Maybe regional parks have less funding and more overhead than state and national parks somehow.

From the parking lot, the Hood Mountain fire road dips to a wide creek (you could cross on strategically-placed boulders; I chose to take off shoes and socks and wade across wonderfully cold water), and then climb for four miles to the 2730' peak of Hood Mountain. It was about 80 degrees out, and while the fire road looked freshly-graded and was graciously leveled off for at least a short walk after each series of climbs, it was a long, hard grind to the top, with not a lot to look at in the process (unless you are fond of piles of chopped-down dead manzanita on either side of your hiking paths). The summit was a distinct anti-climax, as the peak was actually a crater surrounded by (said manzanita and other) trees, with almost no view of surrounding country. However, I had noticed something called "Gunsight Rock" on the map in the parking lot - anything with that kind of colorful name is bound to be SOME kind of attraction, no? It was about a quarter-mile past the summit.

Loathe to head downhill on the opposite side of the mountain, but wanting a reason to have hiked this far, we chanced it, and it was well worth the extra hike. Perched high on the side of a very steep cliff, Gunsight Rock is actually a pile of rocks which happen to be arranged like a certain type of gun sight - two similar-sized cubic blocks atop a larger flat block with about five feet of space between for "sighting" the entire Sonoma Valley and, for the brave soul who climbs the left or right block (I don't "do" heights like that, but was able to inch up the left rock enough to look around while Drew sat easily atop the rock on the right), a sweeping 300-degree view. Though there was a lot of haze, we could even see Mt. Tamalpais way off in the distance, right behind Sonoma Mountain.