Hamms Gulch Hack Job

First of all, congratulations to the Stanford Women’s Basketball Team who upset UConn to reach the title game in the NCAA tournament! Go Cardinal!!!

I ran today at Windy Hill Open Space Preserve and the ascent up Razorback Ridge trail was great as usual. However, the descent down Hamms Gulch had an unpleasant surprise. Apparently the park has decided to take water drainage measures to the extreme and literally bulldozed at least 50 giant troughs throughout the trail. For the downhill runner, this amounts to 50+ speed bumps that totally upset the rhythm and really become annoying about midway down the trail. I appreciate the park’s maintenance of trails, but this seemed excessive and overkill. After all, the Windy Hill area is not a rainforest and is not even one of the wetter spots on the Peninsula. Moreover, the trail before the bulldozing was not in bad shape and it didn’t seem like water runoff on the trail was ever a problem. In fact, I often chose to run Windy Hill after rains because it never got that muddy. I guess I will have to build in a couple more minutes for the descent or instead run up Hamms Gulch (as opposed to down) so the troughs will have less of an impact. The run itself was fun with 10.5 miles covered over 72 minutes.