Welcome!
Welcome!
Who I am:
My wife, Eleanor and I have lived in San Jose since 1963. We have three children, Melanie C.. Hildebrand, Peggy Smith and Mary Elsten. In addition we are proud to have five grandchildren.
I worked for IBM in San Jose for 38 years, finally fully retiring in
June 2001.
A long term project several of us at Almaden Research Center have
especially enjoyed is the Bluebird Trail we established almost 15 years
ago. We currently have about 70 boxes in a variety of environments. A
map of the box locations is in Almaden
Bluebird Trail.
More that 35 years ago I discovered H. W. Coe State Park and for many years spent most
of my
weekends there.. The park is the states second largest and has
grown many fold in 20 years. It is unique in being the largest Oak
Savannah Woodland area left preserved in California. There are 350
miles
of roads and trails and 100+ square miles of land to wander at your
leisure.
In September 2007 the Lick Fire burned over 47,000 acres,
mostly in Coe State Park. This
map shows very graphicly how
much burned. These larger maps (1) (2) show more detail. All
maps copyright by the Pine Ridge Association.
For more than 20 years, I was member of the Trails Advisory Committee for Coe Park which helps the State Park Department plan and implement a trail system. I am one of the founders of the Pine Ridge Association at Coe Park, the cooperative association that provides visitor services in education and interpretive activities.
My long term hobby is photography, both still and video.A long time
project is a CD-ROM of my collection of Wildflowers
of Coe State Park. This CDROM is on sale at the Coe
Park Bookstore. For the last couple of years, I have been adding new
flowers for the second version. The images I collected so far are at Ver200-cd. More recently, I completd a
two volume of wildflowers on display at park headquarters.
A recent project with two friends, Bill Levey and Bob Patrie is to
make improved maps of Coe State Park.
The map has been finished, printed and is on sale at the Coe State
Park Bookstore. Currently we are working on relocating as many
Public Land Survey locations as we can.
After watching digital photography develop for several years, I
recently acquired a digital camera and have been entranced with the
results. As I have been a long time Nikon user, after much research I
decided on a Nikon D100 so I could use my lenses I have become familiar
with. The fact that that the D100 is also a true SLR and has film like
resolution were further inducements. The most unexpected result is that
being to immediately view the results has led me into experiments where
I can verify and redo to achieve the image I want. These are some scenes from a couple of my favorite
places to wander..
In summer 2003, El and I took a trip to Yosemite. There I took many
photos and the best are in my Yosemite
album.
This year, 2005, we went to Death Valley for the
best wildflower season in 50 years. We weren't disappointed.
My latest adventure is using a GPS receicever to geocode image
files and then creating a Google Earth file to explore a hike in
satalite view. For this I use RogoGeo.
Some of these satalite views are here.
Spammers have taken over and destroyed email. I no longer can
publish my email address online.
