West of San Jose, between it and the Pacific, rise the Santa Cruz Mountains. Their ridges run northwest to southeast, covered with Douglas fir, oak, manzanita, madrone, and patches of ancient redwood trees. Ghostly seafogs hang in the canyons and peek over the ridges, but never reach San Jose. The hills are cut by the San Andreas Fault, and rise to flat-topped Mount Umunhum, which the Ohlone named The Place Where the Hummingbird Rests. Some south-facing slopes are chaparral, some mountain valleys are filled with rushing streams and almost everywhere is poison oak.

East of San Jose, dry foothills rise toward the Diablo Range, straw brown most of the year. In winter, when California gets its rain, they are briefly a tender green. The folds of the hills, the canyons and watercourses, are full of oak, bay, wax myrtle, and imported eucalyptus. Most of these mountains are ranchland or rangeland, and unpopulated. Abrupt Alum Rock Canyon is just east of town, with reeking mineral springs and sycamore shaded trails. Large Grant Ranch Park spreads out from the first ridge, and beyond it is huge Coe Ranch. To the east, past Halls Valley, Lick Observatory crowns Mount Hamilton with silver-domed telescopes.

The Santa Clara Valley lies between the ranges, just touching the end of the San Francisco Bay, running south from the salt flats and marshes of the Alviso district and the sinking ghost town of Drawbridge to San Jose, Morgan Hill, Gilroy, and Hollister. Jack London called it the Valley of the Heart's Delight. It was farms and blooming orchards then.

Among others, the Guadeloupe and the Coyote Rivers run north to the bay, and long parks run along beside them, strung with bike paths, walking paths, playing fields and fishing ponds. There are at least 51 miles of trails along the rivers, really streams, of San Jose. The city is flat, with a few small hills south of downtown, called Spyglass Hill, Church Hill, and Communications Hill, a cemetery rising to one slope, an old quarry cutting away another, a huge church landed like a flying saucer on one shoulder, and dense new condos and projects packed everywhere else.

San Jose fills the valley with houses from range to range. The city blends into Milpitas, Cupertino, and Santa Clara with nothing but a sign to show the difference. On the southwest, it becomes Campbell, which becomes the prosperous mountain towns of Los Gatos, Saratoga, and Monte Sereno, each town proud of its flavor. To the south, San Jose splits around the Santa Teresa Hills, and reaches south in the Almaden Valley toward the closed mercury mines of New Almaden, and down the old flat route to Monterey almost to the dot on the map called Coyote.

San Jose's climate is usually mild. Sometimes summers are too hot for a few days. Rarely the mountains, that are really hills, that ring the city are lightly dusted with snow. It's a city where children play outdoors nearly every day of the year.

Learn more about this author, Janet Grischy.
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