Hikin' is easy at the South Bay's tiny Huddart County Park

WOODSIDE, Calif. - If doing three 10,000-foot plus peaks in a day is a little much for you, consider Huddart County Park at Woodside, Calif. This is one of those California parks that has everything short of escalators to make a hike easy.

Access is easy, just about a mile from Woodside on Kings Mountain Road off Highway 84. There's a $5 parking fee, but you get some nice handouts at the gate.

A couple of miles into the park, there's a large parking lot and the trailhead to the short-but-snappy Chickadee Nature Trail.

This is only about a one-mile jaunt, but the information signs offered along the way are enough to make it seem longer. Unfortunately, recently a bridge was out at the far end of the loop trail, and the ravine that it traversed was too deep and steep to be forded, not that there was much water in it.

One of the things of interest was an explanation of a redwood forest in transition - returning to redwoods after loggers clear-cut the area. Seems the redwoods will take over the forest there by a process called succession. Banana slugs, those bright yellow invertebrates, are common here.

There's also a lecture on how redwoods sprout again after being logged, so that a stump that furnished redwood for some porch deck in San Francisco is again ready to (eventually) furnish wood for another deck.

The whole park is little more than 2-by-1.5-miles, so obviously long treks are not possible. Still, the Richard's Road trail is about 2 miles out and a bit more on the winding Dean Trail back.

This is a California way of enjoying the outdoors. Many group picnic sites are there, with room for a couple of hundred people at each ($70 to rent the large areas).

Everything is very nicely laid out, and the trails are just dirt with very few rocks. Nothing is very demanding at such a park, but it can be a nice change of pace after doing something like Horsetail Falls on Highway 50.

Hey, that's a good idea. Next up - Horsetail Falls, a bit on the dry side this time of year, but still with enough water to keep Pyramid Creek and the American River rapids flowing.

Horsetail is one of the most popular trails around and leads to Aloha Lake.