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Friday Slide Show: Knockash Hill Trees
7 March 2025
We've had a few atmospheric rivers flow through San Francisco this winter. Part of the cleanup was to cut down a few of the Eucalyptus trees on Knockash Hill. We suspect they were threatening the homes below them on Kensington Way.
We saw the road crews closing off the street a few weeks ago so they could take down the tall trees. But it seems that's all the did. They cut them down, chipped a few branches and left most of the trunks laying there.
We noticed that on a walk around the neighborhood a while ago. From Portola Drive, we saw an avalanche of Eucalyptus on the hill. But we didn't expect the wood to stay up there, so we didn't think twice about it.
But it's almost spring (March 20, if you're counting) and they're still lying up there.
So yesterday morning after we finished putting a couple of stories up, we took the Nikon D300 with its 18-200mm zoom down the hill to see what we could photograph.
Quite a bit, it seems.
We started on Kensington where one tree hung over the side of the hill just off the single-lane roadway. You can see its roots fanned out up hill a bit like a bad hair day.
It looks like it's about to slide right off the hill into the street. But it hasn't.
Then we walked over to the overpass on Portola and dared to climb up (which is not easy with double vision and a brain bleed). We thought we'd get a good angle on the upper part of the hill, the open space area where a lot of the trees formed that avalanche of wood.
But as soon as we got up there we realized it wasn't going to work. Power lines ran right across our vantage point.
So we walked back up the hill and into Edgehill's open space where the old path, now covered in wood chips, still leads to two benches for a godly view of the sunset.
And there we snapped a few shots of sheered trunks and fallen trees. We could have spent all day at it but we had to get to a CT scan* so we were as quick as a photojournalist.
That's probably too much wood to chip so we suspect it will just lay there, providing some sort of environmental support for wildlife of one kind or another. Other plants at least.
Making them giving trees, you might say.
