Bernal Hill

Should We Install a Solar-Powered Floodlight to Deter Illegal Dumping on Bernal Hill?

/ Todd_Lappin / 28 Comments

So… what was the outcome of that recent meeting about strategies to deter illegal dumping on Bernal Hill? District 9 Supervisor David Campos has a proposal, and he’d like your feedback:

Bernal Heights Residents. At the community meeting I held a couple weeks ago with representatives from the Department of Recreation & Parks, we decided that the best and most cost effective strategy to deter further illegal dumping on Bernal Hill is to install a solar power light at the site of the dumpings. I am attaching a picture of the lamp so you can see what it would look like. Please let us know if you have any issues with this solution by contacting Hillary Ronen in my office at hillary.ronen@sfgov.org. Thanks for participating in the decision making process!

Bernalwood used the photo provided by Supervisor Campos to create the absurdist illustration shown above. It shows what the actual floodlight would look like (if it took steroids and grew to about 10x its actual size). Don’t take the photo too literally. The point being, we’d get a light shaped kind of like that, somewhere kind of around there, to help keep the baddie illegal dumping people away, and possibly prevent actual scenes like this:

Do you like the idea? Should The City go ahead and install a solar-powered light? Feel free to email Supervisor Campos’s staff, or discuss here, in the comments.

PHOTOS: Telstar Logistics

Five Year-Old Covers Bernal Hill with Graffiti, Leaves No Trace

/ Todd_Lappin / 7 Comments

Ahhhhhh… Indian Summer, here at last. And with a full moon to boot!

On Sunday night Bernalwood’s Cub Reporter and I headed up Folsom Street to savor the evening — and the view — from high atop Bernal Hill. As we sat on the warm dirt watching the twinkle of the lights, the Cub Reporter declared the shimmering skyline “the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.” She’s a San Francisco kid, so that’s high praise.

Then, when we looked east to admire the giant moon, she noticed something strange…

There was bizarre vessel tied up at one of the piers on the waterfront. “It’s a ghost ship!” the Cub Reporter said.

Let’s zoom and enhance for a closer look:

Later research revealed that the ship was not, in fact, an oceangoing emissary from the afterlife, but rather a South Korean warship in town to ferry a delegation of diplomats to Our Faire City. Almost as good, I guess.

The Cub Reporter had insisted upon bringing her spiffy new LED flashlight on our nighttime micro-hike, so we decided to have some fun with it.  With the camera set to take long-exposure photos, I urged her to wave her arm with the light turned on. This was the result:

“THAT’S AWESOME!” she declared after seeing the result in the camera’s view screen. “Let’s do more!!!”

So we did…

It was a free-form spectacle of creativity, but by morning, her proto-Pollock light paintings were gone without a trace. Luckily, we got a photo of the culprit at the scene of the crime:

PHOTOS: Telstar Logistics

Watch Eight Hours of Sutrito Tower in Just 45 Seconds

/ Todd_Lappin / 1 Comment

We’ve seen some rather fantastic time-lapse videos filmed from Bernal Heights before, but I don’t recall seeing a fantastic time-lapse video that looks at Bernal Heights. Until now.

This new time-lapse by Gregg Marks gets more and more dramatic as day fades to night. It’s silent, however, so please bring your own soundtrack. (I tested it with “Alone in Kyoto,” with pleasing results.)

Watch a Film About Watching a Film at the Bernal Heights Outdoor Film Festival

/ Todd_Lappin / 1 Comment

Last night I fought my way through the velvet ropes and throngs of groupies to attend the glamorous Bernal Heights Outdoor Film Festival screening that happened on the north side of Bernal Hill.

Since there were no critics from Fox News in the attendance, the festival organizers decided to show “My Grandmother,” a bizarre 1929 silent film from the Soviet Union, which was accompanied by a pitch-perfect live music performance by the Beth Custer Ensemble.

It was deeply fantastic. Here’s a little sampler of what you missed:

More screenings happen tonight on stylish Cortand Avenue beginning at 7 pm. Check the schedule for full details and enjoy.

Editor’s Note: To whoever it was that arrived at the screening in this pristine 1976 AMC Pacer X: Well played!

PHOTO: Adrian Mendoza VIDEO: Telstar Logistics

Mars Rover Mission Exposed as Elaborate Bernal Hill Hoax

/ Todd_Lappin / 10 Comments

Neighbor Yatima and I recently spent some time looking at this photo, which was taken last weekend atop Bernal Hill by a Bernalwood reporter. Savvy Bernalese will immediately recognize this as the southwest corner of the hill; it’s the area that the local skiiers call Rock Quarry.

But there’s another reason why this terrain looks so familiar, and Neighbor Yatima put her finger on it:

Can’t believe we landed a nuclear rover right there. Awesome.

She’s referring to the glamorous Curiosity Rover that landed recently on the surface of Mars. Sure enough, Curiosity’s photos of the Martian terrain sure do look an awful lot like this cozy corner of Bernal Hill. So that got me wondering. What if…

I decided to see if the original Bernal photo had been doctored. Sure enough, when I examined the digital file, I noticed some odd fragmentation along the edges of the image that would be consistent with a photo that had been cropped to narrow the perspective. Hmmm…

If the image had been cropped, what parts of the photo had been removed? The next step was to restore the image to it’s original size and perspective. Using vectored antipixel algorithms, Bernalwood was able to reconstruct and enhance the base image.

What we found was rather shocking:

That’s right. A full reconstruction of the original image reveals the Curiosity rover perched atop Bernal Hill. But how? How can Curiosity be sitting on Bernal Hill, when we all know that right now it is parked inside a crater on Mars?

Fellow Citizens of Bernalwood, it seems we may have a Capricorn One situation on our hands. Indeed, our investigation suggests that the Curiosity rover has been atop Bernal Hill this entire time, and that the whole “mission to Mars” is little more than an elaborate ruse.

But who would perpetrate such a hoax? And who has the technological capacity to pull it off? As I studied the reconstructed image, I noticed a blue insignia on the rover’s nuclear battery pack:

It wasn’t clear enough to read, so I tried to zoom and enhance it. That’s when the last piece of the puzzle finally fell into place:

BASA!! Of course!!

The truth really is out there.

Art or A**holes? About That Random Furniture Atop Bernal Hill

/ Todd_Lappin / 15 Comments

A message to whoever left a collection of furniture on the saddle of Bernal Hill, in the area beneath the Vista Pointe chairlift:

If these items were placed on Bernal Hill as part of an in situ art installation intended to provoke wonder and an attenuated appreciation of place, then bravo and well done! The plan is working brilliantly, and we assume you will arrange to remove the items promptly and completely.

However, if you hauled all that furniture up there as props for a video or some such, and then left the stuff after you were finished, then you are a jerk and an illegal dumper, and you must now live with this sad knowledge about your true nature for the remainder of your days.

In the meantime, Neighbor Frank returned from a visit to the hill a few minutes ago, and he shared this photo:

He writes:

The furniture is still there, and apparently attracting other artists.  This photographer and model told me that they did not carry the chair there.  The model hoped that the chair didn’t have bedbugs.  The ottoman and two footstools were moved to the west.  I didn’t see the black chair.

UPDATE: In the comments, several neighbors report that the chairs were used during a “hipster picnic” that took place on Sunday. After the picnic, the chairs were abandoned. So there’s the answer: Not art, but hipster a**holes.

PHOTOS: Top, Dunstan Orchard, Below, Neighbor Frank

Xtreme Unicyclist Shreds Gnarly Steeps of Bernal Hill

/ Todd_Lappin / 8 Comments

I noticed him last weekend as I approached Bernal Hill from the southern entrance; he was silhouetted against Sutro Tower and the setting sun. He was standing on the rim of the old gravel pit the Bernal snowboarders call Rock Quarry, and as I got closer I noticed that he was leaning on… a unicycle!

But it was no ordinary unicycle: It had a beefed-up frame and one knobby tire; it looked a lot like a monster truck (if a monster truck had pedals and only one spoked wheel). I moved in warily for a closer look:

I watched him look down the rock steep face, and pause for a meditative moment on the lip of the couloir…

… and then — TOTALLY XTREME!!!— he dropped in!

Dude rode it all the way down, smooth as glass, and didn’t stop until he hit the flats below.

Impressive. Maybe next time he can try doing it while also juggling bowling pins or playing an accordion.

PHOTOS: Telstar Logistics

Junior Volunteers Spend Saturday Cleaning Up Bernal Hill

/ Todd_Lappin / 2 Comments

Last Saturday, an intrepid group of Bernalwood’s finest micro-citizens climbed Bernal Hill to take part in a volunteer clean-up effort. Neighbor Karen was on the scene, and she filed this report:

A boy name Nico wrote a letter to the Bernal Heights Rec Center recently, saying he worried about animals eating trash on Bernal Hill and “dieing.” So they pulled together a group of about 20 folks to clean and weed last Saturday. The weather was glorious! Such a good way to remind us not to take the hill for granted.

PHOTOS: Neighbor Karen

Let’s Go for a Sutrito Tower Spin

/ Jobius (Joe Thomas)

Last week saw the launch of HYPNO SF, a thing whose Twitter bio says it’s “visually exploring + animating San Francisco” with crazy/amazing yo-yo videos of the Golden Gate Bridge, Market Street from the Ferry Building to the Castro, and more. These shots can be seen in the video for a song called Water Falls by Kalle Mattson, and and in animated GIF form. The gorgeous spinning shot of Sutro Tower at the end of the video really got my attention.

Why not try something similar for Bernal’s own Sutrito Tower, I thought. So, with my iPhone and bicycle, I set off to get some pictures.

Map image I had on my iPhone as a guide for taking pictures approximately the same distance from Sutrito Tower.

I figured that the hard part would be aligning and scaling the pictures, so I wanted to take them from close to the same distance from the tower. I had the map above open in Safari, and switched back and forth between that, Maps, and the Camera app. I ended up deviating from a circular path quite a bit, in order to get usable pictures:

Actual track taken. More or less. Reconstructed from embedded lat/longs in the pictures.

I got back and started aligning and stacking images. File, Save As, GIF, click the “animated GIF” (not “flatten”) radio button, and I soon had a 16 megabyte animated GIF. And it basically worked!

So that was a nice way to spend a Saturday.

FINALLY!! BIGFOOT SIGHTING ON BERNAL HILL!!

/ Todd_Lappin / 11 Comments

Friends and neighbors, that is a headline I’ve wanted to write for almost two years.

But, really, it’s true! Bigfoot WAS spotted today on Bernal Hill, and Neighbor Frank was there with a camera to capture an image of the wild beast. Let’s zoom and enhance for a closer look:

Neighbor Frank writes:

My wife and I were walking around the top of the hill just before noon today and spotted Bigfoot, or something like that, running up the hill near the top of Rosenkranz Street.

We thought that maybe Bernalwood was Bigfoot’s new habitat, but in the heat, Bigfoot removed his head and looked more like a person in a costume, surrounded by two photographers.

Phone pictures are all I have as evidence.  No footprints or DNA samples.

PHOTOS: Neighbor Frank