Standing on the top of Black Mountain this morning at about 5:45 a.m. and looking west, I could see the fog in the valleys below:
Where I was standing was about 2,812 feet above sea level; I’d guess that the top of the fog was about half that height, perhaps 1,500 feet high.
The view to the east was even more spectacular: the sun just peeking over the 4,000 foot high Hamilton Range, and the entire Santa Clara Valley covered with a blanket of fog — or, more precisely, covered with a layer of stratus clouds the tops of which were about 1,500 feet high, and the bottoms of which were probably about 500 to 1,000 feet above sea level. It was funny to think that there were ten million people down there under the fog who were enjoying a cool, cloudy, grey morning, while I was looking up at a cloudless sky and wondering where in my backpack I had put my sunscreen.