Behind Clark Kerr Campus, there's a trail that goes up into the Berkeley hills. I've hiked this trail since I was a kid, and in recent years I've hiked it every Friday afternoon with a group of friends. It's sort of a sacred place to me.

A few years ago a group of zealots decided that the trail needed to be more accessible. They started putting in lots of wooden steps. They turned the steep parts of the trail into staircases. They kept going, putting in more and more steps, even in shallow parts of the trail. The spacing of the steps was awkward, and their sharp edges were unpleasant to walk on. The steps nearly ruined what was once a wonderful trail.

A couple of years ago someone painted the longest stretch of steps to resemble a piano keyboard. This person - with tremendous artistic vision and clarity of purpose - evidently was protesting the arrogance and idiocy of the out-of-control step builders.

In the first version of the work - which we might call "Scale" - the steps were entirely black or white. More recently, the steps were repainted to make the black keys shorter than the white keys, as on an actual piano. I think this was a big improvement.

I have a fan (1/30/2026)

I've been working, late at night, on repainting the Piano Steps behind Clark Kerr campus. Last night I primed the white parts and repainted the black parts.

Small groups of nocturnal hikers, with headlamps, occasionally pass by, and generally offer encouragement.

Last night a group of 6 or so was coming down, boisterous, around midnight. Their leader was a young man wearing a captain's cap with lots of gold brocade. He asked if I had created the Piano Steps; when I said yes, he became very excited, and was kind of star-struck. He said he hikes the trail every day and has always loved them. He had others take pictures of him and me.

I asked him if they were from UC; he said no, they were from the Richmond yacht club. They were impressed when I used the word 'regatta'. I asked them if they knew Chris Sullivan; they said no.

The group continued but the young man stayed and chatted. He was familiar with the sign I often post at the bottom of the steps, and wondered why it gets taken down. I told him of my plan to remove the inflammatory 'misguided zealots' rhetoric.

He said his name was Aivan; it's an unusual name, and I was able to find him on the web: Aivan Durfee, an engineer who graduated from UCB a few years ago. I messaged him on LinkedIn.