The Big Dipper

Day 5: May 6, 2009

Route: Bear Creek Road at Happy Valley Road, into Briones Regional Park, right on Old Briones Road, to Seaborg trail (formerly Homestead Valley trail), right on Briones Crest Trail, left onto Lafayette Ridge Trail, down, down, down (with many partner ups) to Lafayette Ridge Staging Area, across Pleasant Valley Road to Acalanes Ridge Open Space – steeply up the ‘Briones to Mt. Diablo Trail’ and then down, going straight east on the Sousa trail (do not turn left on the BTMD trail) past Larkey Reservoir, eventually found the small unmarked trail that goes over a bridge and into a neighborhood that has no direct route out of it towards the Bart Station. Headed northwest for a mile to Alvarado, then right in the opposite direction on Buena Vista to the Walnut Creek BART station.

Mileage: 8.8 miles

Flora and Fauna: Sticky monkey flower, Lazuli bunting, poison hemlock, Nuttall’s woodpecker, vetch, spotted towhee, acorn woodpecker, California sage.

Logistics: We were staying with Steve’s cousin Cindy and her husband Peter and their son Matthew in their great digs in Rockridge in Oakland. Peter drove us to the Briones trailhead in the AM and we took BART back to the Rockridge station and walked back to their house in the afternoon. We then got our car, drove to the campground on Mt. Diablo near Rock City, set up a camp to receive us the next day, left it all by itself, and slept another night in Rockridge.

What can I say, we live in a beautiful world and this was a beautiful hike. I am so fortunate. All the numerous posts about this piecemeal trek – before and to come – hold a certainty of being dreadfully laden and perhaps dull with grateful exaltations. Each day must be named.

Every inch of Briones Regional Park is awe-inspiring –enormous oaks and bays, a perfect wedding site, Newt Hollow, at the base of the hill, lazuli buntings playing hide and seek in hillside swatches of coyote brush and poison hemlock. I notice the distinctly sharp smell of mouse pee that rides the dew-moisture of wet grasses at dawn. I know the smell from my days of hunting and trapping (benignly) the salt marsh harvest mouse. In those days we mostly caught the Western Harvest Mouse, same genus and just as good a pisser, and I wonder if this is the species I inhale with fondness this morning.

Homestead Valley

Seaborg Trail

This hike goes up the Homestead Valley to Briones Ridge, south through a short galleria of somewhat dwarfed live oak on the hard soils of the ridge, and then like a roller coaster, down and up and down and up along the length of Lafayette Ridge. Steve began making ratcheting sounds on his way up as if it were a real coaster. What looks like a fantasy poster of The Land of Make Believe with receding trails and diminutive knolls and just-so twisted oaks placed at perfect spots physically begins to wear on the hiker. One becomes sentimental about switchbacks and good principles of trail building on a ridge trail.

In a former life, employed as a field researcher on studies of the Alameda whipsnake, I had been given a set of keys that opened all of the locks on Pacific Gas and Electric gates. This allowed me to drive many private dirt roads of Alameda and Contra Costa County. I was not immune to the excitement of driving our old Jeepster Commando 4WD along these rounded and grassy Coast Range arretes and the fleeting, receding and wheeling views at those speeds held a real thrill. But to walk a ridge trail is to be center-stage in a 360-degree vista at every second; to be able to indulgently, unhurriedly and breathlessly (from exertion) capture the experience. The land makes you notice its true contours. The destination loses importance; getting somewhere is obviously not the point. The views are. Glimpses of Grizzly Peak to the southwest, Mt. Diablo due east and the Carquinez Strait and Sacramento River to the northeast were fine rewards for staying the high road.

Sticky monkey flower

Down we go

Oak galls, or baseballs in a pinch

At the base of this hill a pleasant woman named Dale Carey in a bright pink polo shirt, eighty-four years young, asked me for a tissue. She was just beginning the slope up the ridge from the parking lot. She told me that she had completed her usual walk today but found she just could not stop – it was too beautiful. I consider her happily as a good omen of the benefits of hiking throughout a life.

The knee rattling of the Lafayette Ridge trail wiped me out even though it did not take long to travel. Across Pleasant Valley Road we found the Acalanes Ridge Open Space trails. The Briones to Mt. Diablo Road at this trailhead goes straight up a very steep hill, quite unforgiving.

We had lunch at the top. I had to take my boots off as the previous descent had crushed my little toes. I was so tired, hot, foot sore and cranky. I was shaky from exhaustion, very hungry, and sunburned in places that I thought I had covered with clothing and sunscreen. I succumbed at that moment to a strong fear that my body would not be able to handle this walk, let alone the backpacking and bicycling that I planned. Was it too late for me to reclaim an acceptable form of fitness now that I had let it go for nearly fifteen years? Fifty years to celebrate but also just as many pounds to lose in order to once again experience the physical sensation of lithe.

When I get in this mood I start surveying for omens – only bad omens need apply – noting every small thing that had already gone wrong in the last few days (I ignore completely the many things that have gone so well everyday in total that enable me to take this trip). Just yesterday my appointed walk earring, a ceramic feather, shattered in the sink. This morning a key button to prevent sunburn fell off. These are the signs that I shouldn’t be doing this walk, that it lacks good portent, that in fact it is completely indulgent and vain, and considering the seriousness of the swine flu epidemic, mortality, and the vast needs of humanity and the planet, I should have never chosen such a folly. All of this of course – my repulsive lack of moral high rectitude, and its subsequent lip service to express a chaser of guilt about my purpose on earth not being very valuable to the whole of society – actually are, in fact, covering for my heart’s real desire to quit the whole damn thing because my toes hurt and I hate sweating, panting, and a fast heart beat.

I found that cashews and messages on my cell phone to answer are the cure for doubt of such a large nature. Hope returned and I thought that as California had formed me it might now do so literally, and I might look a lot better at the end of it all.

We watched a couple of acorn woodpeckers go in and out of a hole in a eucalyptus and I was reminded of a description I had read that eucalyptus forests were biologically dead places with a substantial amount of malevolent stickiness that entrapped smaller birds like brown creepers and nuthatches that visited them. I have always wanted to rebut this notion of their worthlessness in the California landscape. Here was a small piece of evidence that they did provide. Perhaps someday I will still make a study of them to see what their value may be to our native wildlife. I like the way they look. My grandfather loved to paint them. They are part and parcel of the visage of my beloved mother-state. An adoring child easily overlooks distasteful truths – even in plants.

My tiredness was not helped by the fact that after we left the Sousa Trail on its trip down to civilization we overshot the path and descended into a dead end at the bottom of a hill near a water treatment plant (I think that is what it was). We walked back up until we found a gap in a fence that led us to a bridge over a creek and then off the hill. We had to walk about a mile and half indirectly to our seat on a BART car and our trip back to Oakland.

Acalanes Ridge Open Space