This Must Be an Isthmus

Day Four: April 5, 2009

Route: From Inspiration Point in Tilden Park (near Wildcat Canyon Road) down the east side of the Berkeley hills following EBMUD (East Bay Municipal Utility District – the water company) trails down to and across San Pablo Dam Road to EBMUD’s Old San Pablo Trail, then south to the Oursan trail which climbs the San Pablo Dam, and then south east on the Bear Creek Trail that runs the length of the Briones Reservoir, out to Big Bear Rd just short of the Briones Regional Park entrance.

Mileage: 6.5 miles

Flora and Fauna: Lesser goldfinch, elderberry, brown creeper, white-breasted nuthatch, Indian warrior (spectacular multi-flowered red club, related to Indian paintbrush), chinese houses, cliff swallow, white pelicans, western bluebird, Cooper’s hawk, California quail, starlings, white alder, Wilson’s warbler, bracken, five-finger fern, western sword fern, California polypody (an odd and delightful name for a fern) and trillium.

Logistics: You can get an EBMUD permit on-line – highly recommended for beautiful, under-used trails. We drove our car to a proposed ending spot that was about six miles further from where we actually finished. The nice spouse of an EBMUD employee that had jogged past our slowing bodies with a double stroller full of child drove us in his van, with one kid strapped in, staring at odd strangers, from Bear Creek Rd./Happy Valley Rd. back to our friend’s car at San Pablo Dam Road. We then fetched our badly placed distant vehicle and these two cars drove back to Oakland.

Out of Sight

Oaks and trillium

This walk can be summed up with the word fantastic. There is no finer thing than an EBMUD permit for obtaining empty trails with beautiful views, water-shine glimpses of reservoirs, and great pockets of plants and happy animals taking advantage of them. Leaving Grand Central Station at Inspiration Point’s parking lot you tend to look over your shoulder to make sure no one notices your disappearance over the wrong side of the hill – through a discreet and probably intentionally shabby cattle gate. What you lose in San Francisco Bay views you gain in peace and beauty and quiet.

These are not pristine trails or hills, they have been worked for years by cattle, invaded by non-native plants, homesteaded, logged, and prior to all of that regularly burned by Native Americans to promote wildflower bulb growth as a source of food. The wide fire trails are ankle hurdles because of the depth of muddy cow hoof depressions. High spots on these road-trails are shiny hardpan and support only those invasives tough enough; tiny erodium with its magenta flower, roadside mustard and delicate chickweed find a home here.

It is so Spring. The impossibly dense layers of the evergreen forest of coast live oak, bay laurel and madrone are pumping out new growth, red and green. Maples are coming out in a preposterous lime color. Poison oak is beginning to leaf and I hear it calling me to make one slight mistake at its most potent time. The forest here on the eastern and northern slopes is so robust at this moment that I feel an impact, a dull press against my chest and a distortion of closeness that is quite amazing. This day is a day of polarized eyesight, the greens unreal, the blue sky so dark, and the light so crisp.

New Territory

My husband Steve Evans has joined me for the walk today, and has declared his intention to accompany me for the entire length of the walk across California. How grand is that? We head steeply down past a curve of arching trees above pockets of rich soil covered in miner’s lettuce and poppy. At the bottom we spy lounging cattle in a stream bed –too much mud here now from all of their visits. We cross San Pablo Dam Road and find a connection to the Old San Pablo Trail and head south. This is a beautiful trail along a nearly invisible stream, its view blocked by a wall of alder and willow. My first migratory warbler of the year, a Wilson’s warbler, draws our attention with its bright yellow body and little black beret.

Our reverie is interrupted by a cell phone call from my good friend, another mompadre, Bobbie Lewis. She is wondering if we can meet her at the interim trailhead to borrow our ATM card to get cash for a bike she wishes to purchase that day at a swap meet. She would pay us back at a more convenient time that evening. She had gone to the swap meet in the early morning and planned to meet us at the trailhead to join us for the reservoir walks. Bobbie had figured it would be more time-efficient than getting her own cash from her bank back in Berkeley. We acquiesced to this weird form of efficiency, marveling at the notion of giving out our pin number, but were later called back and informed that the transaction would instead occur the next morning at 6AM before work. Bobbie is the most multi-tasking human I know, necessarily skilled at it; the trait seems to be required of an independent acupuncturist and single mother. Her full life matches her effervescence and energy and we knew she would be a great companion.

We three meet and walk up the perfectly engineered slope of San Pablo Dam. At the top of the dam we watch Cliff Swallows for about ten minutes, such an incredible flight display. The trail then follows along the south side of Briones reservoir. You go around coves full of trees and sticky-monkey-flower bushes.

This is a gorgeous trail that takes you out a peninsula that juts into the reservoir but refuses you access to the point (the trail is verboten, don’t know why). There is a bench at one spot where you can see all the way to the east and the west end of the reservoir. We stopped at this spot; this pseudo-isthmus, and all commented that we could not believe that we had never done this walk before.

Indian Warrior

At this not-even-half-way point I was feeling very tired. In the coolth of Washington I would easily walk six miles in a couple of hours on not very steep local trails. I had plotted out a course for the day that I thought would be a simple combo of two little walks, one of seven miles in the morning, and one of seven miles in the afternoon. I had been buoyed by the ease of my walk from the bay to Tilden and foresaw no problems. Well here it was almost 1PM, we had already eaten our lunch at the isthmus, and we still had approximately eight miles to go to reach that distant car in Lafayette. I have to admit I was really out of shape. Bobbie was not as winded as us and she had hoped for a more challenging walk but she went along with our truncated plan to quit at Bear Creek Rd, and for one of us to hitch a ride back to her car at SP Dam Rd.

Steve began talking to a man pushing a double stroller complete with twins along the dirt road where the single-track widened. Steve started up what would become a trademark schpiel for him. “This person here is Monica Fletcher, and for her fiftieth birthday she is walking across the width of California,” he would declare. I would wince, and then he would wait for some sort of interested response to further discuss our plans. This was a very odd thing to bear. I didn’t look like a trekker, I carried a small lunch backpack, my face was red from the heat, I was overweight, and yet I had just been presented as if a celebrity or an athlete. I felt like I was on a litter being carried amongst my people and heralded by this guy in a dirty yellow hat and a pair of binoculars around his neck.

But Steve undoubtedly had a plan. We were nearing the end of this leg of the trail and after our chat this nice man agreed to give us all a lift to Bobbie’s car. We walked with him to his home, a house provided by EBMUD as a portion of recompense for his wife’s job at the utility. Here he dropped off one of the twins with his wife (who regularly runs the ten mile Oursan trail to work, no slouch like us) and took us back down the four plus miles to Bobbie’s car.

Isthmus of Briones looking East

Old friends

When I conceived of this project so long ago –when I decided that this was the year I would do it –I never really bothered to consider the logistics of the thing. I never had a thought about the car use that would be necessary and its ecological effect. I had only vaguely imagined a backpack being necessary in the High Sierra. Route-finding was something someone else must have done, somewhere – only I couldn't find their info. I had pictured it as a walk alone with little distraction but wordsmithing along the route. I was finding even at this stage, on a day that resembled simply any park-user’s experience, that instead I was going to have to make my way with the use of a lot of fuel, with friends, with my husband as an accomplice, and with the help of strangers. The scope of those needs became much clearer in the far-back section of our Good Samaritan’s van. Sitting cross-legged in a rather undignified position in the cargo section with groceries around me and a baby's carseat above my head, I could not rely on such luck to always appear. I would need to plan this thing a bit better. Or at least try.