Hiking the Fins at Arches National Park

The first day of summer brought in some heat.  After a cold spring, it finally feels like California.  Following the Pacific Crest Trail List -- the email forum the thru hiker community connects on -- I’m hearing stories of stalwart hikers who have come across the deserts in record cold and have been hiking for weeks in the snow bound High Sierra, only to be stopped by what are usually small streams. They haven’t even hit the really dangerous crossings, but are finding the small creeks simply impassible due to the sudden snowmelt caused by this heat and the resultant runoff.  

One party, fifteen miles north of Tuolumne Meadows, turned around several days ago when they found a “small” stream impassible, and realized that the fords known for being dangerous were still ahead.  They found tracks in the snow made by three or four other hikers ahead of them, who had scouted up and down the creek and finally turned around as well.  Another person reported that the bridge over the Tuolumne River, five miles north of the meadow was thigh deep in water over the bridge, not under it, but over it.  Another prudent decision to turn back and go around this section of the High Sierra was made. 

I’m writing from a home above Martis Meadow near Truckee, where I’m staying with a friend, and the weather is simply gorgeous.  A balmy breeze is blowing in the open doors at 6,500 feet, and the rocks along Interstate 80 this morning were sheeted with water coursing down every available drainage, from the record snowpack still sitting on Donner Summit.  There were waterfalls I’ve never seen before, and the South Fork of the Yuba River is a torrent.

In these wonderful but really dangerous conditions, my heart goes out to anyone in the High Sierra.  I hope the thru hiker pack uses common sense, as those folks in Yosemite did, and leaves the High Sierra until we get some cold weather to slow down the melt, or it simply exhausts itself, the trails dry, and the crossings become safe for passage. 

Back in the Bay Area, the heat was one reason for revisiting a favorite local walk this past week, the Old Stage Road up Pine Creek, through Castle Rock Regional Recreation Area and the Diablo Foothills Regional Park on the outskirts of Walnut Creek.  When our hills dry up, blond with summer grasses and the temperatures are topping 100 degrees, this is an easy hike up a verdant, riparian canyon.  The day we hiked it, the stream was still running well, as were several springs we passed higher up on Mt. Diablo.

Park at the end of Castle Rock Road and walk up through the Castle Rock Regional Recreation Area which offers shaded picnic spots along the creek, large grassy ball fields, restrooms and a pool.  

Hiking in, we were greeted by several East Bay Regional Parks staff members who were signing children up for the Park’n it Day Camp, one of many summer programs run by the Parks.  We learned that there were spots still open and even scholarships available for low income families.      http://www.ebparks.org/activities/daycamps    

If you’ve got kids, or grand kids, check out the Regional Parks web pages for their summer programs which are all rich in outdoor experience for children from elementary school age through late teens.  

Looking through the offerings at the Tilden Nature Center for July the programs are designed for ages ranging from tots to older folks.  Offerings include numerous hikes, photography, natural necklace making, a squirrel study, birding, a dragonfly quest, butterfly program and many others.  http://www.ebparks.org/files/NN_TNA_July-2011.pdf  August continues the hikes and adds arrow making, fire ecology and many more.  http://www.ebparks.org/files/NNTNA-AUG-2011.pdf  I’m sorry I missed June which included, elderberry flute, atlatl and dart making, felting, bees, a walk on the wild side and a hike for the over the hills gang.  This is just Tilden.  If you’re willing to drive to Ardenwood, Black Diamond, Sunol, Coyote Hills or Crab Cove, the possibilities are endless for great outdoor learning and fun.  Don’t miss the Cajun--Zydeco Music Festival at Ardenwood on August 13, 10am to 7pm http://www.ebparks.org/activities/naturalists  

Last year I found that one of the most common life threads for most Pacific Crest Trail thru hikers was some organized or family exposure to the wild when they were children.  Parents who were outdoor enthusiasts, Girl and Boy Scouts, and the Regional Parks Junior Ranger Programs, were common childhood experiences for many.   

Castle Rock is a great place to spend an afternoon with kids and get that outdoor education started, but if you want to experience the coolness of Pine Creek, just follow the paved road past the picnic area until it becomes a dirt road that leads you right up the canyon.  This is all part of the Diablo Foothills Regional Park. 

It’s hot and dry for a short distance, but just as you reach Castle Rock -- a series of huge sandstone monoliths on the left that have hosted a family of peregrine falcons for many years -- you’ll enter an oak forest.  The trees tower above, draped with liana like wild grape vines, the banks are crowded in ferns and greenery and the aroma of bay is in the air.  You’ll repeatedly cross the creek at easy fords, thick in watercress, and if it’s really hot, you can soak your feet and your head if you want.  The effect of such lush foliage, trees and deep shade is to significantly cool the canyon, and you.  

A mile and a half in, the Little Yosemite Trail branches to the right and you’ll find picnic tables in a shaded grove.  Just beyond this you enter Mt. Diablo State Park, and dogs are not allowed on the trails beyond this point, but following the map on the regional park brochure will allow you to hike for many miles with your furry companions by backtracking through Diablo Foothills Regional Park and entering the contiguous, Shell Ridge Open Space.  We continued up the canyon.

I was hiking with my friend Elaine, who was game to try a section of the Burma Road, which begins at a small cattle pond overgrown in cattails and is alive with redwinged blackbirds.  It climbs sharply out of the canyon up the slopes of Mt. Diablo.  Hiking in the sun was initially much hotter than the canyon we’d been in, but as we ascended we got into a steady breeze blowing cooler the higher we went.  Branching onto the Angel Kerley Trail at Poker Flat, we hooked around the end of the canyon to the right, circling near Turtle Rock and back onto the Stage Road, to return to our beginning in Castle Rock Regional Recreation Area, all told, a hike of approximately 8 miles.

Castle Rock and Diablo Foothills Regional Park, are great places to get out and hike up a cool, forested canyon when the temperatures really crank up in the summer.  If you’ve never been there, check it out.  A map and Brochure can be found at: www.ebparks.org/files/Diablo_Foothills-Castle_Rock_map.pdf.

Arches National Park Trail Stories: Two weeks with my college age kid in the Southwest, and Sarah and I had been having a ball.  We’d backpacked the Grand Canyon and camped and hiked in Canyonlands National Park.  Links to those stories can be found at: and   We had one day left to explore Arches.  

We’d been reading Desert Solitaire aloud, Edward Abbey’s ode to the beauty of the Southwest, its people, often as dry as the landscape, and a life he saw dying under the crush of “industrial tourism.”  One of the classics of environmental literature, he hangs his story on a year he spent as a ranger in the 1950s in Arches National Monument, now a National Park.  The book is beautiful, and after a week and a half of following his prose into the landscapes outside of Moab Utah, we had to see them for ourselves.

We left the campground in Canyonlands with one stop on the way back to Moab, Newspaper Rock, a Utah State Historic Site, and one of the largest groupings of Indian petroglyphs in the Southwest.  Outside Canyonlands, the road leaves the high mesa country and enters a long wooded river canyon.  Cottonwoods grow tall on the banks of a strong stream, and sandstone cliffs tower above on both sides.  From the road you can see petroglyphs scratched into the rocks at several places before you get to the main site.  

Newspaper Rock itself is easily accessible from the road, only a short distance from a small parking area.  On a smooth sandstone face, carved into the desert varnish, a blackish manganese-iron deposit, are hundreds of carvings dating back over 2,000 years.  The oldest are faint, as the natural patina has begun to recolor them, and the newer works often overlay them.  The abundant source of water and grass for game animals have made this a gathering spot for generations of people living in this place long before I came to look and wonder at their marvelous works.  

We stood in hushed silence, in awe of the antiquity before us.  Sarah said she felt like we were intruding, gawking at the sacredness of the Rock.  We were.  We weren’t of this place as those who carved here, but neither are we part of the Mediaeval world, but I stare in wonder at the cathedrals in Europe in much the same way.  Confronted by those who worked in colored glass and light in a gothic church, I am here left to wonder at the artists who shaped their hunts and spirit quests on a face of darkened stone.  Our Sierras and Rockies, the Cascades and the incredible mesa country of the Southwest, and these human etchings in stone, these all are our cathedrals, natural and human wonders that knit us together as a people.  

From Newspaper Rock we made a beeline to Moab and the far end of Arches, NP, to hike in the Devil’s Garden, to Landscape Arch and as many more arches as our energy allowed. At the end of the road we encountered our first real traffic jam in all of our nearly two week tour.  Cars filled the parking lots and formed a necklace of parked vehicles around the large loop of road that allowed people to drive round and round until a spot opened up.  It was the first real example that we had seen of the “industrial tourism” Abbey wrote of and it was not pretty.  

The dramatic backdrop to the traffic jam were the fins, long tall sandstone formations, twenty to fifty feet thick, sometimes hundreds of feet tall, and a thousand feet long that are the reason for the more than two thousand arches in the park.  As the long slabs of rock age, the centers may weaken and break away, leaving a hole, and eventually an arch.  

There were lots of people on the trail to Landscape Arch, and for good reason, it is magnificent in its soaring, thin as air fragility, almost gossamer in stone.  At two hundred and ninety feet across, it is the longest arch in the park, and considered to be the second longest arch in the world.  I can’t begrudge the easy access, the paved road and the parking lot, as it’s really beautiful, but Abbey would have.  He fought to keep cars out of the park, proposing busses and bikes, ideas that Yosemite and other parks are only now implementing to preserve some sense of wild in these beautiful places. 

After this grand tourist attraction, and the crowds it draws, the number of people on trail lessened and the hike became more of a hike.  Signs warned people that the trail beyond Landscape Arch was strenuous.  It began with a scramble up a rock ravine, between the fins, and eventually brought us right up onto them, using the narrow, smooth tops of these formations as natural causeways over a jumble of rock, cracks and crannies below.  

It scared me at places as the wind was up, but Sarah was in her element.  Always a kid to climb trees or take mud hikes in the winter at home, she reveled in the elevation, the narrowness of the trail, the sheer cliffs and the fact that her Dad was moving even slower than usual.   

Up and down the fins, and through the narrow paths between them, the trail was fun.  Arches and windows in stone opened on vistas, fields of rock, towers, mesas, desert prairies and snow capped mountains.  We hiked to exhaustion, till the thought of the miles we had to retrace seemed too many.  But we made it back to our baking car, to a parking lot thinned of cars by the lengthening shadows and the approach of evening.  We’d had a wonderful Dad and Daughter Southwestern sojourn, and I still count my blessings that she not only talks to me, but had wanted to take a trip with me.  I won’t forget it, and it’s given me ideas for spring backpacking in the future.  We had time to connect in the beauty of landscapes we both fell in love with. 

The Southwest has the largest number of national parks in the country.  In its vastness lie landscapes shaped by the tectonic workings of the planet in ways that make those incomprehensible forces understandable, almost palpable, almost within reach, a touch away.  Carved and etched by wind, water, time, and people, the rocks read like a book, a history, our planets poem in stone. 

"As long as I live, I'll hear waterfalls and birds and winds sing. I'll interpret the rocks, learn the language of flood, storm, and the avalanche. I'll acquaint myself with the glaciers and wild gardens, and get as near the heart of the world as I can.”  John Muir