Walk About Martinez

Falling water. The rain pours down outside as I type, pooling on a patio tarp until it reaches a tipping point, and then rushes in a great gush and splash to the ground.  There is something soothing even about the sound of that splash, or the soft drip, dripping of the rain on the tarp, the quiet indoor bubble of a small water feature, or the roar of a waterfall in the midst of a vast wilderness. There is a sense of peace, and a longing for quiet in my life. I loved the rainy nights on the Pacific Crest Trail last summer, when warm and dry in my sleeping bag, I could have listened to the drum beat forever.  

We don’t often think of our local hills when we think of streams and waterfalls, and yet Mount Diablo’s North Peak sports one of the finest, and most accessible, waterfall walks in the Bay Area.  And it’s not one waterfall, it’s many.

The day after my PCT thru hiker, Muir House tour and barbecue, (you’ll have to read last week's column for the full story), I took three of those super hikers for a little jaunt up the Waterfall Trail out of Clayton. The snow was still melting in the crags above, and the falls had more water than I’d ever seen before.  I snapped a picture or two, but keeping up with Coyote, Huff 'n Puff (their trail names) and Tim left me little time to use the camera. So I went back last Friday and hiked it again.  

The trail to the waterfalls is a five-mile loop, or as long as you want to make it.  It begins at the end of Regency Drive in Clayton and follows a grassy savanna and oak/bay woodland trail up Donner Canyon. At this time of year, the sound of water is with you from the start because Donner Creek is full and looks every bit the mountain stream. The first mile and a half is easy except for the intermittent muddy sections. The waterfall trail eventually branches to the left and is moderately strenuous for approximately two miles, but it’s gorgeous, traversing the side of North Peak in and out of numerous deep water cut canyons, each with its own set of waterfalls.  

The trail is worth the hike even without the falls, moving up through the grassy, oak-studded canyon into chaparral, oak and coulter pine. Great lush masses of ceanothus are in blossom, giving the trail an almost intoxicating, honeyed perfume. Other early bloomers — Indian warrior and grand hound's tongue —color the trail red and blue.  

The flowers will only get more intense as the season progresses, but the waterfalls will dry up quickly with any sustained good weather. They are at their best within a day or two of heavy rains, but the trails are muddy — hikeable, but sloppy in the canyons.  The best time to catch the falls and the trails is after a good snow on Diablo and then several days of clear, but cold weather. The trails dry up but the snow melt keeps the falls at their cascading best.  

Trail directions: From the Regency Drive trailhead, walk up Donner Canyon Road (a dirt road), toward the mountain about 1 1/2 miles, left onto Cardinet Oaks Road, right onto the Falls Trail, right onto Middle Trail, right onto Meridian Ridge Road for a very short stretch, and left onto Donner Canyon Road, which you follow back to your car.  The map I recommend is the Mount Diablo, Los Vaqueros and Surrounding Parks map, published by REI, and Save Mount Diablo.  Trekking poles and good hiking shoes or boots are recommended. 

Friday I hiked with Symbiosis, a long distance hiker from Concord; Richard, an old friend and a great backpacker; and a new friend, Rene, from Guatemala. Rene is a cabinet maker who had some time between jobs, and is one strong hiker, as I got to see that day. We didn’t just hike the waterfalls, we continued up to the summit, circled back down the far side through Juniper Camp and looped around to the Donner Canyon Road and home.  If you want an all-dayer, this gives you more than 15 miles, and according to our GPS, almost 7,000 vertical feet in elevation gain, when counting the ups and downs of the trail.  It’s a real training hike, and we were beat by the end of the day.

Rene is in his early 30’s, and has been in the United States since he was 20.  He’s climbed Whitney twice, Half Dome several times, and loves backpacking.  He was clearly in heaven on the trail, in the wilds of Diablo. At one point I asked him where he got his love of nature. He told me that his childhood home in Guatemala was in the mountains, and that he saw trees outside his windows when he woke up as a little guy. He grew up playing in the woods and just needs to get to the mountains when he can, as the love of them hasn’t left him. He’s planning a hike of the John Muir Trail this summer with friends and was eager to learn all he could about long-distance hiking.  

Toward the end of the day, we rounded the mountain coming upon the face of North Peak again. From the opposite wall of Donner Canyon you could hear the sound of all those waterfalls in the distance. It’s not a usual sound on our mountain, but this time of year it’s as soothing as the rush of snow-melt streams anywhere in the High Sierra. If you can do it, do this hike now, or after the next snow and cold spell on Diablo.

Trail Stories: I first met Mango (Jim) at the Third Gate Cache, one of the most essential water caches on the Pacific Crest Trail. It’s a 25-mile dry stretch from Scissors Crossing, (78 miles north of the Mexican border) across the length of the cactus studded, San Felipe Hills to the Third Gate Cache. My hiking companion, Gramma Lissa and I had “dry camped” in the middle of this section the night before, and by midmorning, we really needed the water. Trail Angels hike this water up from a dirt road several miles away for the thru hikers. Trail Angels on the PCT really are angels.  

The usually scorching hike across this dry ridge was downright chilly. A cold front was moving in, and we had rain and occasional snow flurries and winds that topped 60 mph. We reached the cache in howling winds and took refuge under a big juniper tree with several other thru hikers, Bacon and Jaz, to have lunch.  When I got up to fill my bottles from the cache, I saw this rather tall, older gentleman sprawled out in the dirt, texting away on his little cell phone, totally engrossed and seemingly oblivious to my presence, just like any teenager. Mango kept an online trail journal that he was keying up at that moment. I didn’t know that at the time and just thought he looked like a very old young person texting. 

Mango’s trail name comes from the lyrics of a Jimmy Buffett song he liked. He liked it well enough that he wore mango-colored Dirty Girl Gators (light weight ankle gaiters to keep out the dirt), a bright mango-colored rain jacket with matching pack cover, and decorated his pack with mango-colored crocs, which dangled off the back. He’s a retired employee of Johnson City, Tenn.  If my memory serves me right, he had been the city manager. He certainly was smart enough for the job. He spoke with a honey smooth, Southern Appalachian accent that seemed to roll out and slide right along trail with him. It was frankly quite beautiful to listen to, and he could turn it on, and thicken it at will when he wanted to make a point.  

And he is proud of his Southern heritage, but not in the way you might think. One of the early things he shared with me was that his part of Tennessee, the Tri Cities area of the extreme northeastern corner, had sided with the North during the Civil War. “We were hill people who didn’t own slaves and had no love for the plantations further south.” A deeply spiritual person, Mango later told me scriptural reasons why Christians should support gay rights. He was an NPR-loving Southerner who made it clear that he was not alone in his politics at home, nor anywhere else in the South, for that matter.  

Well, in my ignorant Northern self, I had no idea that any parts of the South had sided with the North, or that I was going to be taught the scriptural reasons for supporting gay rights by an old guy from the Appalachians. Mango was part of the education of the trail that came from living with people from every state, and many different countries, all summer long.  

He played us non-Southerners terribly at times. Reveling in his Tennessee drawl, he’d asked us once, “So, d’ya know what the plural of y’all is?” He paused and waited and we all guessed wrong, and finally he blurted out, “Why, it’s all y’all!”  And we cracked up laughing.

Once, shortly after meeting each other, I made the terrible mistake of asking Mango if he was from Tennessee or Kentucky. Wrong question! He glared at me and through gritted teeth, in his deepest drawl, hissed back, “D’I look like I’m married ta ma sester?” I never made that mistake again. We’ve got regional rivalries out West, but I don’t think I’d ever be able to pull that one off in relation to Oregon or Washington, or even Nevada, for that matter.   

He did love his mountains, and had thru hiked the Appalachian Trail several years ago. When he finished, he sold most of his gear and thought he’d never thru hike again. But he couldn’t get it out of his blood, and was now beginning a thru hike of the PCT, Mexico to Canada.     

We couldn’t stay long at Third Gate Cache because it’s important to keep moving when it’s cold, and after lunch Gramma Lissa, Mango and I started down trail together. The wind continued to increase and the light rain turned to a more consistent wind driven, horizontal snow. At the sight of real snow falling, Gramma Lissa, who is from Southern California, yelled at me through the roar of wind, “I’ve never been in falling snow before. What do we do, pitch our tents?”  I yelled back at her, “Hell no. We’ve got to get off the ridge and out of this wind. Just pretend it’s still raining!” That worked and we all trudged on for miles until we finally began the descent out of the San Felipe Hills.  

As we dropped in elevation, the snow again turned to a light rain, the wind died down and we pitched camp in a deep canyon, well protected from the hurricane force winds above. Many people were caught by darkness on that ridge and were forced to pitch camp in the gale. Several tents were torn to shreds, and one poor guy, who took his sleeping bag out before his tent was fully up, had to stand on his bag to keep it from blowing away while he worked on his tent.  He inadvertently raised his foot for an instant, and his bag immediately sailed off into the night, off the ridge, never to be seen again. 

The three of us, safe in our little canyon campground, made our dinners in relative peace, and fell asleep to the soft drumming of rain on our tents.  Sometime in the early hours of the morning I noticed that all was very quiet, and I assumed that the rain had stopped. I woke again later, just at dawn, and could feel the lower part of my tent sagging against my feet. My initial thought was that the tent was just not pitched quite right, but when I kicked at it, I heard and felt a heavy blanket of snow fall off to the side. We were buried under four inches of heavy powder, and it was still snowing steadily outside.  

Luckily we were only a few miles of snow away from Barrel Springs, and a road.  We broke camp and hiked out through miles of snow-buried chaparral poppies, yucca and agave, a trail transformed overnight into a world of white with only hints of purple, yellow and green where the brilliant spring flowers still struggled to show. When we reached the road we were able to hitch a ride to Warner Springs, a desert hot-springs resort. Good food, a dry cottage and hot pools to soak in were just what we needed.

Meeting Mango proved to be a seminal moment in my hike. Not only did our friendship grow, but when it came time to hit the High Sierra, Mango was the one who proposed putting together a group of people who would promise to stay together through that awesomely beautiful and very dangerous stretch. Spring last year was unusually cold, with very little snow melt along the West Coast.  For us, this meant deep snow over the High Sierra passes, and more than four weeks of hiking and living on snow. I was blessed with great companions — Smiles, Little Engine, Plain Slice and Mango. Without them and our pact, I probably would not have dared try. Next week I’ll begin the stories of that journey, the hardest of the whole trail, but without question, the most rewarding and the most fun.

If you’re just catching up on this story, I’ve been profiling my High Sierra party of friends over the past few weeks, and the articles are searchable in Patch under my name. 

“Anyhow we never know where we must go, nor what guides we are to get--people, storms, guardian angels, or sheep...”    John Muir