Walk About Martinez

The storm door is still wide open on our usually dry state, and the flowers are loving it.  Buttercups are beginning their bloom on Mounts Diablo and Wanda. Popcorn flower is not far behind and filaree dots the trail purple in places. The longer the rain lasts, the more spectacular the flowers are going to be.  

Over the next two months, try to make Mount Wanda a regular walk because it has the best wildflower display in the area. Federal land doesn’t allow grazing and the flowers are stunning. Those little hills go through a whole pallet of color atop the deep Irish green of spring. Carpets of white chickweed and nemophila, yarrow standing tall, yellow buttercup and mules ear, golden fiddlenecks and poppies, blue-eyed grass — the state’s smallest iris — red paintbrush and eventually purple brodiaea, Chinese houses and stunningly beautiful shooting star all are within a stone's throw of the park and ride at the corner of Alhambra Avenue and Franklin Canyon Road.

But today we’re going someplace else, a beautiful hilltop bench that is worth a short uphill hike for a bit of quiet time. It’s a spot where I love to go and just sit.  Overlooking Shepherd’s Canyon and the Carquinez Straits, I usually find it empty, but have come upon artists sketching and others reading or just admiring the view.  

From a quiet spot on a hill, the world looks manageable. Your blood slows down to the rhythm of the shading live oak. If you sit still you might even find the pulse of the place. Listen for the wind, the call of a crow or the sounds magnified from the water below. Tugs and trains pass intermittently, mixing with the noise of nature.

Our lives are filled to the brim with hectic sounds and movement from morning till dark. Even our entertainments are frenetic; TV, movies, concerts and theatre all created to stimulate, to juice us and make us think or feel. While this bench on a hill also stimulates me, awakening my senses to the smells in the grass and the sound of air, cool or warm on my skin, it is a sensory gift that brings introspection and quiet.  I feel the place and am not taken by it. Rather it awakens me to my own heartbeat in synch with the swell of life around me. Unruffled, a sense of me on a bench, on a hill overlooking water and trees, grass and rock. A quiet place.  

Someone before me felt the spot deeply enough to put this bench here in honor of “Leah.” I don’t know who she was, or who loved her enough to put up a bench in her name, but it gave me a spot to just sit. Their love is also a part of this place.

You can find this bench by driving to the end of the Carquinez Scenic Drive and parking at the green gate at the bottom of the canyon. That’s the entrance to the Carquinez Regional Shoreline Park and the trail up Shepherd’s Canyon. Enter the gate and hike a few hundred yards up the canyon until you find a dirt road branching sharply uphill to the left. Here’s where hiking poles really come in handy. Hike up this hill about 1/4 of a mile until you see a small trail leading off to the left. From the dirt road you’ll be able to see the bench at the end of the trail just at the top of the hill. After your climb, you’ll need a few minutes of sitting on it. You’re winded, but don’t leave when you’ve got your breath back. Stay a bit longer. Get a feel for the place and maybe come back again.  

I hiked up here a few days ago, just as the clouds were thickening and a fine mist had begun swirling about. Rain was only minutes away and the atmosphere had tightened in expectation, or maybe it was only me, knowing that in a short time I’d be wet. I stopped at the bottom of the climb, wrestling with an old umbrella that had rusted shut, struggling to open it and not get my fingers caught in the mechanism of wire and spring, when I heard my name called out from the trail above. A figure in blue was easing his way down hill, Gerry Tellus and his hiking poles, just ahead of the rain.  

You never know who you’ll meet on a trail, but in my experience it’s usually someone worth a moments' chat, and Gerry is worth a chat. Positive, and always with people and the town at heart, he’s a great guy. We’ve got our marvelous hills, beautiful shoreline, regional, city and land trust open spaces, but it’s the great people in this town who make it so special. Bumping into Gerry on a deserted trail, a mile outside of town, just as the skies were about to open, made that clear.  

I hiked to the top and would have stayed longer had I brought a worthy umbrella, but in the name of keeping my camera dry, I took only a few pictures and left. If you find this bench on a nice day, stick around for a while.

Trail Stories: By the middle of May last year, I had hiked about 500 miles of deserts and southern mountains on the Pacific Crest Trail, primarily with Little Engine and Plain Slice (their trail names). I had to leave trail for a family wedding on Whidbey Island, north of Seattle, a wedding I wouldn’t have missed. Besides, I had volunteered to cater the affair and would have been dog meat in the family if I hadn’t come through.  

During those first five weeks, I had gone from being a section hiker to deciding that I simply had to follow a dream I’d had for years and hike the whole darned thing, Mexico to Canada, 2,650 miles over the highest mountain ranges in the West. I was simply having too much fun and didn’t want to quit.  

The three-year drought had broken and the mountains were full of snow. April and May had been unseasonably cold in the deserts, which meant very little melt off in the higher mountains. Many people I met in SoCal were hiking around the higher peaks and passes in the San Jacinto, San Gabriel, San Gorgonio and San Bernardino mountains, and we hadn’t even gotten to the really big stuff yet, the High Sierra. San Jacinto and Old Baldy, two of Southern California’s highest mountains, top out above 10,000 feet. The High Sierra passes we’d be crossing were over 13,000 and that wasn’t the peaks.  

The High Sierra is roughly the area between Mount Whitney in the south to Sonora Pass, north of Yosemite. North of Sonora the elevation is much lower, and by late May, the snow report had sent many people north of the High Sierra, with plans to return and hike it later in the season.     

While in Washington state, I considered hiking south from Canada, and drove up to Steven’s Pass to see the snow level in the Cascades for myself. I found snow at 3,000 feet with solid cover by 4,000. The trail tops 6,000 feet in Washington, so that wasn’t a realistic option. On the drive back to the Bay Area, I checked out Shasta, thinking of hiking south from Dunsmuir. Snow levels were still too low to offer any ordinary trail hiking on the PCT and there were reports of massive “blowdowns” —trees knocked over and broken by the weight of snow and wind — of more than 300 trees per mile for hundreds of miles. This proved to be the end of the trail for some of the people who jumped north. Climbing over that many huge downed trees in snow was simply too hard.

During the drive home, I got a call from Little Engine, who was in Lone Pine, on the eastern side of the High Sierra, inviting me to join her boyfriend, Plain Slice, and Mango, the 63 year old Tennessean, with whom I’d also hiked many miles. They had decided to form a group that would promise to stick together over the High Sierra. I was delighted! At that point I had no idea where to go because there was no easy place to hike this darn trail with most of it still under deep snow that just wasn’t melting.  

I got home, put together food boxes that my wife, Katie, would be mailing to me all summer long, said goodbye and headed south with a dear friend, Scott Matthews, who was trail angeling me to Lone Pine, and the certainty of living on snow for the next month or more.  

Plain Slice and Little Engine had climbed Mount Whitney from the east side the day before I joined them and they were beat. So we all took an extra zero day (no mileage) and checked into the Hiker Hostel right across from the Alabama Hills Restaurant with its famous hiker breakfasts.  The restaurant was named after the wild, weathered rock formations just west of town that have been used in western movies since the advent of cinema. During the Civil War, prospectors sympathetic to the Confederate cause and excited by the exploits of the CSS Alabama, an unusually successful Southern warship, named the hills in its honor. It was sunk by the Union ship USS Kearsarge, but Alabama became a popular name with miners supporting the North. They used it on a mining district, a mountain and a High Sierra pass.  By the end of the week, Kearsarge Pass would take on a whole new significance as it became the site of an airlift rescue.  

Lone Pine itself is one of the great trail towns of the PCT, and worth a visit by anybody willing to drive that far south of Lake Tahoe on Hwy 395.  Situated in the Owens Valley, on its northern end is the Japanese internment camp of Manzanar, now a fascinating and very moving, National Historic site, where the story of the plight of displaced Japanese Americans, U.S. citizens, is beautifully told. At the southern end of town is a movie museum detailing more than 150 movies, especially westerns, and dozens of TV shows that have been filmed in the area. Rising to the east are the White Mountains, and with them the world’s oldest living tree, the bristlecone pine living to nearly 5,000 years. But the view to the west is why you come to Lone Pine. The backdrop for this little western town is the towering High Sierra, Mount Whitney in its midst.    

The Sierra Nevada lifts up out of the earth as if a great teeter totter were rising with all the mountains of California on its back. There is a gradual incline when coming from the coast, but on the back side, the Nevada side, the mountains rise to their highest summits straight up out of the desert. From Lone Pine, nothing blocks that view and it is magnificent. There is not a town in this country with such a drop dead, visual setting. 

Walking through the entry area of the Hiker Hostel, I heard a lovely French accent, and saw Smiles, a Swiss woman whom I had met at the PCT Kickoff, many hundreds of miles before. I’d had a quick and deep connection over a discussion of wilderness and John Muir. She loved mountains, and loved what we Americans had done to preserve so many of them. Smiles didn’t know where to go next on her thru hike.  She didn’t want to enter the High Sierra alone, as she had just said goodbye to a hiking partner she’d been with over the deserts.  

She was a bit dispirited and was about to try and catch a bus north. I let her know what I’d seen in Washington state and Northern California, where the snow was still so deep and then I asked her to join us. It was a gamble based on a brief connection at kickoff, since I knew her much less than Mango, Plain Slice and Little Engine. But something had clicked at kickoff and I trusted my instincts. For her, it also was a big commitment to people she did not know but would have to trust over the toughest terrain of the whole trip. Deadly serious, in fact, because we would be in situations in which our lives depended on each other.  

For the rest of the summer Smiles would tell the story of how in a half hour's deliberation, relying on a 10-minute meeting at kickoff, she had changed plans completely and decided to join us on an attempt to walk the entire length of the High Sierra in early spring, in deep snow, with people she did not know. Her skills and her strength proved invaluable to us all, as did the skills and strengths we all possessed.  

With Smiles on board we had ourselves a J.R.R. Tolkien fellowship of sorts. A group of people who really didn’t know what was in store for them, but who had vowed to help one another meet the obstacles up trail not alone, but with friends. Over the long haul, over the High Sierra, that was the most important thing any of us possessed.

"From garden to garden, ridge to ridge, I drifted enchanted . . . gazing afar over domes and peaks, lakes and woods, and the billowy glaciated fields. . . . In the midst of such beauty, pierced with its rays, one's body is all one tingling palate. Who wouldn't be a mountaineer! Up here all the world's prizes seem nothing" 

- John Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra