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Walk About Martinez

A book that does justice to the beauty of Mount Diablo, a hike at the top, and we summit Forester Pass this week in Walk About Martinez

This week we start with a book, not a trail — Mount Diablo: The Extraordinary Life and Landscapes of a California Treasure.  Just released, it features the work of preeminent nature photographer Stephen Joseph and the writing of Linda Rimac Colberg. It is huge and it is beautiful. Joseph has captured the moods and expressions, grandeur and intimacies of our mountain, and put them together in a book that is simply stunning.

He shows us Diablo from all angles, all seasons, and the surrounding open spaces.  My snapshots a few weeks ago of the North Peak waterfalls may give you an idea of what’s up there, but Joseph’s make you feel as if you are there. The oaks become personal, characters in the telling of a mountain’s story, ancient and solitary.  

Martinez resident and land programs director for Save Mount Diablo, Seth Adams, sums it up on the jacket of the book.  “As Ansel Adams was to Yosemite, Stephen Joseph is to Mount Diablo.  His photographs move beyond paper and ink and rise to the level of fine art.” They do indeed, and if there ever was a “coffee table book” that rises above “coffee table,” this is it.  If you don’t buy it for yourself, buy it for someone else and spend some time poring over it before you give it away.  

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It’s not often we see our hills portrayed with such sensitive artistry. Sheila Grilli Booksellers, downtown at 610 Ferry St., is sure to have it. You’ve got a high recommendation from me for this one.  I bought my copy at the Visitor Center on Mount Diablo a week ago, and carried it back down trail to the car. It’s not in the “ultra light” category, so I won’t be carrying it any farther than my living room.

Now for our trail. In step with this lovely book, Katie and I recently hiked the Mary Bowerman Trail, which is an easy .7 mile loop around the summit of Mount Diablo. It’s a short walk, much of it on a paved path, sporting the best views the mountain has to offer because you are very near the summit. On the day we hiked it, we were at the tail end of a storm so the air was filled with moisture. We didn’t have the clarity I’ve seen before, when the clouds have completely blown through and the air is like crystal.  

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This is a great trail for those who are not strong hikers; there is nothing steep and no mud. At the end of the first paved quarter mile or so is seating on a deck looking toward the northwest, Mount Tamalpais, and the wine country, with Martinez in midview.  

As you move around the summit, you’ll eventually meet with the most expansive view of the Sierra Nevada visible from anywhere short of an airplane. On an exceptional day you can even pick out Half Dome in Yosemite.  

This trail is dedicated to botanist Mary Bowerman, who was the co-founder of the land trust Save Mount Diablo.  This organization has taken Mount Diablo from fewer than 7,000 acres of public land in the 1950s, to 100,000-plus acres today in more than 40 contiguous parks and open spaces.  

The trail begins at the lower summit parking lot, about 100 feet up from the restrooms. Pick up a nature trail brochure if you want to learn more about what you’re seeing, what’s growing nearby, and what the story of that rock under your feet is. When you return to the parking lot, either drive to the upper lot or walk up to the summit and check out the new visitor center. A vast improvement over the old one, it’s much more inviting and even has a little seating nook around a gas fireplace to warm you on a cold winter day at the top. 

If you want an easy trail with a view to die for, give the Mary Bowerman a look, and then realize that it’s just the beginning of miles and miles of trail connected to this mountain peak.

Pacific Crest Trail Stories: Waking up at Tyndall Creek, just north of Mount Whitney, after the evening Shabbat trail service (see last week's Walk About for the details), our band of six faced the High Sierra in all its might. In the lower 48, there is no other gathering of peaks to match it for grandeur or altitude. The Sierra Nevada lift up at an awkward angle, sheer on the Nevada side, but also tilted north to south so that the southern portion of the range is easily twice as high as the area north of Tahoe. 

The “High Sierra” begins with Whitney, the highest mountain in the continental United States, and extends all the way north to Sonora Pass at Hwy. 108. The several hundred miles between these points is simply the most jaw-dropping slice of mountains in the country.  

The Rockies, with their belted bands of gold, blue, and red sedimentary stone, are sublime, like the great brush strokes of a painter gone mad with color and line. The Northern Cascade’s canyons and cirques of forest green, fogs and mists, echo classical Chinese landscape artists.  

The High Sierra, however, is not brush strokes on nature’s canvas. These are mountains built by a God with hammer and chisel. From the domes of Yosemite to the finely sculpted canyons and peaks in Kings Canyon and Sequoia, it is as if nature took Michelangelo in hand and said, “Sculpt me a mountain!”  The colors are gray on gray with highlights of black, and fields of brilliant snow, so that the form and shape, the massiveness, become preeminent. One grand escarpment after another builds ever higher, then drops to canyons, frozen lakes in every depression. 

The thrust of the uplift staggers the eye, and puts in perspective the small creatures trudging beneath, backpacks and hiking sticks slowly moving against the size of the landscape. It’s a place that makes clear my insignificance, and leaves me to revel in the majesty that has given me a life just now, on this field of snow. 

Really big mountains can do that. Most of the time it’s one foot after another, slog, uphill and down, but the breathtaking nature of these mountains can shake you.   

At Crabtree Meadows, two nights prior, the Pacific Crest Trail had joined the John Muir Trail. We would be hiking both until Tuolumne Meadows in Yosemite, several weeks up trail. The five miles from Tyndall Creek to Forester Pass took us above timberline with no clear path. We spread out over the snow, all eyes searching for signs of the PCT/JMT, working our way ever north, with topographical maps to keep us on course. Some of the time we had footprints that seemed to be going in the right direction, and every so often, a bit of trail surfaced, and we would yell “PCT!” We’d all move in that direction, and keep searching for the next sign that we were on the right path. It was frustrating and fun at the same time.

The higher we got, the less important finding the trail became, because the vast snowfields made the whereabouts of the trail superfluous. We simply went north, keeping the side of Diamond Mesa to the east, eventually coming to a great glacial bowl fronting an almost sheer face of granite. The slight notch, more than a thousand feet above us, was Forester Pass.  

From a distance we saw only rock and a thin snowy chute below the pass.  As we got closer, lines on the face of the cliff became visible.  Impossibly scratched into the sheer wall was a trail, switchbacking up the eastern side, then crossing “the chute” and ascending on the west to the very top.  The slopes below were long, steep snowfields, from which the trail eventually emerged.  

Although that trail looked as thin as a dime, we believed in trails. We did joyous trail dances when we found them, and were willing to follow a trail anywhere. Just get us off this unending snow! The trick would be climbing the lower slopes until we could reach the exposed trail. Then the chute, but we wouldn’t worry about that until we got there.

Shortly before we reached the base of the climb, we had been joined by three other thru hikers who had camped near us at Tyndall Creek the evening before, 21-year-old Double Check, and his 16-year-old brother, Calorie (their trail names).  Traveling with them was Shin, a Japanese hiker in his late 20s.  

I don’t know how Double Check got his trail name, but one can only guess why a 16-year-old boy would become “Calorie” on a trail where you never seemed to carry enough food to really fill you up. Thank God I wasn’t 16. I was starving at 57!  

Double Check came up to me and asked quite seriously if I thought it would be a good idea to climb the chute instead of climbing to the exposed switchbacks. He didn’t have an ice axe, and I told him it was a bad idea because there was a rocky outcrop in the middle of the chute that you could kill yourself on if you slipped.  

As we all started up the snowy incline to the trail, the two brothers diverged and headed for the chute. Shin followed us. 

The snow was steep, and we ascended with crampons and other traction devices, ice axes ready to “self arrest” if we slipped. The camaraderie and encouragement of the group made it so much easier than it would have been otherwise. Just having people close by in case of a fall somehow made it all right, even if there was nothing they could do but pick up the pieces if you did slip. 

One foot in front of the other, and suddenly, there was the trail. What had seemed impossibly narrow, just barely clinging to the cliff, was quite stable and downright wide in places. It was straight down, with lots of air on the outer face, but so much easier than snow. The engineering of it was incredible, being carved from the living rock in places or built up of great stones stacked up in crevices to hold the trail in place. This rocky path will be here long after we are gone.  

Our final challenge was crossing the chute. If the snow had been avalanche prone, it would have been unthinkable, but we had good snow and tracks cut by previous hikers. If you just didn’t look down, and put one foot in each track, it was no big deal. Certain death if somehow you screwed up, however. 

There were other hikers at the top who gave us each a hand over the last bit of snow, and then the sense of relief, elation and utter joy just took over. We cheered and hugged each other. We were on top of the world, at the highest point on the Pacific Crest Trail, and we were all here together. Double Check and Calorie had made it safely up the chute and greeted each of us as we summited.  

We knew there were quite a number of High Sierra passes to come. What we didn’t know was just how hard some of them would be, and that there were accidents and injuries in the offing, as well as some of the best times of our lives.

But on this day, we had crested the first, the highest of them all. 

"…their eager, childlike attention was refreshing to see as compared with the decent, deathlike apathy of weary civilized people, in whom natural curiosity has been quenched in toil and care and poor, shallow comfort." 

John Muir (Wilderness Essays)

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