Walk About Martinez

Do you love parks?  I do, and I especially love parks where you can really get outside, smell the flowers in spring, the perfume of an oak/bay forest, or the cool air on your skin of the redwoods when all else is summer dry.  Best of all, parks where you can take a walk, stretch your legs, and feel for a bit like you’re strolling in a wilderness.  And now imagine a place, a county where at the height of the Depression, 1934, the people had enough forethought to vote to tax themselves to create a park like this.   

That’s Alameda County, later joined by Contra Costa County, and it’s the East Bay Regional Parks District.  Now at over 100,000 acres, in 65 parks, the EBRPD encompasses urban bike paths and restored creeks, the merry-go-round, model trains and little farm of Tilden, children’s programs and backpack trips, the history preserved at Black Diamond Mines, and the wilds of Sunol Regional Wilderness or Round Valley.  They encompass one of the largest urban wildernesses in the world, and are the envy of regional planners and folks who love parks nationwide.

We pay for ‘em.  They’re ours, just as much as the Great Smokey Mountains still belong to the children of the children of the Southern Mountain states who organized grammar school penny drives to save the great forests of the East, or the folks who argued and fought for the preservation of Yellowstone or Acadia National Parks.  But these parks are within a short walk or a drive of our homes.  They’re our bit of the wild.   Check out the great video at their web site.

Starting today, I intend to visit and explore every one of them in a series of columns, one or two per month until we’ve seen them all.  These are the gems in our midst, “places to play in and pray in,” as Muir put it when he argued for national parks.  Today we begin with the Carquinez Straits Regional Shoreline Park and the trails leading from the Eckley Pier.  

This is a park in two parts.  It borders the west side of Martinez with many of the trails I’ve written about in earlier columns.  If you follow our shoreline east, you’ll come to land managed by the Regional Parks for the Port Costa Conservation Society surrounding the little town of Port Costa.  East of that, you come to Crockett, the second half of the Carquinez Straits Regional Park, and the Eckley Pier.  

Situated a mile or so west of the old C&H Sugar Factory, and nestled at the bottom of a wooded canyon, the Eckley Pier, juts out amid the ruins of our fishing and maritime history.  Walk out onto the well maintained fishing pier --no fishing license required by the way -- and you’ll see the burnt top pilings that supported miles of sardine canneries.  Joe Dimaggio’s family, as well as so many old time Martinez families of Italian and Portuguese background, came to this area to fish for herring and sardines.

Immediately west of the pier, you’ll see a pile of metal debris just off shore.  That’s all that’s left of the Garden City, a lovely old wooden Sacramento ferryboat that sat there on the mud for many years, and was always a highlight of any sailing or kayaking trip on the Carquinez Straits.  It burned down before the land on shore became a Regional Park.  I still remember my disappointment at finding it gone one day, and just a pile of metal boilers and pipe.  

From the pier you can hike up onto the bluffs for several miles to the east, eventually coming to the old town of Port Costa, or west for a mile to the edge of Crockett.  The trails are good, and the elevation gains moderate, so on the day we came, we hiked in both directions, and found that this park is really all about the views.  

West you take in the hills, the Interstate 80 bridges and mouth of San Pablo Bay, where the water of the entire western slopes of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, funnels from the Straits into the Bay.  North it’s the Benicia State Park, Glen Cove and the town of Benicia, and to the east, the long swing of river bend that gives us the Martinez Shoreline and Mt. Diablo in the background.  

We were all amazed at the beauty of the views, and the fascinating shoreline, a mix of old and current industrial and rail, framed to the south by pristine hills, grazing lands and ribbons of forest down each canyon.  When we hiked west we ended in a monarch butterfly habitat, with signage, but no monarchs to be seen this time of year.  In the hills higher above is the Crockett Hills Regional Park on the ridges off Cummings Skyway, and we’ll be hiking this in future.  

It’s all close.  It’s lovely, and well worth the short drive to explore the other end of our shoreline ridges.  If you’re interested, you can find a map here. 

Pacific Crest Trail Stories: Morning in the High Sierra.  The stillness of dawn, just a pink glow at the tops of the peaks.  Then the highest point is struck by a brilliant beam of light as the sun begins its descent into the shadow of the canyon.  This is not an unusual morning, which is to say, this is one of the most beautiful mornings any of us has ever witnessed. 

On trail we live by the rhythms of the day.  There’s no need to plan, the day will happen.  We wonder at the weather, but for weeks now we’ve been blessed with an unusually cool spring, slowing the melt off and keeping the snow firm.  It’s the hardest hiking any of us has ever done, but it could be a lot worse.  A warm spell with this much snow would mean a hundred miles of postholing and even more dangerous stream crossings.  But each day we wake to a dawn that could be the morning of the world.  

June 25, 2010, and we’re camped just beyond Silver Pass, and have a choice to make.  We can hike pure, staying exactly to the Pacific Crest Trail/John Muir Trail, and hike up and over a long snowy section to Red’s Meadow and Devil’s Postpile, or take a slightly longer, lower route down the Cascade Valley Trail, through a reputedly dangerous ford, which will take us past the Ida Bell Hot Springs.

On trail, a few miles from camp, we met a greying man who passed out two dollar bills to everyone he met, in commemoration of his own thru hike of the PCT years before. I don’t remember the significance of the money, but it meant something to him.  Hey, it was money.  We took it.  

He was a strange, prophet looking kind of guy, and very animated.  We asked him if he had ever hiked the Cascade Valley Trail before, and he became even more animated as he described his own near death experience years before at the creek crossing we would have to negotiate.  He was adamant that we should brave the snow and not the stream.

We weighed the options that morning as we walked, a steep climb and miles of route finding through a snowy forest or a lovely trail and the first flowers of spring with a stream crossing that could kill us, ending with a hot springs soak.  The old Scout leader in me came out, and for the second time I voted for taking the safer, harder route.  Ah, heck, I was just chicken.  I like my life.  But Little Engine and Smiles argued that the guy we’d just met was weird, and we were good at making dangerous crossings.  For the second time I was voted down, and for the second time in retrospect, alive to tell the tale, I was so glad to have been out voted. 

The first time, several weeks earlier, our band of five had voted three to two to continue our transit north through the very snowy High Sierra, instead of catching a bus to Yosemite and hiking the lower JMT section first.  I had argued that it would give the higher, southern section, more time to melt out.  Given the cool weather we’d gotten, it wouldn’t have changed appreciably, and we’d had the time of our lives so far.

They were right again.  The ford was bad, but it was still early in the morning and the water level was lower than it would be later in the day, and we did just fine.  We scouted the stream and used the willow branches and a bit of a human chain to help each other across, and after a moderate climb and descent into the next valley, came upon a wonder of the High Sierra.  

The Ida Bell is not one spring, it is a whole series of lovely dammed up little rock pools of just right hot water.  You can soak in the shade of the pines, or out in a tall grass meadow in the glorious sun.  You can find privacy, or bathe and talk with one of the people camped nearby.  Smiles and I soaked long in the sun talking to a fellow who came every year and camped for a time in the peace of the place.  It’s a destination, and only a days hike south of Red’s Meadow.  I’ll be back.

Thoroughly cleaned and rested, we hiked down a thickly forested canyon for the rest of the afternoon, when we came upon another marvel of the trail, a bridge over a bad crossing.  Who would have thought.  Mango and I had hunted for a crossing and found none too promising, when we met a fellow hiker coming the other way who said, “Why don’t ya take the bridge?”  We looked down stream and felt a little sheepish when we finally spotted it, but that sure didn’t stop us from using it.  Now we really felt pampered, and we were at 6,300 feet, our lowest point in weeks.

Late afternoon was a pull uphill on the side of a ridge with no clear spots for a camp.  Then Little Engine and Plain Slice spotted a promontory, just a bit of a bushwhack off trail, that looked flat on top.  We made for it and found ourselves looking over a sheer cliff into a magnificent chasm.  The mountains rose on three sides and the canyon fell away between them.  Like our morning, it wasn’t anything out of the ordinary, just one of the most beautiful places we’d ever camped in our lives. 

We pitched our tents on the very edge, forest behind us, and nothing but air and rock beauty before us.  A small stream in the forest provided wild onions and watercress to our dinners, and all was right with the world.

The sun set, as it had risen, a band of pink light moving against the granite walls until it was just a bit of brilliance at the highest spire, and then only a glow across the infinity of sky.

Fresh beauty opens one's eyes wherever it is really seen, but the very abundance and completeness of the common beauty that besets our steps prevents its being absorbed and appreciated. It is a good thing, therefore, to make short excursions now and then to the bottom of the sea among dulse and coral, or up among the clouds on mountain-tops, or in balloons, or even to creep like worms into dark holes and caverns underground, not only to learn something of what is going on in those out-of-the-way places, but to see better what the sun sees on our return to common everyday beauty.  John Muir