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Walk About Martinez - Snowy Diablo

A snow hike on Mount Diablo, Plain Slice and a jump to the desert this week in Walk About Martinez.

Snow, snow and more snow.  The almonds are in bloom, and Mount Diablo is covered in snow! The hike I did last Friday with my daughter Sarah and friend Roman was right in the thick of it.  

We had all planned on a four-day snowshoe camping trip on Glacier Point Road in Yosemite. When one of the group couldn’t get out of work, we used that as an excuse to change plans in the face of unrelenting storms last weekend. I chickened out this time. I think it probably is the first prudent thing I’ve done where snow and hiking are concerned.  

Is this a sign of maturity? Have I finally grown up? Not on your life. We turned around and did a wonderful hike in the rain and snow Friday on Mount Diablo instead.

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If you’ve never hiked up there in a storm, it is out of this world. It feels like you’re no longer in the Bay Area, but have been transported to a vast wilderness, somewhere far, far away. Look at the weather first to make sure it’s really going to be lousy, then pile on the warm clothes, rain pants a jacket, hat and gloves, grab hiking poles, a good map and some food and water, then hit the slopes!

If you’ve trained in inclement conditions, you know what to expect. There’s a big difference between cold hands and hypothermia, which causes your core temperature to drop.  In the one case it’s uncomfortable, in the other, life threatening.  If you have never played in the rain or snow, you have no experiential way of knowing the difference between wet and warm, and wet and dangerously cold.  

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The seven-mile hike we took around Mount Diablo's summit, and up and over the top, was one of the most exhilarating of the season. This is a serious hike and has strenuous sections, but both ends of it are of moderate difficulty and quite beautiful. 

The rangers had blocked the North Gate Road at Juniper Camp, just below the 3,000 foot level, so we began our hike here. The snow was falling but not sticking at this elevation as we walked to the end of the campground and continued northwest onto the grassy hills overlooking Concord, Walnut Creek and Danville. We were sandwiched between a thick fog below and the storm clouds above, which gave us beautiful views of the foothills without the intrusion of the cities lying below, blanketed in fog.  

The trail starts at the far end of Juniper Camp on Deer Flat Road. Hike about .5 mile to the junction of Burma Road and turn right, continuing on Deer Flat Road for 1.15 miles until you again turn right onto Meridian Ridge Road. Follow this uphill .75 mile and turn right again on Bald Ridge Trail, which you continue on for 1.25 miles to Prospectors Gap. This is the saddle between the two peaks of Mount Diablo, a point easily viewed from Martinez.  

From Prospectors Gap, turn right onto the North Peak trail, hiking 1 mile to Devils Elbow, where the trail meets Summit Road. Follow the trail to the right, above the road for .3 mile to the Lower Summit parking lot. It’s a short hike, less than .25 mile, to the summit. To complete the loop back to your car, walk to the far end of the lower parking lot, where you enter the Juniper Trail. It’s just one mile downhill to Juniper Camp.

Chaparral in the snow is a magical contradiction of chemise, ceanothus and low hanging bay bows all draped in icy froth. As the snow falls, the grass and mosses, so emerald at the start, shade to gray and are eventually just a hint of spring under a frosty burden of white.  

It’s an experience my father shared with me when I was a little guy, and now I was sharing it with my daughter. We passed five other intrepid hikers while we were out, but the best of all was to find two families in the Juniper parking lot with really little kids, buttoning them up, putting on their mittens and pulling out the sleds for a hike up the trail we had just come down. Their spirits were high, the kids were in heaven in the falling snow and there was hardly anyone else around to crowd the experience.  

Mount Diablo is right in our own back yard, offering trails that rival any wilderness walks I found all summer on the Pacific Crest Trail. Yet everyone waits for the snow to stop falling to go up and enjoy it. Try it someday while its at its wild, wind-whipping best during a winter storm. Be prudent, be safe and give the rangers a call if you have questions. But try it if you can.

Mount Diablo State Park can be reached at www.mdia.org/spinfo.htm.

Save Mount Diablo, the land trust largely responsible for the size of our wonderful mountain park and involved in the preservation of all the lands contiguous to it, can be reached at www.savemountdiablo.org

My recommendation for a map of Mount Diablo is the “Mount Diablo, Los Vaqueros” map published by Save Mount Diablo and REI. 

If you have any questions regarding snow travel, or want to learn proper “self-arrest” techniques or any of myriad snow-related skills, I highly recommend you contact Ned Tibbets, director and chief instructor of Mountain Education out of South Shore Lake Tahoe.  Ned thru hiked the Pacific Coast Trail (PCT) in 1974 and the Continental Divide Trail in 1980, and is an official “mentor” of the PCT Association. He is a member of the ski patrol at Heavenly Ski Resort, and is regularly involved in search-and-rescue operations in the Sierra in winter. He offers a three-day weekend course done on a donation basis teaching winter camping, traveling over snow, navigation, avalanche awareness etc.  Ned happened to be 10 minutes up the trail when we needed an air evacuation on Kearsarge Pass, in the High Sierra, so I’ve seen him in action. He is a wonderful guy and a regular contributor to the PCT list, the e-mail forum many of us subscribe to. If you are interested in learning snow-survival techniques, contact him at ned@mountaineducation.org

Pacific Crest Trail Stories:

Plain Slice, that was Adam's trail name. As in a plain slice of pizza. No good New Yorker would dream of topping a great slice of corner shop New York pizza with anything but tomato sauce and cheese. Our mile high, pineapple, sausage, ham, pepperoni, mushroom, onion, red pepper, kitchen sink kind of California specials are an abomination to any self-respecting New Yorker. You can ask my wife Katie, she’s from Queens, and she’ll tell ya.  

Adam got his trail name when he went into Idyllwild one day expecting to be able to buy a single slice of pizza as you can on any street in Manhattan. When he found out that in California you have to buy the whole pizza, he returned with such a hang dog expression that he was named on the spot. Plain Slice is a documentary film maker from Long Island, N.Y., in his late 20s, who lives in Brooklyn and whose partner is Little Engine.  

I met Adam — he hadn’t gotten a trail name yet — when I stumbled upon him and Little Engine in Idyllwild.  You’ll have to pull up to get the whole story.  This was just as I was trying to decide what to do and where to go. The Search and Rescue (SAR) people had been involved in their first rescue on Mount San Jacinto, (in early May on the 9,000-foot tall mountain of snow just west of Palm Springs) and they were asking us thru hikers to please hike around the mountain and give the snow time to melt. 

After a day of deliberations and multiple visits to the PCT Association’s office, 13 of us decided to rent cars and jump ahead to Agua Dulce, the first town after the Southern Mountains, just before the trail enters the Mojave Desert, and then return to the San Jacinto Mountains after a few weeks of warm weather and melt off, or so we hoped.  

Agua Dulce is also the home of Hiker Heaven, run by Jeff and Donna (L-Rod is her trail name) Saufley. These folks are trail angels of the first order. They’ve got a small horse ranch up a rural road, and are hikers themselves. Mainly though, they just love thru hikers. They have lawns to camp on, a garage full of hiker’s resupply packages and info on transportation. But beyond the lawns are a large trailer and a small camper, set up as home base for thru hikers. Showers, laundry and a kitchen are all for use by “smelly Hiker Trash,” as we were proud to call ourselves. In this case, smelly was the operative word. A shower was one of the real niceties of bumping into trail angels with a house.

I began bonding with quite a few of the 12 who jumped forward with me. Bag Lady and Tumbleweed were from New York; Kiwi and Moa, two elderly gents from New Zealand; Yellowstone and Skyward from Montana and Idaho respectively; Bacon and Jasmine, a lovely young couple from Wisconsin; Amoeba, one of my favorite people on trail, a 65-year-old retired corporate worker; I believe an attorney from upstate New York; and Plain Slice and Little Engine from Brooklyn.

We all left Hiker Heaven at different times the following morning, but before Plain Slice, Little Engine or I had even gotten close to the edge of town, we were deep in conversation. We talked about our families and the similarities in our Jewish/Scandinavian mixed marriages.  

It was totally fun, and we were engrossed in conversation when a guy in a pickup pulled over and asked us if we were PCT hikers. We proudly said we were. Then without even laughing at us, he told us that we had missed the trail about a mile back. What a guy — our third trail angel in two days. He took us in like lost puppies and drove us back. The worst part of this was passing Amoeba, who was hiking the wrong road because she had followed us! Our angel dropped us off and headed back for Amoeba. 

Our first day of hiking together and we were already lost. Well, we had many more “directionally challenged” days after that. Somehow we always made it back to the trail and ultimately farther north, always north. I hiked with them almost consistently from that day until the grand old Timberline Lodge on Mount Hood.  (Yes, that’s the hotel from “The Shining,” Jack Nicholson’s scariest film ever.)  They had both sets of parents visiting with them for several days, and I didn’t need the time off trail, so we separated.

The way those two cared for each other, and all of us for that matter, was part of the reason I stayed with them. I’ve never been around two such balanced people. There was never a fight, not even an argument over thousands of miles, with many mistakes by all of us, and yet nothing but support for each other all the way. One night, long into the trail, I kind of waxed poetic about it. Actually, I got real gushy because I’d never hiked with two people who were so consistently sweet to one another. Finally, Plain Slice couldn’t stand it any longer, and leaned over to me and said very quietly in my ear, “Yeah, but sometimes in the tent at night, we have whisper fights.” We all rolled on the ground laughing.  

Trail News:

In other trail news, we had a great, soggy group hike earlier in the week on the Carquinez Scenic Drive. This is a great place to hike in the rain because there is no mud. 

Then, on Saturday we hosted four long-distance hikers for a tour of the John Muir House and a crab boil. They were Piper and Trail Hacker, an author and “computer guy” from Santa Barbara, and Tarzan and Zelda from Roseville, a businessman and an unemployed mom, as she’s proud to tell you. We talked all day, drank Alhambra Valley wine long into the evening and pored over tales of the trail. Tarzan and Zelda and I often were within a day or so of each other last summer, and even in the same restaurants, but never really met until Saturday. My nefarious plot seems to be working, in that my wife, Katie, really liked them all. If I can make it all positive enough, and the people and experiences rich enough, maybe when she retires in a couple of years ...

“Nature chose for a tool, not the earthquake or lightning to rend and split asunder, not the stormy torrent or eroding rain, but the tender snow-flowers noiselessly falling through unnumbered centuries.”  John Muir

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