Walk About Martinez -- Sobrante Ridge

Haze filled the sky between the hills and turned the horizon into a muddy layer cake of ridge line silhouettes, rising one above another.  I was climbing a trail out of a subdivision in Pinole with my friends, Brad and Elaine, into little 277 acre, Sobrante Ridge Regional Preserve. 

In a surprisingly short time we were on top.  Vistas opened in all directions, if somewhat muted by the midwinter smog.  Marin County and Mt. Tamalpais gleamed across San Pablo Bay through a fold in the nearby hills.  In spite of the haze, it appeared an enchantment of blue sky and water, the grey mountains etched into the smoky skyline.  The hills west of Martinez, rolled like waves behind Highway 4, but the air was too thick to pick out Mt. Diablo.  To the south, the ridges backing the cities of Richmond, El Cerrito and Berkeley completed the nearly 360 degree view.  

In my quest to explore all the East Bay Regional Parks over the next several years, I had picked a spot on the large, two county park map, surrounded by city; a spot on the map I’d never been to.  It was isolated from its much larger neighbors, Tilden and Wildcat Regional Parks and was reported to be home to the extremely rare Alameda manzanita, one of only two groves in existence.  

It’s always amazing to me how close to the hubbub of urban life a bit of nature can be and yet how far away it seems when I’m immersed in it.  In a very few steps up a trail I’ve shaken off the drive to get there and the business of the morning and find I’m as wide eyed as if I’d just looked out on Half Dome.  Getting outside can do that.  All it takes is a few trees, some weeds and a bit of dry grass, topped off with a view. 

After the short climb this lovely ridge trail led us through grasslands, chaparral, and finally into dense coast live oaks and the less common, laurel leaved, shreve oak.  As we passed the huge, gnarled trunks and sprawling limbs of centuries old, magnificent trees, I began to see the reason for the area's preservation.  Each was a work of art worth spending time contemplating, a moment of awareness of our place under their arching canopy. Their trunks were painted in lichens and moss, orange and black and green, the variegated textures, a palate of tactile and visual experience.

When the Manzanita Trail branched off the Sobrante Ridge Trail, we took the short descent to a path that loops through the grove of Alameda manzanita.  Fan like, their multiple, bright red trunks resemble giant exotic corals somehow removed from the sea and planted on this ridge, a rare wonder of the chaparral community.  Park District literature call them “one of California’s most beautiful manzanitas,” and as they spread above the trail, a net woven of leaves and twisted branches, I had to agree.  But that net is all about catching the sun and shading the soil.  This is a manzanita barren, an outcropping of siliceous soil so devoid of nutrients that live oak and the other ubiquitous East Bay flora have trouble here.  It is left to a rare manzanita to eek out an existence and grow, gnarled and lovely for the delight of casual hikers. 

The larger branches were peeling, the bark a patterned stippling of crimson curls or regularly fractured checkerboard flakes.  Most of the stems were vividly alive with the smooth red of manzanita life, but older branches, long dead, protruded grey, but splashed with brilliant chartreuse fungus. 

The sensually smooth bark of manzanita and its larger cousin madrone perspire and are cool to the touch on a hot summer day.  Native Americans would sprawl on them for relief, using them as a natural cooling post, something I’ve done on the larger manzanita trunks that grow on Mt. Diablo and at Henry Coe State Parks.  

This is a small preserve, all of it hike-able in just a few miles with no difficult trails.  It’s dotted by picnic tables and sitting spots offering views in one direction or another, and on the day we hiked, a bit of quiet.  It would be a great place for a quick getaway and a touch of wild, at times only feet from the backyards of the subdivisions below.  For a few miles, in a postage stamp sized preserve, we had a taste of what all our East Bay hills looked like a hundred years ago, and a glimpse of a rare plant suited for barren soils and a sunny hillside, as good a reason as any for saving a bit nature in the midst of human sprawl.

In memoriam:

We lost a great friend of the hills last week with the death at 92 of Hulet Hornbeck.  As head of Land Acquisition for the East Bay Regional Park District from the early 1960s until his retirement in 1985, he helped expand the District from its original eight parks and 13,000 acres to over 64,000 acres.  Working for the visionary General Director, William Penn Mott, Jr., the Park District grew to become the largest Regional Park District in America.  Hulet made that happen having been responsible for the purchase of over 50,000 acres during his career. 

If you’re hiking in Briones, Las Trampas, Diablo Foothills, Black Diamond Regional Mines or dozens of other wonderful wild preserves, you have Hulet to thank.  He did his work well and even after retirement, his legacy of preservation has continued through the policies of the District and those he taught.  At present the Parks and Regional Trails encompass over 100,000 acres and hundreds of miles of urban paths and wild land trails. 

Thursday, I took a hike with friends along the Franklin Hills backing Martinez, on the Hulet Hornbeck Trail, named in his honor.  The views are magnificent and the trails are still dry.  It’s a bit over three miles, but if you add the Shepherd’s Canyon loop to it, you’ve got a great seven mile walk in the wild and you haven’t even left Martinez.  It’s accessible from either end of town.  You can pick it up just behind the John Muir House at the end of Canyon Way, or leading up from the Nedjedly Staging area, down the hill from the pioneer cemetery on the Carquinez Scenic Drive. 

When you look out at an unencumbered view of the hills, from anywhere in Contra Costa or Alameda Counties, there’s a good chance you’re not seeing urban sprawl because of what Hulet accomplished.  As a person who hiked and trespassed on our local hills as a boy in the 1960s, before many of them were parks, I will be forever grateful.    

Thank you Hulet.

Greta Mart, Staff Reporter for the Martinez News-Gazette, wrote two great articles on Hulet, published in the January 10, 2012, edition, in the Martinez Patch.  The East Bay Regional Park District has also put together a fitting tribute. 

“The battle we have fought, and are still fighting for the forests is a part of the eternal conflict between right and wrong, and we cannot expect to see the end of it. ... So we must count on watching and striving for these trees, and should always be glad to find anything so surely good and noble to strive for.”   John Muir