Category Archives: November

Briones Regional Park from Alhambra Creek

Elizabeth and I have gone on a morning hike every Thanksgiving for the last three years. This year was no different.

We’d gone to Las Trampas in previous years, but today I wanted to try somewhere new, yet still nearby. I chose to hike the northeast part of Briones Regional Park. It’s just 20 minutes away and would leave enough time to prepare for Thanksgiving dinner afterward. The last time I’d been to that part of the park was a clear October day in 2006, when there were nice fall colors on the leaves of the blue and valley oaks.

I sometimes complain about the monotonously perfect weather we get in the Bay Area, but on days like today, when it’s 60 degrees with only a slight haze from overnight fog, I have to admit that it is nice to hike in a t-shirt and shorts in late November. I brought my fleece jacket in case I got cold.

We hiked south on the Alhambra Creek Trail. It’s a dirt road on the west side of Alhambra Creek with grassy hills on one side and the creek itself on the other. The hills bore a few blue oaks and the creek was lined with leafy oaks and California bay. The creek also had a few California buckeyes, but their leaves were long gone and only their mottled gray branches remained.

In the canyon ahead of us was a dark evergreen forest. It closed in as we climbed. The air grew cooler, the grass was replaced by ferns, and the trees cast a deep shade. I put on my jacket.

We walked a half mile through these shady woods until we reached a small crest where the forest gave way to a sunny grassland. Coyote brush was blooming, just as it was at Las Trampas two weeks ago.

We stopped at the Maricich Lagoons. Their water was muddy and their shores had been stomped into mud by cows. Despite being an unappealing scene to humans, the murky lagoons are perfect habitat for California newts and California tiger salamanders, which come there to breed. We walked around one of the lagoons, stepping carefully to avoid any cryptic amphibians, but could find none.

The haze layer was some 1,000 feet thick, which covered Mount Diablo’s lower elevations but left much of the 3,864-foot mountain exposed. Hiking above the haze at 1,400 feet on the Table Top and Spengler trails gave us excellent views of the peak.

The views ended on the Blue Oak Shortcut. We left the grassy highlands and were again plunged into a dark ravine where a stream trickled next to the trail and the tree trunks were covered with moss.

Why are the changes in vegetation so dramatic here? In the Appalachian Mountains, the difference in vegetation between a ridge and a ravine is unnoticeable if you’re not really paying attention. This isn’t because the plant species are the same, but because their growth forms are the same. Everywhere you go, the plants are mostly broadleaf deciduous trees with some conifers mixed in and shrubs in the understory. Here the differences are obvious. The climate, I guess, is on the borderline between what will support a forest and what will support a grassland. A slight change in aspect, soil, grazing history, or fire history is enough to tip the balance toward one or the other. But if we ignored the growth forms, would Appalachian hills exhibit the same variety of plants as Bay Area hills?

After passing by the park boundary and seeing a few roofs poking out from behind the trees, we climbed uphill, walking through a lovely woodland of blue oaks. We stopped for a little lunch at the top of the hill. At 1:30, we finished our hike with plenty of time to get ready for a big Thanksgiving dinner with family.

Twin Peaks and Eagle Peak

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Today’s plan was to hike a loop over Eagle Peak on single-track trails. We’d be joined by Elizabeth’s friend Alice, who had just finished an internship at the Siskiyou Crest Goat Dairy in southern Oregon and who is visiting us for a few days. We slept in this morning and didn’t get to the trailhead until 11. But no matter: the loop was only 7 miles.

Temperatures were in the 60s. There was a layer of clouds at 2,000 feet. They covered the summits of all the major peaks: Mount Diablo, Mount Olympia, and North Peak. Even our goal, Eagle Peak, the lowest of the four, was in the clouds.

Personally, I’d only been here on sunny days and was eager to see the landscape from within the clouds. I secretly hoped that Eagle Peak would stay in the clouds until we were on it. There’s something magical about going into the clouds using your own two feet. And we’d have good views regardless.

We left the foothills and started climbing up the ridges and canyons toward Eagle Peak. We were in the chaparral, and we’d stay in it for most of the day. The shrubs were about shoulder high, but sometimes they were tall enough to form a tunnel around the trail. Most abundant was chamise. But there were also sticky monkeyflower, buckbrush, and interior live oak. Bigberry manzanita had little white urn-shaped flowers and the toyon had little red berries.

We scrambled to the top of Mitchell Rock, our first summit of the day. It had a great view of the deep Mitchell Canyon and the web of little canyons that fed into it. The canyon bottoms were thick with evergreen trees. The ridges were covered by a mosaic of pale-green grassland, dark-olive chaparral, and woodlands.

After some more climbing we were on Twin Peaks, our second summit. We could see Mount Olympia and North Peak, their tops in the clouds. The sky above us was cold and gray. But as the clouds moved over Mount Diablo and descended its lee side, the air that held them grew warmer and drier, forcing the clouds to dissipate over the canyons to our left. The result was a shifting pattern of sun and shade on the canyons as shafts of light broke through the clouds.

From Twin Peaks, the trail took the crest of a ridge to the summit of Eagle Peak. The path led up a triangular silhouette of chaparral and a few pines before disappearing into the clouds a few hundred feet above us.

Soon we were hiking in the clouds, just as I’d hoped. A slight breeze carried the scent of the chaparral. The wind rushed through the trees—short, twisted California junipers and scattered gray pines. We put on our jackets and gloves. Mist accumulated on our faces. The temperature dropped to 54 degrees.

We stopped for lunch on the summit of Eagle Peak. Elizabeth and Alice posed for pictures. We were entirely in the clouds. It was as if our mountaintop were an island set in a white ocean. As we talked and ate, clouds poured continuously through Murchio Gap and swirled over Back Creek canyon.

By the time we left, the cloud layer had risen a little and we could see all around. The hike to Murchio Gap from Eagle Peak, with views in every direction, is a great ridgewalk on any day, but today the clouds streaming just overhead made it even more dramatic.

At Murchio Gap, we turned around and walked down into Back Creek canyon. I last walked this trail in April on a hike to Mount Diablo’s summit. That was at the beginning of the dry season—the grass was green and tall, and I found new wildflowers with every step. Now it’s the beginning of the wet season—the grass is just starting to sprout and I found no wildflowers. Otherwise, the chaparral was quite like the trail to Eagle Peak. There were more bigberry manzanita and toyon. Next to them them were chamise, buckbrush, and yerba santa.

At the end of Back Creek canyon, the hills became easy, the brush gave way to grass, and we were in woodlands of blue oak and buckeye. Buckeye seeds, quite like chestnuts and of a rich honey color, rolled on the ground.

We took the Coulter Pine Trail back to the car. As advertised, there were plenty of Coulter pines. We stopped below them to look at their cones. The cones were about a foot long and weighed a pound or two. They were solid, woody. Coulter pine cones are, in fact, the most massive in the world. Their scales had hard, talon-like spines curving down from their tips. I looked up and scanned for loose cones. I got nervous standing under the trees.

At the car, I still felt fresh on account of all the trail-running I’d done the last few weekends. For dinner we went to Skipolini’s Pizza in Walnut Creek. It had a mural of mountains along its walls, but it was only once we’d sat down to eat that I noticed that it was a view of Mount Diablo from Mitchell Canyon Road. The mural was so accurate we could trace our entire route on it.