Hiking Mount Diablo

Date: April 1, 2012
Elevation: 3,848 feet / 1,178 m
Via Summit trail, approx 12.5 miles/20km distance and 3100 feet/950 meters elevation difference

Mount Diablo

Mount Diablo is pretty cool for several reasons. The first and most obvious one is the intriguing name. The second one is that this mountain is quite prominent relative to its modest height. Practically, it means that there is nothing around to obstruct the views, so the vistas from Mt Diablo’s summit are really great. All of that, combined with the fact that it’s one of California’s Counties Highpoints meant that we simply had to go!

Summit Trail

The trail-head for the Summit Trail turned out to be outside of the park entrance. That made for a bit of an awkward parking situation on the edge of the road (it’s a good thing we like to start early – the “parking lot” was already almost full when we got there). It also meant not paying the park entrance fee (yay) and not getting the official park trail map. We had some topo maps on Vitaly’s iPad, so the theory was that we would be just fine without a park map (sinister pause…)

California mud

The day before, it was raining cats and dogs. After all the mud we’d been through on the Bruce Trail, it seemed unlikely that an isolated California shower would pose much of a threat. However, as soon as we started hiking, we discovered that California mud was not the same as Ontario mud. The California variety of mud was really really sticky. The feet kept getting stuck to the ground, and quickly got covered in thick and heavy layer of dirt. This is how our shoes looked like about 5 minutes into the hike:

It looked like we were the only people dumb adventurous enough to be out hiking, since the trail had no other human footprints. The deer must have had no problem with the mud though, judging by the fresh hoof impressions on the trail.

Wrong turns at Rock City

Eventually we reached the area of the park called “Rock City”, named for large boulders scattered throughout. Here, the trail passed through a large campground with lots of paths going off in all directions. The trail signage was extremely confusing, so we decided to use one of those topo maps from the iPad to guide us. The map sent us walking on the paved road for quite a while, until eventually we reached a rough track marked as “Summit Trail” going off into the woods. Happy to be off the road, we followed the trail and soon reached … the same campground we had passed by half an hour before. Apparently, the topo map was out of date. The trail didn’t actually follow the road. It went along a different route – we ended up walking this section in the wrong direction from the point the trail intersected with the road. This little “detour” added about 2km to our hike, and about 100m of extra elevation difference.

Spring flowers and huge cones

Grumbling at the evil mountain spirits who must have been playing April’s fools jokes on us and leading us in circles, we continued our trip (this time in the right direction). Soon we got out of the boulder field of Rock City, and into the wide open meadows. This is where we got to appreciate the dazzling spring flowers blooming all around. There were many different varieties (at least 10 that I counted) of all colors of the rainbow (except green). The most obvious ones were the bright orange poppies.

My favorites though were these tiny flowers that I don’t know the name of. They were growing right on the edge of the trail; it was an extra challenge to avoid trampling them.

There were some trees along the trail as well, mostly some variety of pine. These trees (of species Coulter Pine, according to wikipedia) had enormous cones. The biggest one we found was bigger than my head! These giant (and very heavy) cones also had very sharp spiny edges, making it a real hazard to hang around under these trees.

The Summit

About 1.5 miles short of the summit, I started to get a pretty nasty cramp in the leg. I really didn’t want to give up this close to the goal, so we continued on. Eventually, we got to the top. It felt very satisfying. Unfortunately, the feeling of serenity and solitude usually found on mountain tops was missing – Mount Diablo has an auto road going to the top, so the summit is always teeming with crowds of people who drive there. We stuck around just long enough to take a mandatory summit photo and visit the gift shop (we bought the map, but forgot to get the “I climbed Mount {X}” badge to add to my collection ). In the hurry to get away from the crowds and back to the trail, we almost missed the actual summit, which was (!) enclosed inside the gift shop structure.

Getting back

I was lucky – the leg cramp went away after some stretching. We got back without any extra adventures, taking some more photos along the way. As always, I was amazed at the surprising and counter-intuitive difficulty of getting down a mountain.

Somehow, the views seemed much better going down (could this be related to not having a cramp in the leg?) It’s on the way down when I finally decided that, despite the parking lot at the top, Mount Diablo is one great hike.