Back for the first time since December 29. Back for the first time since… before.
Let me start by saying this: If you live within a two hour drive of Mount Diablo, go for a walk up Mitchell Canyon this week. I mean it. A short list of what was blooming today: Collinsia, Owl’s clover, scarlet and (insanely fluorescent) purple Delphinium, California poppies of the standard and light-margined coastal types, Clematis lasiantha, Ericameria, Castilleja, death camas, that three-leafletted shrub I always forget to hey out that I want to call hopseed with clusters of white flowers, yellow monkey flowers in the creek, Mule’s ears, other Damned Yellow Composites, wallflower, native thistles, more Stylomecon than I have ever seen at one time in my life (the best group is at the head of the canyon, just before the trail starts to climb away from the creek) and, of course, Calochortus:
And where there are many flowers, there are many flower-dependent creatures.
Aside from the California sisters as seen above, there are checkerspots and orangetips and sulfurs, swallowtails of both common kinds and half a dozen other butterflies I could not identify.
I had in mind a short little hike, not to the summit, maybe six miles or eight. I’ve been mainly off the trail. My natural tendency would be to go for the summit, and then to count the hike a failure if I did not have a summit in me. So I fixed Juniper Campground as my best-case scenario destination, a respectable hike, eleven miles up and back. If I turned back before that, or if my whim took a different trail and came down one of the back canyons, that would be fine too.
My whim took me off to the west a half mile below Juniper Campground, a trail called Burma Road. Maps I’d seen showed a loop between Burma Road and one of the first trails that branches off Mitchell Canyon Road. I had none of those maps with me, but shrugged: I could afford a mile or two of backtracking. It was early in the afternoon, and I dropped down the west side of the mountain in steep switchbacks, 1600 feet in a couple miles. Passed a concrete spring with algae and shy tadpoles, passed islands of peridotite and pine and lichen, passed curious wildlife.
I took a right fork to a rather imposing fence. Barbed wire and cable, and beyond it a broad fire road headed straight for downtown Walnut Creek. not the direction I wanted. The left fork headed obviously in an even wronger direction. I started to worry, a little. Was I sure I didn’t have a map? I rifled the inner hidden pockets of my pack. Yes, I was sure I didn’t have a map.
My alternatives seemed to me as follows: I could hike out for civilization and take a cab to my truck. I could burrow under the mean-looking fence — I obviously wouldn’t be the first — and do some route-finding through the dry grass and chamise back to the truck. I could lie down and go to sleep.
I chose the fourth alternative: After laughing heartily at my utter stupidity, I trudged back up the way I’d come down. I filled my water bottle at Juniper Campground. There was a trail-runners marathon on the mountain, and they had a drinks table set up in the campground. I cadged some salt from them and walked back down Mitchell Canyon to the truck. Seventeen miles and 4960 feet, three miles more hike and twelve hundred feet more climb than if I’d just gone for the summit. Certainly not the longest hike I’ve ever done. But maybe the second-longest, and possibly the climbiest.
At the start of my detour down Burma Road, less than halfway through my 17-mile hike, I gained a vantage point over a broad meadow I’ve walked through dozens of times. I startled a coyote there, once, so rapt in hunting ground squirrels she did not see me approach. Yesterday the wind riffled the still-green grass, silver cats’ paws flowing across the sward. There is structure to the wind’s chaos, fronts and eddies, and I watched rapt as a hungry coyote. All I love are waves kicked up by the impact of light on earth, and we fade only a little less quickly than these shimmers in the grass.
Passing the spot on my way back Raven joined me for a time, circling, a quarter mile of company. I’ve missed you, I told her, and then told myself it was the wind that filled my eyes with tears.
