Creek Running North

My dirty little secret is this: aside from a short jaunt with Becky last weekend, three miles around Mount Wanda in the green and mist, I have not been hiking since July. 186 miles hiked between January and July 2005, and none for the rest of the year.

Matthew and I walked just under six miles today, my old default hike in Briones, up the Alhambra Creek drainage and past the newt ponds to Briones Peak, and then down and around the other side.

I’m not sure why I stopped hiking, though I suspect my renewed desire after starting anti-depressants is a clue. I just… stopped. Foolish of me, and not just for the exercise — though my labored breathing up that first 1000 foot elevation gain reminded me that I lose more than just communion with the elements when I stay in the house.

At the knife-edge ridge that’s my usual first rest stop, two miles in and 850 feet above the parking lot, we sat and ate in the cold, stiff wind. Our hats blew off a few times. After a ten minute rest, when it started to get nearly uncomfortable even through layers of pile, we looked at the little thermometer on my day pack. 65 degrees F. It felt colder than it did Wednesday, when I walked Zeke through a hard frost down by the creek.

The wind blew the urban scales from our eyes. After five or so minutes Matthew asked “Is that the Sierra?” And there it was, across the Central Valley, a white band of peaks floating above the landscape. We headed for Briones Peak, two hundred feet higher, for a better view.

The Tahoe Sierra was a broad band of white. North of it, a perfect white triangle: Mount Lassen, 180 miles away. A snowy range peeking over the shoulder of Mount Saint Helena — itself at the other end of the long Napa Valley from us — was either the Yolla Bollys 150 miles north, or the Trinity Alps fifty miles past them.

The air was full of raptors. The trail crumbled beneath us. Great slivers of sodden earth had come loose from the cliffs and plunged downhill. Soil is a fluid, and the plants it carries do their best to sprout where it flows. We saw one fresh-tongued landslide already bearing soaproot rosettes and bracken ferns.

And then down the cow-trodden vertical mudhole that had replaced the Spengler Trail, and up again, and down and up again for a few miles. This was the hike I used to do when I had little time. It exhausted me today. It is late January, and I have not yet broken the double digits in my hiking mileage.

I will have to put some serious wear on the hiking boots’ tread next week in the Mojave. And I can’t wait to get back to Briones.