Creek Running North

Platystemon californicus, a.k.a. “cream cups,” El Sobrante Ridge 3/6/2005. Matthew and I hiked 14 miles today if you believe one map, 13 if you believe another. I believe 14: I am sore.

It was a slog. The rain stopped a few days back, but the mud remained on the trails. In places we were glad we’d laced our boots tightly: it was a good six inches thick where declivities had funneled extra rain onto sections of the trail.

But what good are weekends if you can’t spend them slogging through 14 miles of boot-sucking mud with an old friend?

We followed the trail around the north shore of the Briones Reservoir, with its lake-like fringe of tules and cattails. Coots and grebes sang from the astonishing blue-green water. A mile or so in Matthew gasped and pointed: a giant appparition floated in the air, crossing the reservoir without flickering a muscle. “So Matthew,” I asked, “what do you suppose that great, bluish, heronlike bird was?”

A small frog huddled in mid-trail in an inch of water, waiting for us to pass. Matthew scooped it up. We examined it, gave up deciding whether it was a bullfrog or something else, let it go. Later on we’d see two Pacific chorus frogs likewise in mid-trail, these obviously identifiable by their bands of Cleopatra mascara. One’s khaki skin was suffused with gold flecks. Matthew stroked its spine softly with a fingertip for a moment, then it left. We tried to catch the second for a minute, not particularly effectively.

Also seen: several lizards and change. Most were fence lizards, or (as we renamed them for the hike) Fent’s lizards, so called for their discoverer the famous if imaginary naturalist Dr. Fent. Matthew saw a skink. I did too, if noticing a flash of bright blue tail constututes “seeing.” “And change”? Toward hike’s end, I found a two-inch section of blue skink tail, likely shed to distract a predator. The tail now sits in the zinc pot on my front porch where the cardon cactus lives: that’s where I put all my lizard tails.

Oh, and an eagle, and a rodent tooth like a scimitar among the trail pebbles, fields of miners lettuce and cream cups and bright soapy orange poppies and blue brodiaea, feral cranesbills and filaree, sunburn on the back of my neck and on the teenaged girls smiling as they passed on horseback, sandwiches on the north shore as we headed up Oursan Ridge and trail mix and chocolate at Disorientation Point — where I signed the geocache register “Ed Abbey.” We crossed the Bear Creek inflow into the reservoir just before we got back to the truck, a couple inches deep to wash the mud from our boots. Call it 72 miles hiking for me since January 1.

P.S. Oh, yeah: A snake too. I only saw the tail, but I suppose it might well have been an Alameda striped racer — if said snakes have a dark variant with inconspicuous red-orange longitudinal stripes. Anyway, it was coal black.