A mortal’s attempt to scale Mount Olympus is more or less the definition of hubris. The 2,946-foot nubbin of rock I climbed first, though, a northern extension of the North Peak of Mount Diablo, is called Mount Olympia. Saved by a suffix! Whatever “hubria” is, I committed it today, and tarantulas and garter snakes were abroad and I saw one of each on my way to risk the wrath of Zeia, King of Gods. And then went on to climb North Peak, and dropped down to Prospector’s Gap to climb to the summit. There is an informal route that drops down to Deer Flat from the summit and then ascends to climb Eagle Peak. I will try that one someday when I start earlier than 10:30 am. Had I done so today, I would have been coming down off a knife-edge ridge after sunset. Still, 14.5 miles and 4836 feet climbed, for year’s cumulatives of 342 miles hiked and 83,361 feet climbed. My 13th summit of Diablo this year. It occurred to me today that I might well break 100,000 feet of ascent for 2006: five more hikes up to the summit will put me well over. 15 and three quarters miles climbed so far this year! That would put me well into the stratosphere. And does.
When I first came to California, it was as a six-year-old in the back of a station wagon from Upstate New York, and I remember little: the lizards in our campsite in Anaheim, the Sequoiadendron and waterfalls in Yosemite, the bumpy road on state route 120 west of Benton, Tomorrowland. Sixteen years later I came out here to live. Hitchhiked as far as Laramie, and cadged a bus ticket out of my dad. Midnight came and I was in Wendover, and the next day was an aching blur of what seemed to my East-bred eyes utter desolation. I know better now, find exuberance enough in the rocks and shadscale, riot in the old-growth sagebrush. It was before the interstate went all the way through Nevada, and we stopped in Valmy and Lovelock, broke for lunch on the banks of the Truckee. And then the climb to Donner Pass, the long drift toward Sacramento (CalTrans yellow signs in the Trucker Vernacular, “Let ‘er drift!” on the easy downgrades), dusty oleander, though I did not know the name, in the highway median past the Milk Barn in Dixon. My first sight of San Francisco Bay in Vallejo, San Pablo Bay actually, directly across from the mouth of Pinole Creek, and I busied myself then finding a place for myself in what would become home, or at least the first place that ever really felt like it.
Home started outside Reno, though again I did not know it. Interstate 80 gains in elevation near Genoa, and the rain shadow of the Sierra Nevada begins to fray at its edge, and suddenly there are trees where there were none. A few at a time, groves here and there, and then the forest. We stopped atop the pass in Truckee to take on passengers: the driver opened the door and it was on us, that smell of pine baked by the arid sun. I cannot smell that resinous scent without thinking of that day, and I have spent thousands of hours smelling it since then, and ten minutes today wedged between two slabs of rock, back against one and soles on the other and I blocked the entire trail that way. It was on the north face of North Peak, where bay laurel and oak woods clothe the rocks, and I was a little surprised: the pines prefer a more open setting. But we were at the head of a steep canyon, the bay laurels and I, and a vulture-kiting thermal blew up off banks of gray pine a thousand feet below us, turpentine and butterscotch and a thin promise of remembrance.
