Up the mountain and down yesterday, as usual. It was not as warm as some days I’ve hiked this summer, only about 90 degrees at maximum in the warm spots. The summit road is still closed. Everyone up top earned the view, on foot or bicycle, though some started from the open road’s end halfway up. I think I was the only one up there who’d clumb the whole thang on foot.
It was a beautiful day. In the upper elevations, it seemed there was a big dragonfly for every cubic foot or so of atmosphere, and the same was true of Mitchell Canyon except with swallowtails instead of dragonflies. Steller’s jays ran rampant, and the acorn woodpeckers’ ridiculous call echoed off the clifs at the trailhead, and by the time I got five miles in and 2000 feet up… I was bored.
My feet weren’t hurting, it wasn’t uncomfortably cold or hot, I was tired but not so tired that the ground felt good when I threw myself down on its shadier spots. (Becky and I had ridden about 7 miles on our bikes at Point Reyes the day before, and I’d done about half that at Briones plus a bit under 5K run besides on Friday, so the mild fatigue was less than mysterious.) There were wildflowers: an unprepossessing little yellow composite daisy thing I hadn’t noticed before, and a blue-racemed thing I would have had to lie on my belly to investigate and did not. I took my camera along: it never came out of the pack. The view was obscured by smog.
I was bored.
I got to the shoulder of Moses Rock Ridge, all the really difficult climbing behind me. What trail remained climbed a thousand vertical feet in two miles, not particularly steep, though demanding of attention in places lest the hiker twist an ankle. I’d trudge up that and touch my foot to the summit and then come back down the same way, the long march back to the truck. I wondered if I would write about this hike. “Hiked Diablo today,” I imagined myself writing. “Nothing else to report.” If it wasn’t for the thousand calories of Clif bars I’d eaten at Deer Flat, obliging me to burn it off by making the summit, I might have turned around.
And then I heard a ground squirrel’s frantic alarum, and then a sound like someone had rended the fabric of the universe. I turned toward the noise. Yellow talons and belly and outstretched, dappled wing: a prairie falcon had pulled out of a stoop not ten feet above my head. It caught a thermal off the valley and rose slowly, wings outstretched, looking at me with what seemed curious serenity.
A mile on two juvenile hawks played, attacking one another in turn, folding their wings above a column of air and plummeting earthward, to recover mere feet above the rocks. I made the summit and then walked back down.
