Every time I flew into San Francisco, there were two mountains to the north of the airport that were annoying. Mt Diablo rises across the bay to the north and Mt Tamalpias peaks the Marin headlands. Both needed climbing. I flew to San Francisco to visit Quinn for a couple of days and we decided to take these two peaks.
Mt Diablo at 3,849 feet was first. It sits in a beautiful 20,000-acre state park. At the summit is a building and beacon tower built by the CCC in 1939. It was such a clear day, from the summit we could see the snow-covered Sierra as well as the city and bay bridges. Mt Diablo is sacred to the native Americas of the area and is subject of many reports of hauntings and mysterious sightings, including a phantom black panther. Bummer. we did not see it on our hike. Our route was a little different than normal. We started at the top parking lot and circumnavigated the mountain. This involved a very long steep decline to the half-way point, then back up to the peak. The climb back up had 3 very serious steep portions but little semi-level breaks in-between. This hike gave us a total of 7.3 miles and 1,941 vertical feet. Following the hike, we had to have a beer in the 1893 historic Clayton Club Saloon. Cool place. Retired cowboy boots hung allover the ceiling. Each had the old owners name painted on the bottom.
The next day we set out to tackle the 3 peaks of Mt. Tamalpais, a Miwok Indian name for west hill. At 2,580 feet, each of the peaks are now covered with radio and FAA antennas. The summit used to be over 2,600. Oh well. We jumped up and down several times on the current summit to gain the extra 20 feet. Mt Tam is a mecca for mountain bikers and hikers. It is literally laced with trails. The mountain sits within the state park that includes the Muir Woods. The drive up through the trees was spectacular. We split this day’s hike onto 3 separate summit hikes, because the 3 peaks were not really joined by a single trail. The East Peak has an active fire tower and the rangers were just arriving as we summitted, but they did not invite us up. We bushwhacked to summit Middle Peak. And on West Peak, we ran into a guy from the American Radio Relay League (ARRL). These guys get on a summit and set up their ham radio to broadcast their position. If 4 other hams are listening and acknowledge their summit location, they get points. They really like the Peakbagger web site because of the accurate locations of summits posted. However most of these guys are drive-ups, not hike-ups. The weather was great, and we had majestic view of the Marin headlands and San Francisco Bay. We only logged 4.2 miles and 680 feet, but it was a great day for us.
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That’s like SOTA summits! Some of my mountain rescue buddies are crazy about getting points.