Mission Peak and More
Today’s hike took me up Mission Peak… again. I’ve been to the top of this peak above Fremont, California four times recently. Today I started a bit earler – I was on the trail just after 7:00 a.m. – so I had a chance to extend the hike a bit.
I climbed the main trail to the junction with the Hidden Valley trail just below the face of the peak. Here I turned right and headed up this valley past the private residence and then up the sometimes muddy trail through oaks and grassland next to the creek before finally turning left again to reach the ridge. (This is the spot where I was almost blown off the mountain a few weeks ago – today it was fairly calm.)
Instead of heading left to Mission Peak I turned right and followed the trail towards Monument Peak, which is the high point in Ed Levin Park above Milpitas. This route follows fire roads along the ridge, though that description of the terrain may create a somewhat inaccurate view. When I think of “ridge” I think if a relatively sharp high mountaintop with some kind of drop off on both sides. The landscape up here is not like that; the ridge is really more of a very wide, rolling flat area that goes on for miles. It is almost all wide open with nothing but grass and some rock outcroppings.
I continued along past the turnoff to the closed dirt road to Mt. Allison, the highest point on the ridge at over 2600′ and dropped down to a junction in a flat marshy area before ascending toward another ridge. At this ridge there was a very confusing sign. This large sign indicated that the Monument Peak trail was straight ahead, but just beyond was a smaller sign indicating “restricted area.” I compromised and took a single path route around to the left, soon hitting the fire road again, and not long after that arriving at the rocky summit of Monument Peak. It occurred to me that I had seen fewer people up here than I would see on a typical Sierra Nevada day hike.
After a snack and a drink I turned around and headed back the way I came, with time for a brief detour to the top of another point just north of Monument Peak. Before long I was back at the ridgeline junction with the Hidden Valley trail. This time I went straight along the ridge to reach the summit of Mission Peak, which was now becoming quite crowded. From here it was a matter of descending the usual route down the crowded main trail.
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Hikers on Upper Mission Peak Trail
Hikers. Upper Mission Peak. February 19, 2006. © Copyright Dan Mitchell.
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Political Sleight of Hand
From Sierra Club Compass:
Mixed Signals. The day after President Bush delivered a State of the Union address in which he owned up to America’s “addiction to oil” and called for more research on alternative fuels and energy sources, the federal lab charged with heading up such research announced that a $28 million budget cut had required the dismissal of 32 researchers involved in ethanol and wind power studies — tow of the programs the president supposedly championed. [Sierra Club Compass]
Follow the title link for the full story.
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Diablo Range Snow and Clouds
Diablo Range Snow and Clearing Clouds. Almaden Quicksilver. February 18, 2006. © Copyright Dan Mitchell.
Today I started out thinking I was going to hike to the top of Mission Peak and photograph new snow. However, as I drove that direction it became apparent that there would be no snow to photograph by the time I got to the top, so I headed to Almaden Quicksilver to get a new image from this spot (that I have photographed a number of times over the past two years) featuring snow.
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Calero Fire Road (Color)
Fire Road. Calero Park. February 17, 2006. © Copyright Dan Mitchell.
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Oak, Grass, and Sky at Calero
Oak, Grass, and Sky. Calero Park. February 17, 2006. © Copyright Dan Mitchell.
I got out for a morning hike at Calero Park today, mostly before the rain arrived.
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SFGate is on a Roll Today
A whole string of interesting outdoor articles arrived in my SFGate RSS feed today, so I’ll point to some of them here:
- Paul McHugh offers the story of multiple PCT hiker Scott Williamson and offers a list of outdoor events.
- Tom Stienstra explains why now may be a great time to visit Yosemite Valley, offers a guide to Del Valle Regional Park, and shares some places to find wildlife.
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Interesting Conditions in the Bay Area This Weekend
We have a very unusual weather forecast this weekend in the San Francisco Bay Area in that the word “snow” appears! The prediction is that we’ll have snow showers – and some accumulation of snow – above the 2000′ level tonight and possibly even lower by Saturday.
Since I have a four-day weekend, I’m hoping to get out at the right moment and hike to a spot where I can photograph the unusual juxtaposition of new grass and new snow on the surrounding hills. I think Mission Peak may be a good option on Saturday.
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More Anti-Environment Shenanigans
From Sierra Club Compass:
Way out there in the Grand Canyon Game Preserve, a land inhabited by the Mexican spotted owl, the northern goshawk, and the Kaibob squirrel, the U.S. Forest Service planned to burn and log 17,000 acres of forest. The Bush administration’s “Healthy Forest” plan defends such projects as necessary to protect communities from catastrophic fire. Only in this case, the nearest community is 48 miles away, and the East Rim Timber Sale on the Kaibob National Forest targeted old-growth, fire-resistant trees.
The Forest Service yanked the sale on Tuesday, saying that its surveys on spotted owls and goshawks in the region had gotten too dusty and would have to be updated. Cathie Schmidlin of the Kaibob National Forest says the agency doesn’t know what it’s going to do next.
Perhaps it will address the concerns raised in a lawsuit brought by The Sierra Club and the Center for Biological Diversity, who contend that the project would have logged thousands of old-growth trees while offering little fire-reduction benefit. The government triumphed in the first round when a federal judge ruled in its favor, but the case has been appealed by the environmental groups.
Schmidlin said the decision to withdraw the logging plan had nothing to do with the lawsuit. [Sierra Club Compass]
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Dan's Outside 
Mission Peak: A Second Try
On Saturday I wrote that I headed toward the Mission Peak trail in the morning, only to decide to head down to Almaden Quicksilver instead when it appeared that I would not find snow on Mission Peak.
I went back to Mission Peak yesterday and did climb the peak – but via the main trail since the wet conditions would likely have made the alternate Horse Heaven Trail variations a very unpleasant, muddy mess. There was still no snow on the peak, though there was still a bit left on the next peak south and more in the Diablo Range to the southeast.
Conditions on the peak were interesting – it was very cold with fog blowing up the west side. A few feet east of the ridge it was perhaps 10 degrees warmer and – for a time at least – sunny. There was still a pretty good cloud cover over the Diablo Range, so I decided not to stick around to take photos this time.
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February 20, 2006 Posted by gdanmitchell | Commentary | Comments Off on Mission Peak: A Second Try