Two-Heel Drive

I made a snap judgment Wednesday to check out Mission Peak at sunset, which I had been fixing to get ready to do for ages. Winehiker Russ loves to lead this hike (just under six miles with 2,000 feet of elevation gain), and now I see why. It’s the same ol’ sweaty slog to the top, but the fading light casts a glow on the hill that you never see at any other time of day; it even causes shade in a few places, imagine that. The sunset itself its just OK on a cloudless night — it can be spectacular on partly cloudy days — but the light show gets much better as the sky turns from purple to black. And if you pick a full moon night, you can stroll down without a headlamp.

Yeah, I took pictures:

Even the cow pictures come out better this time of the evening.

Even with the hills pretty much browned over, the peak looks better in the evening because it’s the only time when the sun illuminates the rocky sections just below the summit.

Speaking of rocks, these were very photogenic in this light.

I took this just a few minutes before the sun fell below the horizon. I planned on taking 90 minutes to reach the top exactly at sunset but didn’t calculate the need for picture taking and rest breaks. Even with my timing off by a few minutes, I still had some nice shots.

Fellow hikers goof off with their cameras. There were about a dozen people up there.

Full moon rises over the Diablo range.

More summit shadows.

Really liked this one.

Lights of Alameda County looking north toward San Francisco begin to flicker in the fading light.

Shot this with a 15-second time exposure, with the camera resting on a fence post near the cattle guard high on the peak.

Another 15-second exposure, facing in the opposite direction, with some Photoshop tweaks to lighten it up a tad.

The walk back is the best part — with the sounds of night creatures raising their usual after-dark ruckus. I even heard a couple coyotes yelping back and forth at each other; a bit scary at first till you realize it’s not somebody screaming bloody murder up the trail.

As is always the case at Mission Peak, you need to be ready for a cold, windy experience at the summit, even in the summertime. It was pleasant Wednesday but it can be all over the map. Just take a jacket along.

More Mission Peak links:

• My park profile, with hard, harder and hardest hike suggestions.
• My previous Mission Peak hikes.
• My Flickr pix | everybody else’s.
• Bay Area Hiker’s Mission Peak page.
• Winehiker Russ’s Mission Peak moonlight hike.

For those who haven’t been reading along since the summer of 2004, here’s a look back at the day I figured out I could be a hiker.

About three-quarters of the way up, I’m starting to tire out. I walk five minutes and my heart is beating like mad, so I have to stop and let it calm back down. My calve muscles have gotten used to the strain but the rest of my body is telling me: stop this nonsense now, dammit.

But I round a bend at the top of a ridge and the sight gives me fresh inspiration: it’s a view of the back side of Mission Peak that I would never have seen if I hadn’t made the climb. Makes me realize why people get hooked on hiking. The view is different up here.

I turn to my right and the summit is in clear view, maybe a quarter-mile away. “You’re almost there,” says a beefy guy who passes me on the way up. Must be my heartbeat is audible to pedestrians.

I’m probably been up there dozens of times since then. It’s like that old greasy spoon you always go back to even when you know there’s 25 better places to eat along the way.

Posted today at www.mercurynews.com

A few hours at Mission Peak Regional Preserve might make you wonder if the United Nations has a West Coast hiking club.

Fremont’s signature peak attracts people from everywhere. I’ve chatted with hikers from India, China, Taiwan, Russia, Mexico and even remote, exotic places like Livermore.

You don’t come to Mission Peak expecting solitude: the parking lot’s like a shopping mall on weekends. You come to meet interesting people and to stand on the summit. There’s no easy (or even moderate) route to the top - it’s nearly 2,200 feet above the trail head - but the view up there is worth every step.

Winter’s the best time to do Mission Peak because a layer of gravel keeps the main trail from turning to muck after it rains.

I don’t go on many hikes that make me glad I’m done and wished I’d chosen wiser, but this was one of them.

I’d hiked Mission Peak Regional preserve from every direction, save one: the parking lot at Ohlone College in Fremont’s Mission district. It has one distinct advantage: a fairly gradual, four-mile route to the summit, vs. the burn-your-legs, straight-up-the-hill-in-2.6 miles route from Stanford Avenue, where most folks go up. Frankly, the more direct route is vastly preferable.

The area around the college is butt ugly with a row of power line towers, the trail up from there is littered with cow crap and and there’s hardly any view of the summit to see you on your way. I usually come home with something nice to say about a hike … to rationalize the exertion, if nothing else, but this was just walking up hill, stepping around cow pies and wishing I was somewhere else.

I did get one fairly interesting picture on the way up. The two boys in this picture, being boys of their age, did find a way to amuse themselves on the way up: They were taking rocks and plopping them in the cow pies, bursting with laughs at the sight of fresh crap going every which way. Ah, to be young and amused with poop.

If you’ve done Mission Peak a few times and have been wondering about parking at Ohlone College, take my word for it: endure finding a spot at the Stanford Avenue entrance and go up with the crowds. At least you’ll have company.

Or follow Steve Sergeant’s favorite route and hike up from Sunol Wilderness. It’s 12 miles, with six all uphill, but at least you’ll feel like you’re in the country.

I spent about 20 minutes yesterday chatting with a East Bay Parks volunteer cop at Mission Peak, one of a few who carry police radios, report crimes to the real cops and try to keep fools from ruining the hillsides by taking shortcuts.

Among the things I learned:

Popularity of hiking Mission Peak has exploded in recent years. The volunteer guy did a count one weekend morning recently and noted more than 600 people were on the hill.

Break-ins at the Mission Peak parking lot have tailed off because volunteers have stepped up their patrols. However: The break-ins have merely moved to the side streets where most people have to park because the main lot is way too small. Bottom line: don’t assume your valuables are safe in your car, and never leave them in view unless you want them stolen.

Lots of beginners with no concept of outdoor stewardship are just charging up the hill, ignoring the “stay on trail” signs and making all the shortcut areas wider, uglier and, of course, more prone to erosion when the winter rains hit.

I was mostly interested in taking pretty pictures and it didn’t occur to me somebody oughta write about the mess at Mission Peak till I was done hiking. But if you head up there, you’ll see the damage straight away. All the signs are being actively ignored, and the “use trails” are as wide as the main trail in a disturbing number of places.

Most of this has happened in the past nine months. I hiked Mission Peak at least once or twice a week in the spring of 2005 and saw none of this; I hiked it less last year but I have no memory of it being so notable. I was starting to notice it this spring, but I took the summer off to avoid the heat. Yesterday was my first visit in months and I was appalled.

The volunteer guy told me an amusing story: an elementary school brought two classes of kids to the peak. He was heading up the hill on his mountain bike when he came upon a mile-long path of litter that eventually led him to the kids, and then their teachers, who were leading the way and apparently hadn’t looked backward in awhile. He stopped the teachers and said, “hey, your kids need to pick up all their trash.”

One of the teachers called out to the kids, “hey, we need to clean this up or this cop’s going to send me to jail.”

The volunteer guy was dubious: “I didn’t think they should give their kids the option of sending their teachers to jail.” Turned out there were no Bart Simpson-caliber brats among the youngsters, who never made it to the summit because they spent the rest of their outing cleaning up after themselves.

Guess that’s what they mean by “teachable moment,” eh?

OK, enough ragging on unsightly things, let’s look at some sightly ones. A weather system was moving in, which meant excellent clouds and lots of sky candy. The highlights:

The guy on the right is the volunteer park district cop. He was quite chatty (must’ve been a traveling salesman in a previous life). The folks on the left are passing hikers who stopped to chat. They’re former Arizonans who regaled me with tales of squeezing through slot canyons.

At the summit, the view of the Diablo Range to the east was wonderful.

Yes, it’s my 900th posting of the Summit Post.

Can’t believe I never noticed these rocks in all my previous trips up here.

My timing was perfect for taking a dead-tree pic. The sun hit this snag at just the right angle — complemented by nice cloud formations.

Like I said, a great day for clouds.

These holes in the rock along the Horse Heaven Trail apparently were created by the original inhabitants of this area to grind nuts and other things.

The peak looks pretty good from here.

You can see a bit of fall color in those leaves if you look real closely.

I received an e-mail this morning pointing to a history of the people who’ve lived around Mission Peak since the 1850s. At one point there was a game preserve up there, which produced this anecdote:

In approximately 1916 a hiker was traveling the trails on the Rancho unaware that there was a game park in the hills. He went around the bend of the trail he was on and came face to face with the full grown bull buffalo. At the snorting and pawing of the ground by the bull, the man turned tail and apparently ran the four to five miles down the road to Solon’s Saloon in Mission San Jose. He figured the bull was on his tail the entire way down, and he never looked back. He shared the tale of his adventures with the listeners in the bar, one of whom happened to be Donald McClure, who had stopped off from work for a beer on the way home to the Ranch. Everyone at the Rancho had a hearty laugh that evening. The bull never made a move to follow the man.

After years of grazing and being treated almost like pets, the buffalo had become more cantankerous than Moore realized. At one point the ranch hands complained about how difficult they were. To show these men how easy it was to bring in the buffalo, Moore went out one day on his own to find them. He proceeded to get chased up a tree at the age of 75. He stayed there for several hours until the ranch hands came by and rescued him. After that, the buffalo were shot and their heads mounted.

Well, it’s never been easy to be a buffalo in the West.

But anyway, if like me you’ve slogged up and down those without knowing much of the history of the place, now you can walk wiser.

Some of you might be saying to yourselves, “Tom, why do you keep going back to the same ol’ places.”

Laziness, mostly, but there are times when knowing the terrain like the back of one’s hand (though, come to think of it, how well do we know the backs of our hands, anyway?) come in handy.

Times like when, for instance, you’re not quite sure where the trail is because you’ve wandered a half-mile off course and you’re standing in pea soup fog and it’s an hour before dark and you have no gear for an overnighter and you’re not sure how much good your little headlamp will be when all it’ll do is reflect off the fog anyway.

This was the plan: I had goofed off most of Saturday but it got to be about 3:30 and, lacking anything better to do, I thought, here’s my chance to do that Mission Peak-at-Sunset hike I’d been thinking about getting around to for, oh, about the last 18 months. Weather forecast said we had 90 percent cloud cover at the time but called for gradual clearing as the afternoon went on. This told me that with any luck I might get to the peak during a break in the clouds that produces excellent sunset imagery. My estimate was only off by about 20 minutes but it might as well have been three days, because the peak was socked in when I got up there. Cold, windy and damp, not the place anybody wants to be upon realizing “wow, this could start to suck real soon if I don’t find where the hell that trail went.”

I was so proud of myself for deciding to get a hike in that I raced over to the trailhead just in time to realize I had three hours to get to the top, a jaunt that usually takes 90 minutes max. With plenty of time to kill, I took the long way up the so-called Horse Heaven Trail, presumably heavenly on horseback because somebody else is doing the climbing up those steep-ass trails and it’s much easier to intimidate testy cattle on horseback and the horse gets to step in all the cow shit. (Obviously, the horses did not name this trail).

Though I didn’t get my sunset shots, the afternoon light did afford a few interesting images.

For instance, the grass was positively shimmering for a few minutes when the sun broke through the clouds. Makes you wanna sing that “Green, Green Grass of home,” song, don’t it?

Some famous photographer whose name escapes me took some totally cool pictures of clouds gathering over the San Francisco Bay that looked all foreboding and moody, kinda like this except he knew what he was doing, had a real camera, used a tripod and snapped off hundreds of frames hoping one would have that perfect images. Me, I point, click and hope.

Gimme leaves, a bit of blue sky and some clouds and I’m happy.

The bottom of this one is unremarkable but the silver-blue color of the sky at the top is a shade I’m not sure I’ve ever captured in a picture before. Mostly because I never hike at this time of day and never take pictures in this light.

Dead tree against the sky is familiar territory for me, but different, again, because of the evening light.

Looked like the clouds were attacking the peak in this one.

It’s shaping up to be a good wildflower season — saw lots o’ lupines blooming as I trudged up the hill — they start showing up at about 1800 feet or so.

More cows. This young angus looks like somebody took a down payment, via his ear, on his future status as somebody’s cheeseburger.

A snag in the pea-soup region I mentioned earlier. Turned out I was able to follow some old barb-wire fences back to the trail I had wandered away from.

Once I got back on the right trail I headed toward the peak, fogged in all the way, realizing that a nice sunset was probably transpiring down the trail, below the clouds hovering over the heights. There’ll be another time, though.

Alas, the sunset’s already behind the mountain range on the other side of the valley.

Interestingly, I saw at least a dozen teenagers heading up the trail just as I was finishing in almost total darkness. I’m sure whatever they had in mind was legal, moral and age-appropriate.

This’ll be a quickie: I did the Horse Heaven Trail to the Mission Peak summit on Saturday and snapped a few interesting frames.

It seemed like most of January had passed without a cloud in the sky, so it was nice to see some swirls up there for a change. Down side: trails with gunky, gooey mud.

Some cows liven up things a bit. A small bit; they are, after all, cows.

A couple Boy Scouts enjoy the view from the Summit.

We’ve had so little rain in January, I can only imagine how swamped we’re going to be in February or March.

I’d do all my hikes at Mission Peak if the weather’d cooperate like it did on Saturday.

Cloudy skies, light rain, prodigious mud and gale-force winds might not sound like cooperative conditions, but when you’ve done this hike several dozen times, any change feels like an improvement.

It’s worth noting that this is the first adverse-weather hike I’ve done since, like, April or so.

I didn’t bother going all the way to the top this time; I was more determined to just amble along and see what kind of photogenic scenes presented themselves. Fortune did smile upon my shutter release a couple times.

A storm front’s been passing through since Friday, but my timing was pretty good: I got sprinkled on a bit but never got soaked. This bench is about a mile up the trail, looking west over Silicon Valley. With clouds like this it’s almost a crime to call yourself a photographer when the camera and the weather do all the work.

I made a point of looking for stuff I hadn’t shot before, like this old branch with stuff growing all over it.

Another example of excellent cloud cover.

One of the many springs at Mission Peak.

I tiptoed across a minefield of cow crap to check out this rock formation, which has nifty coloration in some places.

So this mud was only next to the trail, not right in the middle of it. But there were many times when I had a pound of gooey muck stuck to bottom of each shoe.

A cow and her baby send along holiday greetings.

I was almost done hiking when I noticed unexpected patches of blue showing up.

I’m sure I’ll be cursing the mud and storms soon enough, but it’s nice to confront some nature-imposed hardship after six months of sunshine. You don’t want Mother Nature acting like one of those moms who wants to be her kids’ best friends. You want her to have her moods, to enforce discipline, to keep you on your toes. Well, for the first few rainy hikes, anyway.

I have a hundred-dollar windbreaker imported from England, where they need such attire to fend off those North Sea gales. I had this jacket on Saturday when I stepped out of the Hiker Hauler at the base of Mission Peak, where it felt downright toasty for this time of the year — sunny, no wind, probably around 68 or so.

“I won’t need this,” I told Melissa with misplaced bravado as I peeled it off and threw it on the back seat. I have another hundred-dollar piece of outerwear, an ultralight insulated jacket imported from Japan, where the winds blow cold across the mighty Pacific. If I’ll be too hot in a windbreaker I’ll surely swelter in the insulated jacket, but it’s already stuffed in my backpack and I’m too lazy to remove it. Melissa drives off to do some shopping and leaves me at the Mission Peak Stanford Avenue trailhead.

If you’ve been following along you already know what will happen next: 30- to 50-mph gusts keep me company all the way to the top of Mission Peak, where I’ve thoughtfully taken the long way (via the Horse Heaven Trail) to ensure maximum exposure to these decidedly unbalmy breezes.

My lazy streak paid off this time, for once, because the wind was blowing so hard that I really needed the Japanese jacket’s insulation.

I also took my Japanese camera along, so let’s look at a few pictures:

Fremont and points north, not far from the beginning of the Horse Heaven Trail. To get to this trail, you take the first right turn about a hundred yards from the trailhead — it’s super steep and adds an hour of hiking if you go to the summit and return by the main route. It does have these great views — with any luck you won’t be gasping for breath and will be able to appreciate them.

There area few interesting rock formations along the way up. Note the clear sky in the distance: this is what happens when strong breezes blow all the smog away.

So you huff and puff your way up the hill till you reach this gate, then the trail goes downhill into a little valley with trees and a stream in it. After that it’s one more push to the summit, but it’s fairly easy after all the climbing to this point.

Hikers at the summit sit on the hillside out of the wind. It’s actually quite pleasant along here with the amazing views.

Somebody’s dog approves of the view.

Mission Peak is really rocky at the top — almost like it’s an actual mountain or something. If you’re lucky to be up here on a sunny day after several days of hard rain, the rocks will be much cleaner and more impressive.

By the way, Melissa came and got me a few hours later. Now I’m downright thankful for the high winds because they gave me something to gripe about.