penitent, turbulent, multiplex!

After many weeks of halfheartedly trying to make it to the Black Mountain Trail in Rancho San Antonio Park, I finally did it. 10 miles of biking and 9 miles of hiking later, I’m sitting here on my bed tweaking all of the cool pictures I took during the climb.

The adventure began at the San Antonio train station where I met my hiking buddy Tom.

The deal was that if the weather looked horrible, we’d take the train to San Francisco and hang out there. The weather did look horrible, but we decided to go for it. I’m glad we did: I’m so used to being rained on at this point that I don’t even notice downpours anymore.

After some initial misdirection by yours truly, Tom found the actual start of the trail.

The trail ascends from 500′ to 2800′ over 4.9 miles, and it starts doing so in a very serious way right from the beginning. Once we’d made the first part of the ascent, there were already some pretty spectacular views to be had. Lots of folks build ridiculous houses on mountains for reasons that I haven’t quite figured out:

I like the little lookout post on that first one. I think it might actually be a hot tub. Now that would be a cool fixture to have overlooking a mountainside…

I also managed to get some nice views of the area from here, although the pictures don’t really capture the details too well.

The tree cover on the trail is pretty amazing:

The middle third of the trail maintains a relatively constant elevation while steadily heading south. It then curves back around, so I turned and took a shot of where we’d come from. You can see the trail cut into the mountainside there.

Another shot from a bit higher up:

I got a glimpse of this peak that has been scraped, perhaps so that a tower or a quarry or something can be set up on top of it:

The next part of the trail was under tree cover, and there I found this little waterfall:

The last third of the ascent was pretty ugly: The terrain was sort of bleak, and the grade was unpleasantly steep. However, after a lot of huffing and puffing we made it to the top.

Now, I’ve hiked a few mountain trails in my day, and each time I do, I have this idyllic vision of what the top of the mountain will be like. I think about having a pleasant lunch sitting in the sun on the warm grass, while studying the magnificent, unobstructed view of the world around me and contemplating the fate of man. I am invariably disappointed. For one thing, mountaintops have this unfortunate characteristic of being extremely cold and windy, which makes sitting and eating anything an iffy prospect. However, even beyond this, it seems that mountaintops also attract all sorts of things that don’t tend to appear in my daydreams, such as…

… trucks,

… and radio towers.

Still, it was pretty cool to be up there. After roaming around a bit and getting out of the way of that radio tower, I was able to get some decent views, although by this point it was dark and rainy again:

I also found a neat little rock circle, amongst which some mystical creature must frolic at night. (OK, so maybe the park ranger just rolls around naked in there.)

While it was fun to be on top of the mountain, being blasted by freezing winds can only entertain a person for so long, so after a quick lunch we headed back down. We took a detour near the bottom to follow a trail that apparently led to a ‘Historic Windmill Site’, but the windmill has long since been scoured from the earth. All that’s left is a little sign that has been erected by the park folks. However, we did manage to stumble across a valley that was home to a bunch of deer that were unmindful of our presence:

The final bit of wildlife that I saw was this giant slug. The last time I took a picture of a giant slug, I was unable to prove that it was in fact gigantic because there was nothing to compare it to, so this time I had the presence of mind to supply a scale:

After the hike, all that remained was a quick downhill ride home in a torrential downpour. This was useful, because the rain managed to wash away most of the muck that had saturated my pants during the climb. Yes, I really am that optimistic these days.

So that’s the Black Mountain trail. Apparently there are another 59 hikes in the Bay Area that are worth doing, so perhaps I’ll get to a few more of those before my stint here is done.