A Mountain for Us—and Joe and the Gang

That is Mount Diablo, a "forever mountain" for Northern California

Mount Diablo is one of my forever mountains. Do you have a forever mountain? Bet you do.

A forever mountain is a mountain that means a lot to you. It is a reference point, an earthbound lodestar, a constant in the constantly changing universe that is your life and time.

Mount Diablo is such a mountain for me. You could almost say that it is a forever mountain for everyone in Northern California. Drive to Tahoe or most anywhere in the northern Sierra, coming and going, and you’ll see it.

Get up in an airplane heading east and there it will be, big as life. And in the winter, after a big storm, it even snows up there.

The highest peak in the range of hills and mountains that is named after it, Mount Diablo occupies a central geographical position between the Bay Area to the west and the Sacramento and San Joaquin valleys to the east.

As such, when you stand atop Diablo on a clear day, you can see practically forever. They say that you can put your eyes on more land mass than any other mountain on earth except Kilimanjaro.

You can drive to the top of it, or you can hike all around it. Some years ago Dan Crouch and I and another friend hiked to the top, starting at the base on the eastern side. It’s a grind but it’s doable.

But whatever you do on the mountain, wherever you go, it always feels good to kick back and enjoy the view after the hard work is done.

When I was a boy our family took weekend drives from Hayward to see the walnut groves in Walnut Creek, one of the cities at the base of the Diablo Range. We brought home paper bags full of walnuts and cracked them with a nutcracker and picked out the bits of meat from inside the shells.

The walnut trees are all pretty much gone now, but in the spring Mount Diablo still puts on a top-flight nature extravaganza with golden poppies and lots of other wild flowers abloom all over the area.

I lived for a couple of years in Walnut Creek in the 1980s and worked as a freelancer for the Contra Costa Times. During that time there was a local environmental controversy that centered on Shell Ridge, one of the oak-laden open space areas that form the foothills of the range.

Somebody had the bright idea of building a highway through Shell Ridge to connect Walnut Creek with the growing cities on the eastern side of the mountain. The public opposed the plan and in an unaccustomed fit of sanity, the local City Council nixed it.

After Shell Ridge was saved, I drove up there and interviewed some of the young kids who liked to play in the area. Recently, while doing research on another project, I was going through the microfilm files at the Walnut Creek library when I happened to stumble onto the article I wrote back then for the Times.

The piece is surprisingly fresh and funny to this day. The Times published it on April 10, 1986, exactly as it appears here with the identical headline. It is amusing to realize that the kids in this story are now in their forties. Take a look. You’ll like the whole gang.

Open Space Important for Kids, Caterpillars

By Kevin Nelson, Correspondent

Joe Mikos, aged 11, is one Walnut Creek citizen who’s glad about the April 2 decision by the Walnut Creek City Council to drop a proposal to put a road through the Shell Ridge Open Space.

“There are lots of animals up there,” explained Mikos. “They have their homes up there. We don’t want to wreck their homes.”

Mikos, a fifth-grader at Walnut Heights Elementary School, is personally acquainted with Shell Ridge. He has a tree fort there, and once when he was out exploring he found a dead fox.

“I saw it over by some rocks,” he recalled. “It was a white one, a little baby.”

Ryan Bauer, 7, and Scott Gallagher, 9, are good buddies of Mikos. They go out exploring with him—collecting caterpillars, looking for fossils and bones, or sometimes just floating boats in the cow pond.

All three—along with some other neighborhood kids who wandered by—took time out from their active schedules one afternoon last week to talk about what Shell Ridge means to them.

One of the best things about the Ridge, they all agreed, was the caterpillars.

“There’s more than a lot up there,” said the outspoken Bauer. “There’s about a million of them.”

As proof, Bauer, Mikos and Gallagher displayed a bucket of squirming caterpillars they had collected from the area.

“The caterpillars come from oak trees,” said Mikos, who knows about these things. “And over that way we found some caterpillar tents. That’s what they call them, because they look like tents. It’s this white woven stuff over their leaves. It’s where they lay their eggs.”

On their jaunts around Shell Ridge, the boys have seen redwing blackbirds, red-tail hawks, turkey vultures, robins, blue jays, quail, deer, foxes, snakes and lizards by the score.

“We explore for bones too and all kinds of weird stuff, like on treasure hunts,” said Bauer.

“And you get a lot of prikkers in your socks,” added Mikos, who wasn’t wearing any socks at the time he spoke.

They know all about cows too. They see them all the time grazing on the hillsides around their homes.

“Cows are afraid of people, but not the bulls,” said Bauer, while exploding some caps on the street with a hammer. “The bulls are the cows with horns. They’re the dads.”

“Since somebody wrecked Mikos’ tree fort and it’s in need of some renovation, the guys hang out a lot at Gallagher’s camouflaged tree house, which is in a secret spot high on a ridge.

The blond-haired Gallagher also knows the whereabouts of a cave. “Follow the creek and look and you’ll see it,” he instructed.

While the boys were talking, Heather Bauer, Ryan’s nine-year-old sister, came up with her friend Jamie Frazier.

“I’m going to be nine on April 14,” Frazier said, setting the record straight. “But my party’s April 12.”

Neither Heather nor Jamie needed much prodding to explain why they applauded the foresight of Mayor Mary Lou Lucas and the City Council in acting to let Shell Ridge stay the way it is.

“You can go cardboard sliding in the fall when the weeds are dead,” said Frazier.

“Aw, you can do that anytime,” corrected Gallagher, “not just when the weeds are dead.”

“But it’s funner then,” replied Frazier.

“There’s no such word as funner,” said Gallagher with a disgust that showed why his treehouse is off limits to girls.

“It’s fun to roll rocks down the hill too,” chipped in Mikos.

“And there are lots of nice places to go, like on picnics. You can go way back in there,” said Heather. “And there are all these mustard flowers and some really pretty views.”

Heather Bauer seemed particularly indignant about the idea of a freeway cutting through the open spaces of Shell Ridge.

“We’d move if they built a highway behind us,” she threatened. “We’d sue the rangers. We’d sue the people of this country. This is a national park, you know.”