outdoors | Meridian Jacobs' Blog

I always see Mt. Diablo when I walk Across the Road (unless there is too much haze or fog). I feel a sort of weird connection to it because of the road we live on, which prompted the name of our farm, Meridian Jacobs. I wanted to DO something on my birthday and fortunately the weather was perfect for a hike. We picked up my brother on the way and arrived at Mt. Diablo State Park a little after 8 a.m.

Wikipedia says: “The Mount Diablo Meridian, established in 1851, is a principal meridian extending north and south from its initial point atop Mount Diablo in California.”

I took a lot of photos but I have to narrow it down for a blog post. There are probably more in this post than there should be. It’s hard to portray the true essence of the hike in my photos.

Sign at Mt. Diablo State Park with mileage to various points.

I wanted to get to the summit. Not long after we started we spoke to someone who said the direction we were headed was very steep and suggested a different route.

Two people hiking a trail through oak woodland.

We had a map that showed all the trails and decided to start on a different one than what we’d planned.

Two hikers looking at a sign post and a map.

Double checking the location.

We’re still smiling!

Hiker sitting on a ridge top near a sign for Eagle Peak.

One of several peaks on the way to our goal. The sign say elevation 2369. I thought about adding a 1 in front of the 2. That’s sort of how it felt since we live in the flatland and lately all the walking has been flat. This was about 10:30.

Distant view across wooded hills with an arrow pointing to a building at the crest of the mountain.

I took this photo around noon. That point on the mountain is our goal and Dave thought that we should get there by 1 p.m. to make sure we had plenty of time to get back before dark.

Structure at the top of Mt. Diablo. Concrete building looks like a castle.

This is where that arrow points.

Not many flowers yet, but things are greening up and showing promise of a beautiful spring. We did see a lot of this vine that I recognize from other oak-woodland hikes.

There was a point where we had a choice to take a one-mile “short-cut” to the top (steep, we were warned by someone coming down) or another two miles with ups and downs. We split up here. Dan took a different route that Dave and I would follow later back down the mountain. Dave and I went to the top.

Since you may not be able to read the sign I’ll repeat it here: “Mount Diablo, sacred to Native Americans who lived and worshipped there for over 5000 years, became a critical reference point for Spanish explorers in the 18th century, and American trappers and early California settlers in the 19th. In 1851 Colonel Leander Ransome established the crossing of the Mount Diablo base and meridian lines from which most of California and Nevada are surveyed.”

In the days before electronic navigation the light on top of the rotunda (once on a 75-foot tower) served as a crucial route-finding aid. It was turned off after the attack on Pearl Harbor amid fears that it could guide the enemy to an attack on the mainland. It is now dark except when it is lit on December 7 as a memorial to those who died at Pearl Harbor.

This is inside the rotunda.

View north-northwest.

View to the north. If I can see this mountain from where I live it seems as though I should be able to see my house from the mountain. I guess not. It’s out there somewhere. You can make out the windmills that are south east of our farm and we think what you can barely see left of center under the horizon is Travis AFB.

This is the view of the rotunda on our way down the mountain.

View to the east.

We saw a little bit of fall color. I took few photos on the hike back down. It was the most challenging part of the day. We followed a dirt road that is used to access communication towers on another mountain top. Downhill and a road. Sounds easy, right? It was so steep in parts that if I hadn’t had a walking stick to brace against I would have been slipping the whole time on those parts. Even with the stick it seemed treacherous. I hadn’t thought to bring walking sticks, but Dan and Dave had. On the way down Dan had left one of his with me. Once I started hiking this road I realized that his trip would have been extra challenging with his new knee joint and using only one stick.

We got back to the car before dark.

I had turned on my Map My Walk app before starting (blue dot). Somehow it turned off not long after we started and only started up again when we were sitting on the top eating lunch. So these stats are only half of the hike. We think our hike was 13 to14 miles. A good day.

I’ve written a few posts about lambing, but that wasn’t the only thing going on. During the middle of lambing the Texas grandkids were here for a week. Kirby, age 10, and Kasen, age 8, flew solo (without parents) in mid-March, also spending a few days with the other grandparents a few miles away.

The first afternoon here we walked across the road with Ginny. I like this view of Mt. Diablo due south.

This photo shows the main canal to the right. I got carried away just now and did a bit of internet research about this channel, which I know is called Sweeney Creek, but it doesn’t look much like a creek anymore. This document describes the Ulatis Flood Control Project constructed in the 1960’s and 70’s, a series of channels that end in the delta. The focus of the document is a fish survey done in 2023 and sampling point #9 is at this location. How does this relate to this post? The kids wanted to walk down to the water and the easiest place for that is below the structure at the right of this photo.

At that point we saw splashing and realized that there were a lot of large fish in the rocky area below that structure. There is a fish at the top of this photo.

In a small still area we saw over a dozen fish.

Kirby decided that a rescue was called for to move the fish from the small rocky pools to a place where the water flowed more freely. She was able to easily catch several of the fish that were in the small pool.