On Bicycle Touring: Mount Diablo Might Not Be The Tallest Peak, But Its Views Are Bigtime
By Alan Snel
LVSportsBiz.com
Only 24 hours earlier on Monday, rock music was blaring over the NFL stadium PA system as I was chatting with Raiders fans at the Coliseum in Oakland about how they plan to follow the NFL team to Las Vegas in 2020. During the interviews, fans would share a comment for the story, then look over my shoulder and scream stuff like, “Hey Fred, give me an autograph. C’mon!,” as former Raiders receiver great Fred Biletnikoff emerged from a stadium walkway and strolled onto the field.
But today it was all about solitude as I slowly pedaled 11 miles up Mount Diablo on one of the most spectacular bicycle climbs in the San Francisco-Oakland Bay area.
The hay-colored hills undulated in every direction from the mountain summit of 3,849 feet, with splashes of green vegetation adorning the East Bay hillsides of Contra Costa County.
I love this free-standing mountain because it’s far from being a very tall peak in California, yet its lariat-style road layout on the side of the mountain with many hairpin curves gives a slow-moving bicyclist a visual buffet of scenes from the bay to the west to the Sierras to the east. It’s a mesmerizing viewshed for a mountain with a peak of less than 4,000 feet. There’s open grassland punctuated by mixed oak woodland and several different kinds of pines.
I am staying with my friends, Lance and Anne, in Moraga, and Lance intrigued me by suggesting I bike up Mount Diablo, where the starting point for the climb was 14 miles from his house. Lance cooked up eggs with spinach and potato to fuel my ride.
I pedaled along a trail, then hopped on Olympic Avenue into downtown Walnut Creek, before maneuvering through some residential neighborhoods before I reached Mount Diablo State Park.
It’s a challenging 11-mile climb, but not demoralizing or painful. Just a steady and slow climb that kept me in the four mph-eight mph range. There were as many bicyclists as motorists today — and there weren’t too many of either.
Man, the last 200 yards or so were the steepest section of the entire climb and I was happy to lean my bicycle on the summit sign.
The mountain got its name thanks to a bit of confusion by English speakers. In 1805, Native Americans escaped the Spanish in a nearby willow thicket, so the Spanish soldiers called the mountain, “Monte del Diablo” — thicket of the devil. But English speakers thought Monte del Diablo meant mountain of the devil, and the English meaning stuck — Mount Diablo.
In 1931, California purchased land around the peak to create the state park that bears the Mount Diablo name. The state park now includes 20,000 acres and 38 parks and preserves in and around the mountain.
The Tour of California has used the climb as a stage several times, and the fastest time up the mountain is 41 minutes and 39 seconds by professional cyclist Marc de Maar.
I didn’t come close to biking this mountain in less than an hour. I slowly ascended, soaking up the pretty vistas and enjoying a natural setting far from the frenzied scenes of a massive crowd taking in an NFL game at the Coliseum the day before.
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