Last weekend we were lazy, settling back in after vacation. Our goal was to do something more active this weekend.

After getting up a little late, we looked for a place to hike that we haven’t been to before. Our answer: Mt. Diablo. When you drive around the Bay Area on a clear day you can see Mt. Diablo rising above the East Bay. Usually it’s frickin’ hot over there, but today it was going to be a relatively mild 81 degrees. I looked for a trail with a bunch of caches on it and we got our stuff together to go.

We had to make a quick stop at the Sunnyvale dump to drop off some empty propane tanks we used for camping. One of them was so old that it’s moved with us at least twice. Apparently propane tanks are considered “hazardous waste” and this was the one weekend of the month they would accept them. This place was scary. First we went through this checkpoint where they asked us what we were bringing and where we lived. Then we drove around the corner to find all these people in hazmat suits moving stuff around. We handed them our two small propane tanks and got out of there.

Mt. Diablo is about 30 miles away, so it took us a little while to get there. About halfway there I realized I had left the nice map I had made with all the caches on it safely in my printer. Nice.

Our plan was to drive the summit and do a loop from there down and back up again. We drove up and up, trying to encourage the people too focused on the scenery to speed up, the people taking wide turns around corners coming down to slow down, and the cyclists from taking up the whole road. At the junction inside the park, there was a sign. The road was closed to the summit, apparently due to a rockslide or something. Well, there goes those plans.

We drove further into the park and found another spot that looked interesting with at least a few caches. That was a half-mile from the road though, so we took the trail in that looked the most reasonable. It was a bit roundabout and ended up taking us down the “Sunset Trail” which was barely a trail in places.

We found two caches and then decided to head up the other side of the valley for two more. It was steep. When we got near the top, I forged up the side of a grassy hill while Anne took the more sane route following the trail. There was quite a nice view of Castle Rock below.

We continued on and came to a trail that forked up a hill to the right and down to the left. I wasn’t sure which way to go but I didn’t want to go up the hill if we didn’t need to so we went left. Wrong decision. As we got closer, I realized we needed to be right at the top of the hill. Boy that map would have been handy about now. Instead of making the long back then up the trail, I decided to walk straight up the hill with all its tall dry grass. It was steep and parts and uneven underneath from cow grazing. We slowly headed up the hill and Anne told me about all the things I now owned her because of this poor decision. At the top we found another obstacle – a barbed wire fence. The wire was in good shape so it would have been tough to go through it. Instead we went over a part that had a wooden beam and managed to do so without gashing ourselves.

Soon we started heading down again and we found ourselves next to a large stable. We continued in to Castle Rock Park. Buses were whizzing by us on the road, to what we did not know. The PA system was blaring Heart’s Greatest Hits. As we walked through and onto a deck we saw a soda fountain calling us. Unfortunately somebody else was calling us – some guy in a blue shirt behind us asked “if he could help us”. What he actually meant “get out of here and away from my soda fountain, the park is closed for a corporate event”. Alrighty. We did use the restroom though.

We found ourselves on the western end of the road we had followed earlier, before we went up that steep hill. What we really need to do was to go due North to the road and to our car, but there wasn’t a way to do that without going East for a ways, back to the Sunset trail. Never liking to go back the way we came, we opted for a different route – bouldering over Castle Rock.

Castle Rock is one of those rock formations with vertical slabs of rock sticking straight up. It’s popular with climbers. We weren’t actually sure if the trails that led up to the climibing faces would get us up and over, but I guessed it would. There were some moderate scrambles up rock slabs, but nothing too bad. The views were great. The tiny trails that meandered through prickly brush that scraped your legs were not so great.

Eventually we did make it out to something that resembled a trail. It went right and left. Left seemed more right to me so left we went. Right. It brought us more West than we wanted and eventually hit a barbed wire fence. At this point it was less of a trail and more of a trampling of tall grass that followed along the fence. Soon it started heading more directly down and towards the trail we actually wanted to be on.

The “directly down” became more of problem. This was all tall grass that was laid down and on steeper slopes it becomes quite slippery. I stumbed a few times, walked sideways for a bit, then decided to try a different technique. I sat down and just slid right down the grass. It was surprisingly fast and I had to steer myself off the trail so I didn’t break my neck. Anne followed and laughed as she slid down the grass, trying to grab on the sides to slow down. I’ve decided to call this new sport grASS sliding and I’m sure it will be included as in the 2012 Olympic Games.

Finishing our slides we walked through more tall grass and finally on the real trail. By this time our shoes and socks were full of burrs and dead grass, but dammit, we had fun. Amazingly we were pretty close to the car too. We made it back in one piece though we only found 4 caches during our 4 hour, 10-mile hike.

Any day that includes a sudden change in plans, tromping through tall grass, going up steep hills, getting kicked out of parks, climbing barbed wire fences, bouldering and grASS sliding deserves to end well and us that means a big Slurpee. We punched up the nearest 7-Eleven on the GPS and headed over. We picked up a 40oz Passion Fruit flavor and it was good.

After all that, I guess I’m starting to understand why no one wants go hiking with us. I wonder what we’ll do tomorrow.