I went to Mount Diablo State Park in July, 2005, my first assignment out of the Academy. My ranking in the Academy gave me a choice between Mount Diablo and Ventura State Beach. I wanted to go to LA. Susan was working down there and we had an apartment and I was ready to return to LA, particularly the mountains and the wilderness down there. But Ventura was the closest slot available. At Ventura State Beach alcohol is a problem, Hell’s Angels and meth addicts and it was nearly 100 miles from LA. I decided that wasn’t for me, I don’t like the beach, and the enforcement there looked to me like cowboys and Indians. Susan and I wanted either LA or San Francisco. The disadvantage of Mount Diablo was that the actual assignment included being in charge of the museum and souvenir shop at the top of the mountain. I really didn't like the idea of becoming a shop keeper after going through the Academy. I didn’t become a Ranger to be a shopkeeper. I visited Diablo and they seemed eager to have me, so I took the Diablo assignment. I didn't think it would be that bad but it's not what I wanted to do as my first assignment when I became a Ranger.
Mount Diablo is 20,000 acres, 45 miles east of San Francisco. It sits right where the weather of the Bay Area and the weather of the Central Valley meet and it can go either way depending on which way the winds are blowing and where the pressure systems are for the day. I had been to Mount Diablo in 1995. We drove to the top and looked around. That time I was very unimpressed, a 3,837 foot peak with a parking lot and gift shop at the top.
In the Academy when I made my visit to Mount Diablo, it was a beautiful spring day with light fog on the south side, hanging between the blue oaks which were just beginning to bud. It was magical and a beautiful place. When I began working there, I came to appreciate what a gem Mount Diablo was.
At 3800 hundred feet it wasn’t much of a peak but between the Bay and the Valley it was the highest point, looking across to Mount Hamilton which anchored the South Bay. All the hills around it were much smaller and it sat on the edge of the Valley like a giant viewing platform giving a view from the Sierra Buttes above Sacramento and sometimes even Mount Lassen down to Yosemite in the South. On a clear day we could see out to the Farallon Islands 30 miles west of San Francisco.
Mount Diablo is the center of its world, one side facing east with Western Junipers and Gray Pine and the other side facing west with Blue Oaks and Live Oaks. There are Coulter Pines like the ones in the mountains facing LA and Madrones that always made me think of Oregon. For plants in the Bay Area it is as far east as they go and plants from the Sierras stop their western march at Mount Diablo and the same is true for the North and the South. Mount Diablo really is the center point for California. We had our own Manzanita, Mount Diablo Manzanita and the Mount Diablo Globe Lily along with Mount Diablo Buckwheat and Mount Diablo Sunflowers and many other endemic plants. We had two breeding pair of Golden Eagles.
The Miwok people in the Sierras and in the Bay Area were created on Mount Diablo. After being there a short time I realized Mount Diablo for the first people was the Garden of Eden, the sacred place, the center of the world, where it all began.
Even in modern times Mount Diablo gathered legends about itself. Everyone in the Bay Area called it the tallest mountain the Bay Area. It wasn’t. Mount Hamilton well within sight of the Bay was three hundred feet higher. Everyone said that the view from Mount Diablo was the largest view in the world except for Mount Kilimanjaro. From the rooftop viewing platform on top of the museum you could hear that ten times a day. It wasn’t. That particular piece of information had turned up in the newspaper in the 1930s and was groundless but had been repeated so often that people came to believe it.
But these made up myths about Mount Diablo just acknowledged that there was something about Mount Diablo that people couldn’t quite explain, something very special and sacred, and so people made up stories about Mount Diablo just to make sense of it. There was a whole story about how the mountain was a misunderstanding by the gringos of the original Spanish and that it really wasn’t named for the devil.
My own story which I could never verify but made sense in terms of the history of the mountain is that it was named by the missionaries from San Jose. The area around Mount Diablo was a good distance from Mission San Jose and the local people sought refuge on the mountain. It also was the Miwok Garden of Eden, a very sacred and holy place to the Miwok. In Europe anyplace named for the devil is usually a former sacred place to pre-Christian people. I thought the same thing probably occurred at Mount Diablo. The missionaries told their neophytes it was the Devil’s Mountain and they should avoid it. It made more sense to me than trying to claim that the most prominent geographical feature in the area, called Mount Diablo for over a 150 years, had been named by mistake.
An evangelical Christian from the nearby town of Oakley has been campaigning to change the name of the mountain. So far he has been unsuccessful but he keeps trying. The first attempt to change the name of the mountain was in 1863.
When I was working there I saw a Buddhist group at the mountain one day. They were staying at Juniper Campground and then I saw them again at the summit. The group of about 50 people all seemed to surround a monk that they were very protective of. I approached the group. The followers began to move in defense of the monk and then he signaled his followers to let me through and I met the Sogan Rinpoche, the sixth reincarnation of the Sogan Rinpoche from Tibet. The Venerable Sogan Rinpoche was a delightful and very personable gentleman who was delighted to meet and chat with a Ranger from the mountain. We talked about the sacredness of Mount Diablo and agreed that it was a very sacred place. It was where the Sogan Rinpoche came each year to do his earth blessing.
I often heard people say that Mount Diablo had been sacred to the Miwok people. And I tried to correct that and told everyone that would listen to me that yes, Mount Diablo was sacred to the Miwok people but that it was still sacred to the Miwok people and not just to them but that it was simply a sacred place and the Miwoks are aware of it and so are many other people. Yes, it was sacred; and it’s still sacred today.
One summer evening, closing the Park I kept coming across small groups of Muslim Americans, people with young families. They obviously didn’t want to leave the Park and when I went to talk to them, I learned they were from a Muslim Center in San Ramon and they had come to observe the new moon that marks the beginning of the month of Ramadan. For these Muslim Americans with roots from all over the world, just like many other people in the Bay Area, Mount Diablo is a sacred place. Finally they all gathered in a particularly good spot to see the new moon and began praying. They invited me to pray with them.
