From the summit of Mt. Diablo, apparently, you can see more land area than anywhere else on earth except the peak of Kilimanjaro, a fact that somehow made its way into a recent dream, in which I was pointing out these mountains on some ultra-futuristic holgraphic topographical map projector thing, sort of like they had in Star Wars, only you could zoom in to any level of detail and map out all kinds of things, like BART lines or the number of cuckoos per square mile. Somehow (things are always somehow in dreams) this map could change reality, because I hadn’t put all the houses and buildings on the map, and when we went to the Daly City station it was all rolling hills covered in windswept grass.

Back in reality, which isn’t yet controlled by GIS, thank the sweet baby Jesus, I nearly made it to the summit of Mt. Diablo on Sunday. Sasha and I looped around the east side on Morgan Territory Road (with brief views of the Central Valley) and then made the ascent from North Gate. It was a little too cloudy to see anything all that far away, but it was awe-inspiring all the same. Also, Mt. Diablo has some freaky wildlife. There are these pine trees, Coulter pines, that make the biggest cones of any tree on the planet, and don’t really grow anywhere else. And everything was green green green, and there were hillsides covered with lupine and all kinds of wildflowers. We saw huge storm clouds massed into a wall of blue and gray, making their way over the Berkeley hills, and wisely aborted our climb; instead we flew down to South Gate. What a delightful descent! Back to the car just in time to load up the bikes, get in before the rain hit, and have the most delicious lunch ever eaten.

Between music and bicycling I can’t be sure if I’m not already in paradise.

(cdm | BicicletasDelDiablo )