Worst Drought in 1,200 Years!

I saw an alarming item in my newsfeed yesterday. "Western Megadrought is Worst in 1,200 Years" one particularly vivid headline read. But is it just clickbait or is there a "there", there? I caught up with the story via The Washington Post's article "Southwest drought is the most extreme in 1,200 years, study finds" (14 Feb 2022).



The picture used in the article is actually from last year, Oct. 2021, but it's a sight that has become familiar in coverage of the multiyear drought in California. It shows houseboats squeezed together in what's left of Lake Oroville, one of the state's biggest reservoirs. Before the drought the lake was deep enough to cover all the brown hillsides!

The answer to my question about clickbait is No, there really is a "there" there. These articles point to a recent study published in Nature which found that the period of 2000-2021 is the driest period in the American West since 800 CE.

At the start of 2022 I was optimistic this would be a year we stave off the drought. We'd just come out of an exceptionally rainy December, after a fairly rainy November. The article reflects that, noting that at 12/31 California was at 160% of normal season-to-date rainfall. Now, after 6 weeks of clear skies and warm weather, we're at just 73% of normal for the season to date.

Figures like "73%" don't sound alarming. Comparisons like "deepest drought in 1,200 years" do. We could be looking at a widespread disaster like the Dust Bowl unfolding. As I remarked when I wrote about the downside of warm & sunny days in winter a few weeks ago, if I were a religious person I'd pray for rain.

Hiking Las Trampas Ridge, part 2

Yikes, I'm getting backlogged again. Here it is Tuesday and I'm still catching up on blogging about Saturday. On Saturday we hiked at Las Trampas Regional Wilderness near Danville, California. In part 1 (see previous link) I wrote about where the park is and the first leg of the hike. Once we reached the top of the namesake ridge the views changed... though not in the way you might imagine.



The first thing that happened as we reached the ridgeline of Las Trampas Ridge was... we entered a hardwood forest! Okay, we weren't literally at the ridge top when I shot the picture above; the trail bounds back and forth across both sides of the ridge, sometimes right on the edge of it but much of the time maybe 10-15' below the top. And on the east side of the ridge, just below the top, there are a lot of trees. This made us feel like we were walking through a valley when we were really at 1,700' elevation, hundreds of feet above the actual valley.

As nice as the tree cover and deep green grass were, they were also a bit of a bummer. We climbed this ridge, huffing and puffing all the way up, to see the long distance sights. Where were they? We had to squat and peer through tree branches to see them!

Opportunity came in the form of a nearby ridge. In this case, the Corduroy Hills just east of us.



Crossing over to the Corduroy Hills involved a very steep trail that dropped seeming straight down to a saddle below the two ridges, across the saddle with deep canyons on either side, then up a steep, rough trail to Eagle Peak atop the Corduroy Hills. The picture above shows me looking back at Vail Peak on Las Trampas Ridge, and in the distance Rocky Ridge, from atop Eagle Peak.

Even this perch didn't solve the main problem, though. I'd already had plenty of views to the west. I wanted views to the east. Those came from exploring a bit beyond Eagle Peak.

Continuing on this side trail was an iffy proposition... not because it was a hard trail (the hard part was the scramble to the ridgetop) but because Hawk had opted not go when she saw what a scramble it was. I didn't want to get too far away or stay away too long a time from my partner. Fortunately a) the trail was good once at the ridgetop, so I could cover ground quickly, and b) the view I was looking for was only a few hundred meters away.



Totally by surprise I found this beautiful perch some distance east of Eagle Peak summit. From here you can see the Tri-Valley cities of Danville, San Ramon, Alamo, and other over 1,200' below, as well as Mt. Diablo, one of the Bay Area's highest peaks at elev. 3,849' (1,173 m) in the distance.

You can also see a lot of smog or haze in the sky. We saw this over us while we were driving up i-680 through the large valley in the picture above. At first I worried it was going to be a poor air quality day; then I was jubilant at how clear the air was in Bollinger Canyon. From up here it's obvious how bad the smog/haze is over the Tri-Valley. And up here it clicked. The weather pattern, I mean.

The Bay Area has a summer weather pattern that's kind of like "Breathe in, breathe out." When high pressure over the Pacific pushes air onshore, the Bay Area "breathes in" the cool and clear air. That air passes through the Central Valley beyond, where it heats up. When the high pressure system moves inland, the heated and dirty Central Valley air is "breathed out" across the Bay Area and offshore. The dirty air is literally dirty with dirt, BTW, from all the agriculture in the Central Valley. Of course it's not summer right now; it's February. But we're having summer-like temperatures with it being 81° F (27° C) on Saturday. The "breathe out" part of this breathe in/breathe out pattern is part of why.



As I made my way back to the main ridge I called out to Hawk to let her know where I was. When we call to each other in the wilderness we don't just shout, though. We use a bird call: a red-tail hawk call. You've almost certainly heard one even if you don't know what it is. Imagine any TV show or movie playing a sound effect that says "You're a long way from anything." You hear that long, raspy screech. Keeeeer! That's the call of a red-tail hawk. That's how we call out to each other.

I found it amusing that while we were calling out to each other, a real red-tail hawk was calling, too. Later on in the hike we saw her take off from a perch as we approached. I don't know if we confused her with our calls, irritated her, both, or neither.



As much as I've written about this hike up to this point— two blogs worth— we were only about halfway through our hike. And the second half of the hike was... well, this was one of those times where we were in the mode of "put one foot in front of the other." We'd seen so much already we were drunk on the beauty and just focused on the walking. In beauty we walk.

Update: Want to see more of Mt. Diablo? We went hiking there the following weekend!