Hike Mt. Diablo’s “Rock City”: The Bay Area’s Answer to Joshua Tree

Submitted by the Event Organizer

Here’s a great free weekend hike idea from SFGATE’s Freda Moon.

An hour from SF is a maze of towering oddly shaped boulders. Some rise overhead, looming like fortresses. Others sprout like oversized puffball mushrooms, almost too perfectly round and artfully positioned to be real. Still others are pockmarked with mysterious “wind caves,” big enough to crawl inside and sit perched on the face of an ancient rock wall.

Surely, writer Freda Moon found herself thinking over and over again, this is some kind of human-made creation. A sculpture garden? A rustic playground? A Burning Man art project? How does a place like this come to exist without some genius mind engineering it?

For more hikes in the Bay Area and around California, check out SFGATE Outdoors.

But no, Rock City is just sandstone that was once the mineral sediment carried by rivers and ocean currents millions (45 to 50, according to the park’s placards) of years ago. An ancient undersea volcano, Mount Diablo, which now rises some 3,800 feet above sea level, was once surrounded by water.

There is plenty of ambitious hiking to be done here, but you can also pass your time scampering and climbing and touching and hiding more than trekking, like Moon and her family did.

Getting There:
Mount Diablo State Park, 96 Mitchell Canyon Road, Clayton. Open 8 a.m. to sunset.

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