China Wall

On a Saturday in June of 2025, I wrote that I got up seven in the morning I got my 8 year old boys awake. We left at 10:45 on our bikes and took BART to the East Bay. I showed them some geography from the train windows on the way. The boys wanted to know how long Caldicott Tunnel was.

At Pleasant Hill, we stopped at Starbucks on the way to Shell Ridge. The ride up the Ironhorse trail and Canal trail went quick. The grounds staff yelled at us in Diablo Hills Golf Course but we passed them easily. The boys complained at the crossing of near Muir Hospital. However, we managed to get past that as we entered the open spaces.

The first and second climb were hard. I had to fix one of the boys’ had to fix his derailers. I showed him how to do it. I probably should’ve taken his bike to the shop the week before. The third climb was really hard though. It was literally 500 feet. I had to help the boys with their bikes again.

We descended to Borges Ranch where I caught my breath. The boys drank water and had snack snacks. There was a Boy Scout troop from Lafayette. Their tents were in the Sun which I thought was funny. We climbed to Borges Vista then. We actually had to walk some of the way.

However, the boys were in good spirits. We headed on towards China Wall then. There weren't any names for the paths, but this one had a pond and was “the west route.“ I noted that there was a water tower near the top of that path.

We encountered a herd of cows. I asked them to get out of the way. After that, one of the boys abruptly got off his bike and freaked out a horse who had been following us. I tried to get the bikes above the trail, but that made the horse gallup away.

When we crested there, we only had one valley to go. I took a wrong turn and had to go back, but one of the boys bombed a hill at that point and it was really cool. We got to China Wall around 4 o’clock and I got photos of Mammoth rock.

We rode back much of the same route, but after the cows and water tank and pond we stayed on the western route to avoid Borges Ranch to save elevation and time. I noted that that meant we had to skip getting more water.

We descended to the trailhead but opted to go to downtown Walnut Creek instead. The view was great. We managed the traffic along Homestead and Lakewood well enough and stopped at a good but expensive taqueria Broadway.

 
This is an occasional series chronicling my life. This Notebook Analysis series is meant to be contemporaneous piece developed as an agglomeration of my notebook pages. In each of these posts I used my notes to develop my recent thoughts.