UNTOUCHED WILDERNESS
Spotlight: Berryessa Snow Mountain
The top of Snow Mountain was the last place I expected to find anything resembling a traffic jam.
Declared a national monument in 2015 by President Obama, Berryessa Snow Mountain is home to almost half of California’s 108 species of dragonflies and damselflies, and every last one of them seemed to be whizzing about in the clearing in front of me. The air was so thick with dragonflies that they occasionally collided, with a crunchy thwack.
There was no way around them, and I wasn’t turning back, so I shielded my eyes from incoming dragons and ran.
Berryessa Snow Mountain doesn’t have a postcardworthy feature like many national monuments; you won’t find anything like the tower of Devil’s Tower or the bridges of Natural Bridges here. What you will find is biodiversity. If that sounds unexciting, try having biodiversity dive-bomb your face in a highspeed blur of wings.
One animal, however, is conspicuously absent from Berryessa Snow Mountain: people. On a midsummer weekend, high season for California camping, I arrived at Bear Creek Campground in Snow Mountain Wilderness anxious that I might not snag a prime spot. The campground was empty. There were ancient oaks draped with fragrant lichens, yellow-legged frogs along the creek that shot away at my approach, a dusk sky alive with big-eared bats and dragonflies, and me. It took a few long, twisty dirt roads and a creek crossing to get there, but it’s worth a little dust on your bumper to have a canyon to yourself in the land of the dragonflies.
Exploring Berryessa Snow Mountain, I often found myself wondering whether I was in the national monument or not. I only encountered one new sign, and the basic map on the Bureau of Land Management’s website only gave a rough hint of the boundaries.
I did discover a handy rule of thumb: If you’re on a smooth paved road, you’re probably not in Berryessa Snow Mountain. Other than a short stretch of Highway 20 that cuts across the narrow middle of the monument and Knoxville Road, a back-road-lover’s dream that runs north from Lake Berryessa, Berryessa Snow Mountain is mostly a realm of dirt roads and off-highway-vehicle trails — or no roads at all. There’s much to be seen, but you have to work for it.
Less than two hours from San Francisco, covering
There were ancient oaks draped with fragrant lichens, yellow-legged frogs along the creek that shot away at my approach, a dusk sky alive with big-eared bats and dragonflies, and me.
a 100-mile-long stretch of land touching seven counties, how could Berryessa Snow Mountain remain so people free? The shape is partly to blame. Berryessa Snow Mountain sinuously threads between places most Californians know — it’s what you see to the northeast of Napa, east of Clear Lake and north of Lake Berryessa. If you’ve ever looked to the west from Interstate 5 and 505 and wondered what’s up in those enticingly rugged mountains, now it has a name.
The name, Berryessa Snow Mountain — after Berryessa Peak in the south (not Lake Berryessa, excluded from the monument as a concession to boaters and the local chamber of commerce) and Snow Mountain in the north — frames the lay of the land and gave me a mission: Visit both peaks to see what Berryessa Snow Mountain has in store for a curious visitor before any park infrastructure is in place.
Shortly after Berryessa Snow Mountain National Monument became official, it was on fire. In 2015, the Rocky Fire and Jerusalem Fire tore through the middle of the national monument, burning through nearly all of the Cache Creek Natural Area and lands along Highway 20. The Valley Fire in September crept up to the western border. During the following summers, wildfires claimed still more acres.
Fire is an inescapable part of the landscape here. Near the summit of Snow Mountain, I saw evidence in an eerily beautiful stand of blackened firs surrounded by a sea of towering yellow mullein flowers that had sprouted from the charred soil.
The first question most people ask about Snow Mountain (after “Where?”) is: “Does it actually snow on Snow Mountain?” It does indeed. At 7,056 feet, Snow Mountain’s eastern summit is the highest point in the national monument. Fly from the Bay Area to Portland or Seattle in the winter, and the first snowy peak you’ll see out the window is likely Snow Mountain. In snowier years, a few brave locals have managed to get up to the summit with skis.
Even in summer, getting to Snow Mountain is a challenge. The road from Upper Lake is mostly a well-graded dirt road, but one that crosses the Rice Fork, a large tributary of the Eel River. In springtime, even with a fourwheel-drive vehicle you may find yourself stuck by high waters, never able to reach Snow Mountain at all.
The trail to Snow Mountain’s summit — or, in truth, the twin summits of the ancient upthrust seamount — is a moderate day hike starting at the Summit Springs trailhead, climbing through vast manzanita hedges, serpentine barrens and fir forests with cornlily-lined meadows reminiscent of the High Sierra. Anywhere else, this would be a popular hike, but the trailhead logbook contained only a handful of signatures from the past year. More people may come, but for now dragonflies outnumber people here roughly 5,000-to-1.
Standing just over 3,000 feet high, Berryessa Peak is neither huge nor well known, but it does have something most mountains in California don’t: a new trail to the peak. The Berryessa Peak Trail might be a recent addition, but it already fits right in with the flavor of the rest of the national monument: It’s empty, it’s ruggedly beautiful and it makes you work.
The trail starts slowly, following old ranch roads along a creek valley in rolling oak woodland, but the middle section of the trail is forced to trace the property lines of private
inholdings. If you don’t want the trail to go straight up a very steep, crumbly knob, traverse a slippery hillside or make you climb over a fence (albeit on a handy wooden stile), too bad — that’s where the trail has to go. On the upper half of the trail, the dirt is soft, and the track is far from level and at times resembles little more than a cow path. By the end of the day, my ankles were ready to file a formal protest.
The view from the peak — in fact, the view from the ridge long before you reach Berryessa Peak — over Lake Berryessa toward Mount St. Helena is the payoff. I sat on the trail eating lunch without worrying I’d block anyone’s way. At 14 very sweaty miles round trip, it’s never going to draw big crowds.
But that’s why you come here in first place.