Ohlone Wilderness

By: Andrew Thoma

As a friend and I drove through the dawn fog near Livermore, we began to wonder if this was really as worthwhile a trip as we hoped for. We were about to start a backpacking route through remote cow pastures and scattered oak trees, terrain far less dramatic than what we’d come to know and love from our trips crisscrossing the Sierra Nevada.

What we sought was subtlety, a chance to see and notice a kind of backyard beauty easy to overlook—not “epic” peaks and valleys, not snowcaps and deserts. We didn’t want to carry crampons. We didn’t care about being “blown away.” We weren’t going to monitor mileage, heart rate, time, pack weight, or topographic metrics on trekkers’ trail apps. Our only plan was to hike the first leg just the two of us, and then casually meet up with a larger crew later on.

In the end, we both felt the trip helped us regain an appreciation for the present moment, and offered up a kind of low-key enlightenment about the virtues of noticing the subtleties of environments easily overlooked.