JMT3.5: All Trails Lead to Somewhere 2.0

For Part 2, I met back up with Max and Rob Hudson, my four year teammate on MAXC and good friend. Rob is rehabbing from a foot injury, so he’s hopping on as another JMT guest star to some of these hikes in order to ease himself back into athletic activity. We met deep in Mill Valley, where Lovell meets Cascade, for an afternoon hike on the mountain.

We started off on what I think is one of the best named trails in Mill Valley: Zigzag. Zigzag starts at the valley floor, and zigzags all the way up to the Gravity Car Road gate. It’s steep, runs somewhat parallel to Tenderfoot, and is an absolute scramble up - or down - the mountain. After today’s rain, the climb was more difficult than usual.

From the top of Zigzag, we headed from the Gravity Car road gate towards Double Bowknot, in the opposite direction from this morning, and continued on Railroad Grade to the point at which Railroad Grade meets two other trails, Hoo-Koo-E-Koo Fire Road and the Vic Haun trail. We elected to take Vic Haun, and continued to climb further into the gloom of the afternoon.

Vic Haun eventually meets up with the much more well traveled Temelpa Trail, but the reason we came this way was to see one of the crazier historical attractions that Tam has to offer. Just off the main trail, there’s a short side trail that leads to the remains of a US Navy plane that crashed into the hillside near the end of World War II on November 30, 1944. While it’s believed that they crashed into the mountain, nobody knows for sure what happened, and mystery still surrounds the accident today. It’s definitely one of the coolest, and certainly one of the saddest, places on Mount Tam.

To continue our historical adventure, we went on to the Temelpa Trail, where we stopped on the way down to admire the Sitting Bull monument along the way. Sitting Bull wasn’t from anywhere near here, the Bay Area does have its own Native American past. Still, the monument and its haunting, cautionary inscription remain yet another mystery of the mountain.

We exited Temelpa at its intersection with Hoo-Koo-e-Koo, and made our way back towards Double Bowknot, where we took a shortcut in a desperate attempt to get Max home in time for dinner. This trail leads straight down through the woods and over to the Myrtle fire road, but we realized fairly quickly that we may have taken a wrong turn. But seeing as we were still on a trail, and that we were going down, we kept going, and miraculously ended up right where we began our hike.

A few years back, Max and I discovered Zigzag trail on our way to Tenderfoot, and decided to run down it with no knowledge of where we would end up. That day, we coined the mantra that “all trails lead to somewhere.” Today, that rings just as true as ever. All trails lead to somewhere - but somehow, some way, most of them lead to the car. See you tomorrow.

👊✌️

Jonathan