JMT7: Foo Fighters

Mount Tamalpais, like many places in the country, was once home to a Native American tribe, the Coast Miwok. The Miwok shared a special relationship with the mountain they believed to be the dwelling place of their god, Coyote.

In 1921, the writer of the Mountain Play searched far and wide for a native story of the mountain to feature in that year’s show. Unfortunately for him, the Miwok didn’t seem to have any such stories, so he was forced to write one himself. The show is a love story that ends on a down note, with the title character forced to lie down at the top of the mountain for the rest of time. He named his work “Tamalpa,” or sleeping maiden, for the shape the mountain appears to take on from afar. I vaguely remember learning the story, now local legend, from the backseat of my dad’s car as we traveled West down Highway 37 at dusk.

The trailhead at the top of my street, wedged between the two sections of Railroad Grade, is marked in yellow lettering as Tamalpa. It takes a steep, direct route towards where the sleeping maiden is fabled to rest at the mountain’s highest point, East Peak. On today’s gloomy Sunday afternoon, I met up with JMT guest star Aidan Ashe at the trailhead for a good old fashioned East Peak summit.

Tamalpa, Temelpa, or Temalpa - the spelling is a point of contention around here - is epically steep. In ~1.6 miles, it racks up just shy of 1500 feet of elevation. The first mile is a grind with its 1000 foot climb, and things don’t get much easier on the switchbacks to follow, but this trail is truly awesome and undeniably rewarding. One thing that I loved - and hated at points - about today was that because of the heavy mist, the top never seemed to draw any closer, and the valley floor never dropped an inch. We were running blindly up the mountain, and I enjoyed it quite a bit.

Tamalpa’s end marks our entrance onto the Verna Dunshee Trail, a concrete path that offers a short break from the uphill before leading past the Visitor Center and onto the boardwalk that marks the start of the Plank Trail, the final climb to the fire lookout at the very top. About halfway up the climb, I looked behind me to find that Aidan was nowhere to be seen. I pressed on, telling myself that he probably just started walking or something, and found him waiting for me on the steps of the Gardner Lookout, smirking at me and admiring his own idea to cut through the woods instead of following me up the switchbacks. Well done, Aidan.

As expected, there was nobody at the top except for us and one other runner, who actually turned out to be the Tam High cross country coach. On any other day, you can see for miles from here: San Francisco to the South, the ocean to the West, Big Rock Ridge and the reservoirs to the North, more of Marin to the East. But today, the wind was roaring and the mist ensured that we couldn’t see more than a few feet in front of us, which made for an awesome and pretty unique experience up top.

After taking the short way up, we took the long way down. Tamalpa was far too wet and slippery to run down, so we ran down to the top of Railroad Grade and went down past West Point Inn and all the way down to Hoo-Koo-e-Koo, where we turned left and reentered Tamalpa for the final stretch of our run. While we didn’t plan on taking this route down, we adapted to our conditions to try to stay away from some gnarly single tracks.

A few positive side effects of our improvised descent: I officially checked off every inch of Railroad Grade for this project, from West Blithedale to the top of East Ridgecrest Boulevard, and I’m pretty psyched to have done that with so much time left in the project. It looks like I am going to have more time to really explore over these next few weeks than I originally anticipated. The other positive from the way down was just that we had a lot of easy downhill to cool off from the brutal uphill that began the run, which gave us plenty of time to set over/unders for how many people we would see on the fire road (I won) and to talk about the LEGO Star Wars memes that this run is named for.

I didn’t originally plan on running today. The forecast, and my dad, made it sound like it was going to rain hard, so I thought it would be as good a day as any to take my usual one day off per week. But when the weather held up - or at least enough for my liking - I knew that I would have the mountain, the trails, and the peak all to myself, and that was an opportunity that I couldn’t pass up. See you tomorrow!

👊✌️

Jonathan