Assignment #5

For this weeks assignment I wanted to gather some excellent photos of "The Devil Mountain" both from my own personal collection as well as from other sources. The picture above is the western side of the mountain, with Highway 24 in the foreground.

This is an awesome panoramic shot of Mount Diablo from Wikipedia (I know we are to avoid that dreaded website at all costs, but it was the only place I could find this picture. And since I am studying a Satanic mountain, it was temptation that led me to Wiki). The link here provides a much sharper and better picture than the on on the blog. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mount_Diablo_Panoramic_From_Newhall.jpg

This is a photo of the south side of the Summit-Building, which serves as a visitor center, natural history museum, airline beacon, and fire lookout. As one of the tallest land marks in the visible vicinity, at 3,864 feet in elevation, it made a perfect choice as an observation deck. It was the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) that began construction on the Summit-Building in 1939 and completed it in 1942. I will detail more about the specific CCC company that built the trails and buildings in the park in my next blog.

This is a very rare photograph to capture. This is Mount Diablo when hell freezes over. This is from last December of 2009 when a strong arctic storm from the Gulf of Alaska blew in dumping a few inches of snow throughout the Bay Area. Since Mount Diablo is at a high elevation it received a few feet of snow. Usually each winter brings only a few inches and a dusting of snow to only the peaks of Mount Diablo, such as in this photo:, but never anything as spectacular as the top picture.

These are two photos I took from last December right after the snow fell. I finished my last final for the quarter and rushed up to the Mountain so as not to miss an opportunity such as this. In the photo below you can see exactly where the snow line had melted to.




Below you can see Mount Diablo looming over downtown Walnut Creek in a foreboding manner.









This last picture is an awesome 3-D image of one hiker's trip up the Mountain. You can see the towns of Walnut Creek and Clayton in the foreground at the foot of the mountain. The image also gives incredibly detailed topography of the northwestern face of the mountain, the side I grew up looking at.
Here is the link to see the above 3-D Image from its original homepage. It is much larger than the blog would allow me to put on here http://www.rebeccabond.com/blogpics/2009_01_24/MountDiabloEmilieHike.jpg