Assignment #9 Top of the Devil Mountain

What began as a simple look into why the Devil Mountain is so evil evolved on me into an untold story of American hard work and ingenuity. I have been hiking, mountain biking, and fishing on Mount Diablo for years without ever knowing who put the park there. I never thought to stop and ask myself “who built this trail? Why is it here? Why was this mountain chosen as state park”? I had no idea that it was the work of the Civilian Conservation Corps that I can thank for having a wilderness sanctuary so close to my home.

Professor Ivey lent me a book early on in the quarter when I was just beginning this research project. I had a vague idea of what I would have liked to do, but no idea what the future held for me. The book was Wilderness and the American Mind by Roderick Nash. In it Nash describes what a wilderness is and what it means to us as human beings. Wilderness is an idea invented by human beings to describe what is not a part of our civilized world. As early humans we clung together out of a sense of survival and fear. The wilderness represented what was dark, dangerous, unknown, and a threat to our existence. The only way we as humans can rise up and out of wilderness is for us to control the natural processes around us. We develop agriculture as a means of controlling nature for our benefit. We construct dwellings to keep us from the elements. We domesticate plants and animals to prove our domination over nature. We see ourselves as separate from nature and therefore must make a distinction between what we create, civilization, and what is already there, wilderness. Nash argues that “civilization created wilderness” (Nash, xiii), and sentiment that many Native Americans share as well. In their views, there was no wilderness until Westerners arrived. The Native Americans lived in harmony with the natural world around them and had no need to distinguish between civilization and wilderness. It was the white Europeans who came to the New World and felt the need to conquer all they saw in front of them. This is where our notion of a “wilderness idea” comes from.

Nash details more than just our fear and withdrawal from our perception of wilderness. Nash also explains where our appreciation of wilderness comes from. It comes from the cities, those who are so far removed from the wild that all they know is civilization. Nash points out that our love affair with the natural world began, aptly enough, during the period of Romanticism. The aesthetic beauty that nature had to offer was seen rather than just the resources it had to offer up. Individuals grew tired of city life and wanted to preserver what few wilderness areas were left so that they could escape to them. We leave our normal civilized lives behind to step back in time and live in wilderness only for a brief time. This is what I love to do, and why I chose this topic. Being able to leave a paved world of constant noise, overcrowding, and frustration for a wilderness that is miles away from civilization is one of my ultimate joys in life. The opportunity to pick up, essentially drop out of existence, and live in nature rather than against it is one every American needs to take advantage more of. We can learn something from wilderness that we can not get in the concrete jungles. And we learn a great deal about ourselves, what our limits our, and who we are as organisms on this planet when we travel out into the wilderness. John Muir left his life as an inventor and factory machinist behind to traverse the Sierra Nevada Mountains and found his paradise on earth.


The turn of the 20th Century brought about the change in American public opinion on wilderness. Now it was finally becoming understood how import wild open places are to us. The war shifted from conquering wilderness to preserving it. Under the New Deal projects created during the Great Depression the Civilian Conservation Corps was tasked with constructing our state parks. But they did not build them from the ground up. They built ways for people to access the wilderness around them. The CCC was in fact run as if it were a military unit by actual military officers. This was the first campaign to save our wilderness.


I learned a great deal about the CCC and the work they did not only in Mount Diablo State Park, but in all of the state and national parks in America. These men worked for a paycheck during a time when most Americans were desperate for work. But what they really accomplished was not finding employment but rather instilling a sense of preservation and service to our wilderness. They were the ones who made it possible for anyone in downtown San Francisco to be able to drive 30 minutes and ascend a wild mountain.






What I did find unfortunate about this story is what little our state parks keep on record of it. Mount Diablo State Park records only go back to the early 1970’s, and these are just short newspaper articles about park acquisition of land and donors to park causes. Nothing of who worked on the mountain or when is kept in any park records and is a story that has not yet been fully told. The story of the average CCC worker has not been brought out and little credit is paid to these wilderness warriors for making our open spaces accessible.


I would like to thank all of my fellow hikers who followed me on my journey up the mountain and into history. I hope by following my research you were able to take away even just a fraction of what I got from this story. I hope you find a new found appreciation of the not just Mount Diablo, but all of the great parks, open spaces, and wildernesses in California. I hope you can also realize the hard work companies of men put into the state parks on behalf of the CCC.


I would also like to thank California State Park Ranger Carl Nelson. He took the time to sit with me and talk not just about the park and the CCC but also what wilderness means to Americans today, the legacy of the CCC and what it means to be a state park ranger in 2010. Ranger Nelson is not only in charge of preserving Mount Diablo, but also educating future generations in the needs of preservation. I would also like to thank him for taking me through the behind the scenes action of running a state park and the natural history museum at the summit. He also showed me the few records kept on site in the park. He too agreed that this is an important story that needs more light shed on it, especially in our modern green initiative movements.


Finally, and most importantly, I would like to thank my instructor Professor Ivey. This was the first opportunity I have had to research something that is close to my heart rather than a topic assigned to me. Professor Ivey was the one who encouraged me to look inward, as to why I enjoy wilderness, as well as outward, why others enjoy wilderness. Without her I would have never thought to examine who built our state parks and why. I had always taken for granted my escape into the woods, not knowing who allowed me to do this and why. If anything Professor Ivey has only strengthened my love affair with the wilderness and increased my vast appreciation for it. This was a research project like no other I have ever undertaken before, and it has taught me a lot about being a historian and looking more critically at the world around me.


I hope you have enjoyed your time on the Devil Mountain with me and I hope you all get the chance some day to make your pilgrimage to the top. I hope you can see first hand the work of the CCC and its legacy. And I hope you too have an increased appreciation of our national and sate parks. Mount Diablo truly is a mysterious mountain that has captured the curiosity of Bay Area residence since the time of the Native Americans all the way up to our modern day.




The above video is a panoramic view from the summit of Mount Diablo

Assingment #8 Soarin' Over the Devil

Designing an exhibit on the work of the Civilian Conservation Corps on Mount Diablo would be difficult to do. Bringing the exhibit to life and grabbing the attention of my audience would be tricky to do. I could simply gather tools used by the workers, old maps of their progress, and discuss the various facilities they built. But that would be your average, run of the mill, boring exhibit that those outside of the history community often find so dry and unattractive. Designing something worthwhile would be tricky.

The first thing I would do is redesign the summit museum that is already in place on the South Peak of Mount Diablo. The building currently holds many roles for the park. It serves as a lighthouse/beacon, a fire lookout position, and headquarters for the state park rangers. It also has a museum inside the lower part of the building. It is a small museum that is primarily focused on the geological history of the mountain and the wildlife found on the mountain. Currently there is only one small 3’x3’ display that shows the work of the CCC on Mount Diablo. It has only a few photos and little to no information. I would expand on the museum, which was not even opened until 1994, keeping the natural history section that is already in place. I would add on to the museum about my research topic. There is plenty of space at the summit to add onto the size of the building. I would have the usual collection of tools used by the workers on display in an attempt to relate to the CCC workers and understand how they used their hands to build the facilities and trails. Also I would have sections set up to recreate the quarters the workers stayed in. I would have to have the cabins reconstructed since they were all torn down in the early 1940’s when work on the state park was completed. These workers were mostly young average men of the time and having their living spaces on display will give people a sense of what life was like for them. How they worked and lived in the wilderness. We as historians learn a lot from the spaces people lived in.

My main addition to the museum would come in the form of an amusement ride. I would design a ride similar to the “Soarin’ California” ride at Disneyland Resort. The ride would take small groups of people on a simulated hang gliding tour of Mount Diablo. Computer generated images and footage would be shown while the riders are in seats that are lifted from the ground to allow their feet to dangle. Above them would be a massive hang glider to further increase the simulation. The images would be projected onto a concave screen to give the riders a panoramic view of Mount Diablo and the surrounding area. Special attention would be paid to ensure that the images depict the area around Mount Diablo as it was in the later 1930’s and early 1940’s. The images shown would take the riders on a tour of the Mountain as the CCC was working. They would have an areal view of different crews working in different areas on the mountain.

Soarin' California Ride in Disneyland Resort

It would start low, focusing on the first few trails and roads being built. Then it would simulate hang gliding further up the mountainside to see the construction of other park facilities and the ranger stations on the summit road. Finally the ride would culminate at the summit with the completed construction of the summit building. The simulation will have the riders circle several times in the air above Mount Diablo at dusk while right at the end two malevolent glowing red eyes appear over the top of both peaks. Finally, before coming in to land the massive hang glider on the North Peak, the riders watch the last few glints of sun disappear west over the Pacific. This allows the visitors to simulate flying over the progress of the state park’s construction and see how the workers made the trails and facilities without having to take them on an all day hike throughout the park. It would be a much faster, areal, and rollercoaster-esque guided tour of the park as the CCC worked. The ride would be title “Soarin’ Over the Devil” and feature a large demonic statue at the ride entrance beckoning and seducing potential riders to enter.

Assignmnet #7 Legacy of the CCC

The Civilian Conservation Cops (CCC) was one of the many organizations created during the New Deal Program. At that time, the early part of the 1930’s, the CCC was created as a way to find employment for hundreds of young men in America. The CCC was an opportunity for young men in the not only make money at a difficult time in American history but also a way for them to give back to the community. They helped create and build our state parks into what they are today so that everyone can enjoy. Yet there is no way any of these young men could understand the lasting impact their work has had.



We our living in what some is beginning to call our “Green Revolution”. The global community, not just the United States, is starting to look for ways of creating renewable resources and the preservation of our environment. Here in America we have set aside our state and national parks as preservations of natural land. Roderick Nash, in his book “Wilderness and the American Mind”, he discusses what nature means to us as Americans and how we perceive wilderness. Wilderness used to be something we feared as a dangerous and forbidden place. This idea goes as far back as the creation story in the Bible. Adam and Eve were cast out of the Garden of Eden and into the wilderness. Out migration westward across the continent was a conquest and taming of the wilderness. By 1890 the American frontier was closed and wilderness had been conquered. It was at this point that Americans began to preserve what few wild opens spaces that were left.


The work the CCC did in preserving Mount Diablo as a state park has a lasting legacy to this day. I finally was able to make my pilgrimage up the mountain and meet with an expert of the Devil Mountain. California State Park Ranger Carl Nelson is a full time ranger who has been working at Mount Diablo State Park since 1991. Ranger Nelson points to the CCC as the ones “responsible for his work now”. He sees the legacy of the CCC in both a physical and non-physical way. Many of the same facilities and buildings, such as the Summit Building, that the CCC originally built in the 1930’s and early 1940’s are still in use to this day. Ranger Nelson explained to me that very few updates and refurbishing have been done to the picnic areas and the trails have only been kept clear, never altered from their original paths. These are the physical ways in which we can see the legacy of the CCC on Mount Diablo. But the non-physical legacy is just as important and lasting. Without the initial work of the CCC there would be no way visitors could have entered the park. The park originally only consisted of the summit area and was surrounded by privately owned land. This made it impossible for anyone to travel up to the park. The CCC expanded the parklands and created all of the roads and trails that are still there. Ranger Nelson also credits the work of the CCC as the ones who created his job in the park. If the CCC had not worked to preserve our open spaces then our state parks rangers would not exist.







The CCC could not have foreseen the environmental impact their work has had on our world today. We carry the same sense of a need to preserve and maintain our few wild spaces left in our local area. The Bay Area continues to have a growing population, yet in the face of this we still keep our open spaces from turning into developed areas and tract housing. Were it not for the work of the CCC I would not be able to escape on a Sunday afternoon to find inner peace on the Devil Mountain. We can not put a price on the aesthetic beauty, the environmental impact, and the need we have to keep our own “wilderness” accessible. The CCC gave us a priceless gift whether the young men working on the trails knew it or not. The CCC was ended in 1942 as more young men were needed in the effort to fight during World War II. Other conservation groups have picked up where the CCC left off, the Youth Conservation Corps, Eastbay Regional Parks, and our state park rangers just to name a few local groups. It was the CCC that brought Mount Diablo to the people of the Bay Area.