Hike to the Summit of Bald Mountain at Sugarloaf Ridge

Bitching is the one consistent factor my husband can always count on when he and go hiking together, and it was no different on the hike up to the Bald Mountain Summit in Sugarloaf Ridge State Park, about a half hour from Sonoma. It was a long hike for this Sacramento REALTOR, over 6 miles and our elevation gain was roughly 1700 feet. I didn’t bring my hiking boots to handle the terrain, and it was a bit chilly yesterday morning, starting out around 50 degrees, but I didn’t need those 2 things to complain about when I could readily find so many others.

Now, see, I don’t really call it bitching. My preference is to say I am observing nature and making comments about it and its affect on my physical well being. That’s not really bitching. But my husband would disagree because just about anything I say that is not framed in a positive light to him is whining and time for the waaah-bulance.

We were a good 20 minutes into our four-hour roundtrip hike to the summit of Bald Mountain and back down through the meadow when we came across an elderly couple standing near the edge of the trail, taking a photo of something. It looked like the fellow was leaning on crutches. Please, please let it be crutches, I fervently wished. If he was disabled, that would give me tremendous hope that if he could do this hike, it would be piece of cake for me. No such luck. They were resting on hiking poles. Darn.

She hails from Devon, England, and her mother thinks our robins look like starlings in drag. They were not happy with our pitiful looking robins and continued to berate them until my husband pointed out that robins in Chicago, for example, are bigger and redder than robins in California. This is also a woman who hiked from the north end to the south end of the Grand Canyon. She understood my thoughts about the crutches, which I admitted. She had made that Grand Canyon hike alongside an amputee with a prosthetic leg. So, there you go.

For the first two hours, the terrain was pretty much UP. No flat. No down. The views at the top are spectacular. 360-degree views, and if the day had been more clear without fog in the Bay, we could have enjoyed the view all the way to the Pacific Ocean. As it was, I took a photo of the plaque with the valley below and sent it to Ingress as a portal suggestion.

I carried in my head all the way back, as I tried not to slip down the gravel and break my hip, visions of a massage back at our hotel. We had the foresight to make an appointment for a couples massage before we left. That was my reward. 90 minutes of pure heaven. I’m glad that we went on the hike up Bald Mountain, because it was outside of my comfort zone. Sometimes, it feels good to push yourself, as long as you don’t have me alongside bitching about it.