DIABLO
The Diablo Range in California spans 180 miles in length and 20 miles in width, framed by Highway 101 to the west and Highway 5 to the east. Its industries include cattle grazing, oil extraction, and agriculture. Aside from a few small regional parks near Mt. Diablo at the northern edge, few areas are set aside for recreation or conservation. More than 90% of the land is privately owned.
The Diablo Range is a place of little rainfall, slow to green in winter and quick to brown in summer. Aside from a few scattered reservoirs, there is no year-round standing water. Its landscape is defined by rolling, cattle-tracked hills, rocky outcroppings, shimmering plains, and steep ravines rising from dusty, rock-bound creeks.
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I was drawn to this land for the same reason many others are—to escape the clamor of humanity and experience its profound silence. It’s the same reason teenagers from nearby San Joaquin Valley towns come to party, make out, and spray graffiti. Others come to fire long guns without restraint, as evidenced by the bullet-riddled road signs. By and large, the few people you encounter here are working—checking fence lines, tending pump jacks, or cutting alfalfa. I never saw anyone with a camera.
Because so much of the Diablo Range remains, like nearly all the mountain ranges surrounding the Great Central Valley, in private hands, it can only be experienced from the road. And because every road is paralleled by barbed wire, the land beyond is always kept at bay. Exploration is limited to the eye alone, with the imagination filling in the details lost to distance. The road provides the only access—albeit a contradictory one—allowing entry while simultaneously restricting it.
The Diablo Range’s austere, resilient beauty has withstood human intervention. The vastness of this landscape diminishes our influence by scaling down our buildings, windmills, power lines, and roads. Few landscapes in California have absorbed our presence with such grace. These quiet images reflect on our interactions with this landscape—our roads, canals, buildings, fences, wires, signs, bridges, windmills, campgrounds, and graffiti—and their contribution to the larger mosaic.
In this untamed stretch of California, our footprint is small, and our reach is modest. Spending time here can evoke, fairly or not, the sense that humanity is but a speck of sand on a beach that stretches forever.
