Mount Diablo. A burly and beautiful beast of a mountain an hour east of San Francisco. With an apt name, Diablo tends to be toasty so bring plenty of water. There are water taps at Mitchell Canyon, and if you're lucky the store will be open at the top.
From Mitchell Canyon via Eagle Peak: This route takes you on the north side of Diablo on lovely sustained single track over Eagle Peak, Bald Ridge, Prospector’s Gap to the summit. After your FKT attempt, coast down Juniper trail and Meridian Ridge fireroad for a 13 mile round trip, or if you’re feeling spicy, tag on North Peak and Olympia Peak for the 4 peaks of Diablo. This route was selected as the East Bay short route for the 2020 Battle of the Bay FKT challenge (battleofthebay.run). Going into the competition, Devon Yanko (1:28:08) and Yuri Gonzaga (1:13:52) held the CRs for the Diablo hill climb up the Eagle Peak route
5 Peaks Loop: This variant is open-route. The requirements: Start and finish at the gate at the trailhead at Mitchell Canyon Visitor Center parking lot. Tag Twin Peaks, Eagle Peak, Mt. Diablo summit, North Peak, and Mount Olympia. The exact route and direction of travel are up to you. Extra kudos for Mitchell Rock.
This is a pretty common, yet quite stout, undertaking amongst bay area ultra-runners. How fast can you do the 5 peaks?
Round trip from Morgan Territory Road: A fun, quick yet challenging way to get to the top of Mt Diablo. This trailhead is located on Morgan Territory road in Clayton, CA and contains some of the steepest grades amongst all Mt Diablo trails. This trail is nowhere near popular as the other trails on Mt Diablo, but the trail is still very well maintained.
Alltrails description
Comments
Paddy O'Leary held the FKT for this route from 10/24/20-10/30/20 with a time of 1:09:33. Great job!
Adding in a bit of recent history here:
On the men's side
I either just just beat or just missed Tyler Wolfe's time above on December 16th https://www.strava.com/activities/4481436876
I matched the segment slightly faster but my elapsed time is slightly longer than his segment match so it's anyone's guess if it was truly faster as his activity included his warmup time.
However, in addition to this uncertainty, Tyler's record has been bettered 3x since (including once by Tyler himself) as evidenced by this leaderboard:Â https://www.strava.com/segments/24874946.
None of these three faster times though took the correct route at the top. Eddie intentionally chose the road preferring smooth terrain, Tyler chose the road entirely because he was chasing Eddie's time (and beat it), it is unclear why Meikael chose the road other than likely he was chasing Tyler's time.
On the women's side
Devon Yanko set an early mark to beat of 1:28:08, which a month later was taken down by Katy Pieri-McCaffrey in 1:26:45. This mark was lowered a few weeks later to 1:16:38 by YiOu Wang, where it sat until Bailey's incredible performance documented above.
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