Five Canyons

Along the ridge

I do a lot of walking in the Five Canyons area because it's close to home. Today I did a loop that I hadn't done in a while that shows off some of the best trails in the area. One of the reasons that I wanted to do it today was that I was curious about what happened to Eagle's Nest Ranch, the place where we boarded our horses 4 years ago. At that time they kicked us all out and closed the ranch. We've heard various rumors about the place over the years, and the latest was that they had leveled all of the buildings. The Five Canyons trail that I chose to take today has a great view down into Palomares canyon and the site of Eagle's Nest Ranch, so I hoped to see for myself what they had done.

I started off at the Recreation center where there is a swimming pool and tennis courts. The trail almost immediately heads down into a pretty little shady canyon. Then it crosses a road and goes through another little canyon, and then past a small playground (Ridge Trail Park), along a service road, across Five Canyons Parkway near the development entrance with its fake waterfall, and up a hill along the edge of the development. Then it comes to a paved road leading up to some water tanks, a pretty steep climb, and it soon reaches the top of the highest hill in the area.

 There was my view of the former Eagle's Nest, and it was indeed leveled — all except for a couple of small sheds. I don't know why I cared, but we had our horses there for three years and we have a lot of good memories of the place. From there it was all downhill, first along the ridge, and then steeply down into the canyon. Going down the shady canyon along the creek, I ran into a couple of old friends who I hadn't seen in quite a while. They told me that they had seen some newts further down the trail in a pool in the creek. I looked, but didn't see any, but in past years I remember lots of newts along this creek. Even with some pretty good rains in February and March, the creek is mostly dry now.

As I was hiking, I began to think about the name "Five Canyons". There seems to be only two obvious canyons here, the one with the Shady Canyon Trail and the one with the Deer Canyon Trail. Then I realized that there must have been five small canyons here at one time, but three of them were filled in by the grading for the development. This is just another example of developments all over California that are named for the natural environments that were destroyed to build them. I guess it all started just after the gold rush when they cut down a grove of oak trees to build a town and named it Oakland.

3.3 miles, 750 ft. climb