September 6, 2025
My main plan was to visit the museum but on the map, Mt. Diablo is so close by I decided to add it. Turns out the 10 mile drive from the edge of the park to the summit takes half an hour. It took me a little more than that because there were LOTS of cyclists sweating up the mountain. The road has many bike turnouts, which I haven’t seen before, because it’s too twisty and narrow to pass bicycles safely.
I stopped first at Rock City to climb around a bit. The rocks are mostly sandstone and have been wind carved into cool shapes. Sadly, people have also carved into them. I was quite dispirited by the huge amount of incised graffiti I saw. It really limited my photo taking!
At the summit is a stone visitor center built in the late 30’s by the Civilian Conservation Corps (see Expedition 56) but suffered from leaking walls that weren’t completely waterproofed until the early 80’s. Much WPA era artwork was water damaged and even more was lost when their temporary housing burned down.
It was hazy when I visited (it often is these days), so you’ll just have to imagine the you can see all the way to the Central Valley. Yes, that dark fabric on the right of one photo is someone lying on the parapet on the OTHER SIDE of the railing! Yikes.
Next I went to Blackhawk, which is not a town but a collection of gated communities, a country club and two golf courses. Blackhawk Plaza, site of the museum, is bizarrely empty. I saw just 3-4 families with kids in the playground and feeding the ducks and geese (the duck pond is large and cascading). There were patrons in the beauty salon and the dog salon. According to the Internet, it’s always been this way although maybe a bit worse since the pandemic. Kind of surreal.
The museum is an ugly, boxy thing that looks very 80’s (which it is). I knew it as a car museum but in the past 10 years they’ve added sections; the Old West, Art of Africa, Into China and the World of Nature. Why those? Who knows! The place was built to house a billionaire’s donated car collection for which he got tax breaks. Perhaps the other sections were collections from other billionaires. I skipped the car section.
The China section had a wonderful exhibit of carved scenes depicting a Brigadoon type of place from an ancient fable where everyone lives happily, hidden from the rest of the world. The lighting is very dramatic, which made some of my photos look more like drawings.
Another exhibit has life sized replicas of the famed terracotta warriors who guarded the tomb of China’s first emperor. There were more than 8,000 of them and, amazingly, they are not uniform, but have distinctly individual faces. The lighting is this area was also terrific.
The diorama of the Forbidden City is massive. Emperors lived in this complex but the diorama has no people in it for some reason. I would have liked it better depicting daily life at the palace.
By far my favorite exhibit was the natural world one. At the top of the entrance staircase you’re greeted by a great white shark lunging out of the water. Many of the animals exhibited are taxidermied. I discovered that the museum’s founder was a big game hunter, which gave me pause, but at least the results of his unpleasant hobby are displayed in a way that I found enjoyable.
Each scene contains animals from a particular area, and they are quite close together. The scenes themselves are small, and absolutely packed with animals, leaping toward the viewer in some cases. There is a soundtrack of animal chatter of all kinds that adds to the exciting chaos. I had to get down on the floor to admire this alligator under the water.
The backdrops and lighting are beautifully done. I went through the exhibit three times and kept seeing different little details in these packed scenes. A big highlight was being charged by a rhinoceros!