A wonderland FOR wanderers
Link by link, the stunning San Francisco Bay Trail surrounds us
Ten years ago, Kurt Schwabe was walking his dog in Marin, when he came across a sign for the San Francisco Bay Trail. So he went home and Googled it.
“I wanted a project, one that would mean something,” says Schwabe, a marketing manager in San Francisco, who was unemployed at the time. “I had just finished reading Cheryl Strayed’s book ‘Wild,’ where she (wrote about doing) the whole Pacific Crest Trail. This seemed like something that was more manageable.”
Schwabe decided he would hike the Bay Trail. And he did — over the course of 30 consecutive days. He headed out early each morning to walk the shorelines of the San Francisco and San Pablo bays and returned home at night on public transportation to reduce his carbon footprint.
“I was always totally in the moment, not thinking about yesterday or tomorrow or even five minutes ahead,” he recalls. “I ended up noticing things I otherwise would have missed, like an owl and her owlet in a tree in Coyote Hills or a deer several yards down a steep, tree-studded hillside nestled in a thicket with her fawn. When I finished the trek, I was in a great space mentally.”
Schwabe is one of the rare few who can claim to have explored the near-entirety of the Bay Trail, which measures more than 350 miles from San Jose up to Marin and Napa down to the East Bay. Along the way, it skirts the waterline from Crockett and Rodeo to Emeryville, Fremont, Mountain View and more. Future adventurers will have a bit farther to explore. When it’s eventually completed, the trail will mirror the Proclaimers song and allow people to walk (or bike) 500 miles through nine counties, 47 cities, more than 130 parks and seven toll bridges.
The trail beckons you to places you might never otherwise experience. There are moody wetlands bristling with pickleweed, rocky cliffs cloaked in updrafts of iridescent sea spray, habitats for Pacific harbor seals and elusive, gem-colored garter snakes. History lovers can appreciate its grand World War II battleships and Chinese fishing settlements, while urban nerds might monitor operations at major airports and shipping yards and stand atop the Golden Gate Bridge itself.
All together, the trail’s an impressive human
achievement — though early on, the idea may have seemed insane.
“When Western settlers came in during the Gold Rush and afterward, they primarily saw the Bay as this bug-infested swampland they wanted to stay away from. It’s where they established industry and was essentially a trash dump to move not-so-nice activities away from where cities were being built,” says Lee Huo, a senior planner at the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, which coordinates the development of the trail.
This ideology began to change in the 1960s. “A bunch of activists in Berkeley who helped create Save the Bay — which still exists as a nonprofit — essentially said, ‘Wait a second. The Bay is this resource, this jewel we all live around. It’s why we came here in the first place, and we shouldn’t be looking at it as a place to build on.’”
They pressured state legislators to create the 1965 McAteer-Petris Act, which essentially dictated that the shoreline belongs to everybody and shouldn’t be filled unless necessary. That was followed in the 1980s by Senate Bill 100, calling for a bicycling-and-hiking path circling the perimeter of the bays, meant for public recreation and for linking communities together.
From there came the 1989 plan for the Bay Trail, which at that point, measured about 120 miles. Its significant growth over the past three decades has come in two primary ways: when public agencies take the initiative to install new stretches or when developers are obliged to build sections in order to get permits.
There’s always work being done on the trail’s spine. But there are also smaller connections growing through new communities, making the whole thing more rich and comprehensive. The slow and piecemeal linkage is traced out in a massive, cross-governmental spreadsheet with entries like, “Burlingame — Slough crossing near gas station,” “Tiburon — access to Blackie’s Pasture,” “Mountain View — Stevens Creek Trail” and “Proposed — Bay Bridge West Span.”
So what’s the best way to experience this ever-evolving wonder?
“Here’s what I would do,” says Schwabe. “I would look at a map of the Bay Area and find an area you’re totally unfamiliar with, maybe Pinole or Alviso or even West Oakland, and I would go there. I would walk around and learn something new about the cultures and what we have to offer out there.”
Carry plenty of water and snacks and perhaps an official set of Bay Trail map cards sold by retailers such as San Francisco’s Museum of Craft and Design as well as the mtc.ca.gov site (just search “map cards”). And if you plan to go hardcore like Schwabe did, consider your choice of footwear wisely.
“I started out with my running shoes and then about halfway through, my arches were ready to collapse,” he says. “I thought, ‘My god, I’m severely injured!’ and realized I’d been walking 150 miles with no support. So I switched to North Face hiking boots and, with no injury, was able to finish it off.”
Here are 10 of our favorite stretches along the Bay Trail, plus tips on where to grab a bite afterward.
The marshlands of Coyote Hills FREMONT
It’s easy to momentarily lose your sense of time or even place on the Bay View Trail in Fremont’s Coyote Hills Regional Park. After January’s winter storms, the hills on one side of the trail are blanketed with emerald-green grasses, punctuated by craggy red rocks. On the other side, surprisingly clear, blue-green water ripples in a former salt pond stretching far out into the Bay. It’s a world away from the office parks, strip malls and subdivisions of Fremont and Newark.
The 1,266-acre park, dedicated in 1967, is notable for its mostly treeless hills — part of an ancient range — that suddenly rise up amid the flat expanse of wetlands and the Bay. The park draws hikers, joggers, bikers and birdwatchers to its network of well-marked trails, including the Bay View, Alameda Creek and Apay, which are part of the Bay Trail. Explore
meadows and marshlands, climb to the top of Red Hill and venture out onto levees built around the evaporation ponds once used to mine salt from the Bay. Visitors can also view sites once used by the Tuibun, a Chochenyo Ohlone-speaking tribe, who thrived here for 2,000 years before the arrival of Spanish missionaries.
Details: The park district is finishing up a project — slated for completion this spring — to provide better parking and public facilities and to restore habitat to 170 acres of savanna and seasonal wetlands. Until then, walk into the park on Patterson Ranch Road, where you can catch the Bay Trail at the Quarry Staging Area or the visitor center. Find details, a map and seasonal hours at www.ebparks.org/parks/coyote-hills. is open from 11:30 a.m. to 10 p.m. daily in the Newark Place shopping center; www. fengchabayarea.com.
The 19th-century waterfront
This fascinating walk is like taking a distilled shot of Bay history — straight, no chaser. Begin just outside the sea lion-crowded waters of Hyde Street Pier at the San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park. Here you might think you tripped into a wormhole to the 1800s, with the square-rigger Balclutha and other historic ships lined up for public touring. A visitors center holds a pirate’s bounty of artifacts, from remnants of local wrecks and a lighthouse Fresnel lens to pictorials showing how sailors slept underneath wood-plank sidewalks (the housing market was tough even back then).
Across the street, you might spot a drenched-looking individual exiting the South End Rowing Club, which has popularized recreation in these frigid waters since 1873. Pay a small day-use fee, and you can step inside the hallowed club to ogle its boats, enjoy the sauna and listen to athletes tell of swimming to Alcatraz Island. Terry Hunt has made that journey 21 times. “That’s nothing,” she noted on a recent afternoon. “There are four or five people who’ve done it over a thousand times. Twenty-one is chump change.” (Now’s a good time to mention the club’s motto: “No sniveling.”)
Alcatraz is front-and-center in the crescent-shaped scope of Aquatic Park. Look down at low tide for a weirder view: Some of the seaweed-carpeted “rocks” on the waterfront are actually grave markers. San Francisco’s expansion required a lot of fill material, and tombstones from the Gold Rush occasionally fit the bill. A narrow staircase just west leads to a secret-feeling cliff walk by Fort Mason, where ships once mustered for America’s colonial pursuits. The old Black Point artillery fortification with its massive cannon is pointed out to sea, still waiting to rain hell on the British and Confederates.
From here, it’s a two-mile walk to Crissy Field with its famous
Bay views. But an equally impressive experience can be found at Marina Green, where lush grass unrolls like a landing strip pointed at the Golden Gate Bridge. It’s a fine place to take a breather, enjoy a snack and think random
SAN FRANCISCO