Hiking and Biking Around San Francisco

Now 270 miles long, the San Francisco Bay Trail is easily the country’s grandest state-guided effort to link together hiking trails and biking trails and deliver them all to the people of large metropolitan area. It is also only half done; another 270 miles is in the works. Writing in the New York Times, Patricia Leigh Brown reports that to spend a day or two hiking it is to "gain a salt marsh harvest mouse’s perspective on things." Brown writes that "in a part
of the world that fetishizes steep hills with cable cars and
vertiginous streets, the trail offers an
opportunity to experience the Bay Area’s alter ego – a low
Netherland-ish landscape of expansive flatness, endless sky and
surprising solitude."
The trail, which passes through downtown San Francisco, cuts through 47 cities and towns and stretches all the way from San Jose to Sonoma County. The scenery, not surprisingly, is a pleasing blend of natural beauty and urban grit. Brown tells us that at the Don Edwards San Francisco Bay Wildlife Refuge in the South Bay
region, hikers and
bikers do-si-do across a quarry on a footbridge while looking with pity
at road-rage-choked hordes stuck below at the toll plaza of the
Dumbarton Bridge. And while rounding the point close to where the bay enters the
Sacramento River near Benicia, a walk through wildflower fields is
punctuated with distant views of subdivisions and signal whistles from
the red-brick C & H Sugar refinery on the opposite shore. Read more.