This is a slideshow and brief historical note that I put together after hiking 30 miles up the San Francisco Bay Peninsula for my 30th birthday. The photos are at the bottom of the page; mouse over the edge to click through. And while the route I took is nice any time of year, this was probably the single most scenic day of 2010.
A few years ago, I was sitting bored in a hotel room in Port San Julian, Patagonia (population 10,000; major industries: sheep, government). It was a Sunday, and to paraphrase Johnny Cash, there's nothing short of dying that's half as lonesome as the sleeping city sidewalks on Sunday morning in small-town Latin America. I'd walked up the main street three or four times, and watched the tumbleweeds, and then with about 12 hours of daylight left thought, hell, I'll go for a long walk. I picked a hill outside of town -- the only one for miles around, really -- and the cool thing, there was no trail and I had no map, so I just kind of toddled along, making my own way across the plains, until I reached the base of the hill, where I made a sharp turn upward to the top.
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| My route from Pacifica to the Golden Gate. Click the map for a larger, zoom-able version with details on my hike and on the Spanish expeditions. |
Something about the trail-lessness of that hike strongly appealed to me -- estimating distance, terrain, and difficulty by scanning the landscape on my own, I felt more like the early explorers I loved reading so much about (this was part of the Darwin-book travel), forgoing the defined route and figuring out the geography for myself. That interest has translated into what's now one of my favorite things to do: urban-open space combined hiking. I like walking through open spaces and then continuing through the city, or walking a few miles through the city before I get to the open space area. It gives me a better feel for the overall landscape, and the way the open space areas fit into the bigger-picture geography and history of a place. And it blurs the artificial distinction between nature and urban areas, proving both the considerable natural elements in the city and the considerable urban influence on the open space areas.
For my 30th birthday, I decided it would be a neat thing to see how far I could walk in one day, and if I could make this number roughly correspond to my age in years. (I figured it might be my last chance to do so.) I thought it would be neat if I could combine nature and city hiking. I also thought it would be neat if I could finish at the Golden Gate Bridge. And I thought that along the way I could check in on the trail of two 18th-century Spanish explorers, Portola and Anza. After checking mileage on a few maps, I decided the best thing to do would be to drive down to Linda Mar beach in Pacifica -- where Portola and his band o' scurvy Spaniards camped on November 3, 1769, the day before "discovering" the San Francisco Bay -- and then hike from there to the Golden Gate, where another Spaniard, Pedro Font, recorded the first detailed observations of the Bay and Fort Point. I estimated the total distance at about 30 miles, the perfect distance to celebrate my birthday or fall over trying.
I have extremely indulgent family and friends; I told them this and they all just nodded and smiled and said, "That's nice Eric." (They're patronizing me! Next step is the old folks home! AAAA!) My friend Brendan even agreed to meet me halfway.
So off I went. Here's the slideshow to prove it. I planned for 30 miles, but then took a few shortcuts here and there that brought it down a bit, which is probably why in the picture at the end, where I'm in front of the Golden Gate Bridge, I'm still vertical. (Final note: If you fact-check my mileage assertions, go to hell. You can't question me; I'm old and authoritative now!)
Point San Pedro, 7 a.m.
The Spanish explorer Gaspar de Portola camped on the creek at Point San Pedro, in Pacifica, the day before his scouts hiked up the nearby ridge and saw the Bay. A few days later, they all hiked up to see. I thought it would make a nice starting spot, and planned to hike up the ridge to the marked Bay Discovery Site. I ended up skipping the walk through Pacifica to the trailhead, and instead rode a bus with a bunch of high school kids, feeling most of the time like Mr. Crazy-Old-Stalker-Dude.
Banquiano Trailhead, 7:45 a.m.
The bus dropped me off at the corner of Crespi and Fassler in Pacifica, which dead ends at the trailhead. It had been partly sunny down at the beach, but there was a huge cloud drifting over the ridge. The neighborhood commuters, emerging from their garages in the morning light, eyed me suspiciously.
View of Point San Pedro
I climbed up the ridge a little bit and then got this great view back to Point San Pedro and the Spanish campsite. I was thinking that if I were a Spanish scout, especially one with scurvy in a strange land, I probably wouldn't head too far out of sight of the beach and point. But then I realized you could basically hike up the entire ridge without ever losing the view.
Banquiano Trail
I got pretty lucky with the weather. It rained all day the day before, and a small storm passed overhead about 7 a.m., but by 8 or so, as I was walking, the sun was shining and the color was super-saturated from the water. Good times.
Flowers
Rainwater droplets still beading on the flowers. It's been such a late spring this year that a lot of the flowers are still out and open. The wildlife was out, too: I saw deer, rabbits and chipmunks all scurrying around on the trail.
View of Point San Pedro
The clouds were moving in so fast that I could sit on the ridge and watch them move over the beach and point.
Banquiano Trail Gate, 8:15 a.m.
Gate separating water district land from National Park trail. From here, you can see the ridgetop about a mile away, and you can see why the Spanish would have kept climbing up to see what was ahead -- you start to get the idea that it falls off pretty sharply beyond the next rise.
Bay Discovery Site Marker
"From this ridge, the Portola Expedition discovered the San Francisco Bay. November 4, 1769." I liked the view of this plaque rising into the clouds. The Spanish barely would have seen the Bay in weather like this; the sun was shining over Pacifica but the estuary was buried under thick clouds, and mist was pouring off the ridge. I'm not sure how the park service picked this exact spot, but it does roughly correspond with Crespi's directions. This was also the highest point of my day, at 1,220 feet.
Bay View from Sweeney Ridge
The best part of Sweeney Ridge is the narrow trail here where the ridge is only a hundred meters or so wide, and you can look off one way and see the Bay, and look the other way to the ocean. The Bay view here is basically looking out over SFO. Portola continued east down the hill here to San Andreas Lake, where he camped for the night before turning again to the south.
Sweeney Ridge Trail
The long road ahead: I planned to hike north on Sweeney Ridge, into the valley past San Bruno Mountain (on the right), up to the water tower on the distant ridge, and then out to the coast from somewhere off in those hills.
Coast Guard Site
View up the last bit of the Sweeney Ridge Trail, to a Coast Guard building at the top of the hill. The other side of that hill is Skyline College and the San Bruno suburbs.
View of Point San Pedro, 9:15 a.m.
Looking back at Pacifica from the ridgeline for the last time. From here I planned to hike inland a bit, following the ridge and pass between San Bruno mountain and the coastal hills, so the ocean would be out of sight for several hours until I reached San Francisco.
Water Tower, Skyline Boulevard, 10:15 a.m.
Remember that distant water tower from three pictures ago? Here it is. I walked down from Sweeney Ridge, around Skyline College, and along Skyline Boulevard until I arrived here an hour or so later. One of the fun things about hiking like this is noting some distant landmark and then walking past it later in the day.
Skyline Boulevard and Hickey Boulevard, 10:30 a.m.
I was making good time walking along the sidewalk-less side of the highway, but the emergency lane was getting increasingly narrow and the cars were moving pretty quick, so I bailed off the ridge at this intersection after having hiked through parts of San Bruno and South San Francisco, and into Daly City.
Sullivan Avenue, Daly City, and View of Sutro Tower, 10:50 a.m.
I walked down into Daly City past the Chinese Cemetery, the Serramonte Shopping Center, and my favorite Home Depot. Right about here, I picked up a new Spanish explorer: Juan Batista de Anza, who trekked all the way from Arizona on a mission to found and settle the presidio of San Francisco. Anza had camped near SFO on March 26, 1776, and the following day marched up the Peninsula and all the way to the Golden Gate.
Brendan at the Westlake Shopping Center, 12 p.m.
After following the Anza Trail along Highway 280 for a while (mostly on parallel city streets), I turned toward the coast again to meet my friend Brendan at the Westlake Shopping Center in Daly City. This is Brendan, in his Walgreens loafers, striking a hiking pose.
Lake Merced
We walked out of the shopping center and down toward Lake Merced, skirting the west edge of the lake past the gun clubs. Which was kind of fun, because there were a lot of people out skeet-shooting. (On a Wednesday afternoon. Who knew?) Anza's group hiked inland to avoid the sand dunes, but Pedro Font, the priest who kept the trip diary, noted that they had glimpsed "a good-sized lake of fresh water" in the dunes.
Consulting the Map
Double-checking the route. The decision was: cut over to the Great Highway from the north tip of Lake Merced, or continue inland around the east side of the zoo, and then out to the coast? We chose immediate beach.
The Great Highway, 1:15 p.m.
"I believe you have every right to be smug about the weather," Brendan said at this point. We stopped for lunch on the sand dune.
View of Point San Pedro, 1:15 p.m.
The starting point came back into view for the first time in several hours as we cut through the dunes and out to the beach. It's fun to think of covering all that ground on foot, and less fun when you look up in the other direction and think, "Ah, yes. Halfway."
Shark Mural
Awesome shark mural on the side of the bike/pedestrian trail that runs along a little dune ridge past the Outer Sunset neighborhood.
Cliff House, Marin Headlands and Point Reyes
Portola didn't make it up to the Golden Gate, but they'd spotted Point Reyes before they discovered the Bay -- it was so clear they saw it from the hills just above Point San Pedro. The morning was too cloudy for me to catch a view of it from Pacifica, but by this time the clouds had sailed off entirely, and we got a majestic look at the entire North Coast in the afternoon.
Cliff House, 3:20 p.m.
It was so clear that the distance from Lake Merced to the Cliff House seemed insignificant. It was not: It took two hours, and for the first time my legs were really starting to tire. The Cliff House is built on the south end of Point Lobos, marked by the little farallones jutting out of the water. Font, Anza's diarist, put up a cross here and then sat down to draw a map of what they were already calling the Gulf of the Farallones.
View of Point San Pedro, 3:20 p.m.
And now Pacifica is a really long way away. By this time in the afternoon the point where I started had disappeared into the clouds, and all that was left was the ridge above it. Still a nice day at Ocean Beach, though.
The Golden Gate, 3:50 p.m.
From the Cliff House we cut across the bluffs around the ruins of the Sutro Baths to the Lands End trail, where we got our first view of the Golden Gate. This marked about mile 18 for me, and I was starting to feel it a bit, so we sat down at the viewpoint here to look at the bridge and make fun of Pedro Font, who seems to have been fairly well disliked by Anza. ("The fact is," Font wrote, "that he could not bear to have me give my opinion about anything.")
Baker Beach and Lobos Creek
The small bay between Lands End and Baker Beach marks the mouth of Lobos Creek, which the Spaniards followed up to its source, where they camped. (The present-day Mountain Lake, in the Presidio.) The Bay cuts frustratingly far inland for hikers who just want to get to the damned bridge already.
SeaCliff Neighborhood, 4:45 p.m.
We hit the end of the Lands End Trail and wandered past the mansions along SeaCliff for a while. Tough neigborhood to walk around in when you're dirty and smelly and look and feel like you've been hiking for the last nine hours. Interesting to view Sutro Tower from the north now -- five hours ago (but only 12 pictures ago!), I was far enough to the south that it was just visible in the distance behind Daly City.
Golden Gate Bridge, 5:55 p.m.
The final viewpoint, from the west side of the Golden Gate Bridge toll plaza. We walked out on the top of one of the abandoned concrete gun batteries to view the bridge. Given the option of hiking over to the east side of the bridge, where the tourist viewpoint is -- a walk of at least 200 meters roundtrip -- or just collapsing at the bus stop, we elected to do the viewpoint thing some other time.
Anza Trail Marker, Golden Gate Bridge
The high point of the Anza Trail, which curls up here from the Mountain Lake campsite in the Presidio. After 11 hours of hiking, my feet weren't quite up to the challenge of checking out the lake. From here, Font reported, "We saw the spouting of whales, a shoal of dolphins or tunny fish, sea otter, and sea lions."
Me, at the Golden Gate, 6 p.m.
Older and with an extra 23 miles of tread on the tires, but apparently not that much smarter. Ouch, that hurt.
