I've got a two-year tradition going, on my birthday, of hiking my age in miles between two arbitary points, marching happily past whatever's in between them. In May 2011, I set off to explore the East Bay hills of the San Francisco Bay Area, splitting the necessary 31 miles over two days.

It’s about twenty-one miles to drive from the West Dublin/Pleasanton BART station to the Chabot Space & Science Center in the Oakland hills, a pretty straight shot on eight-lane Interstate 580 that should take, according to Google, twenty-three minutes.

To walk that route is slightly more of a challenge: thirty-one miles, fourteen hours, two days, pastures, hilltops, valleys, suburbs. I'd say it's definitely worth doing. Once.

I like this kind of make-my-own-way hiking because it reveals the spaces between freeway destinations. Hiking through mixed urban, suburban, rural, and park land, you get more of a feel for land use and the area’s history of development decisions. A driver would zip past the rustic red barn at the llama farm, the red-tail hawks soaring over the ridge, the incredible insolence of wild turkeys, the Christmas tree farm, and the pop-pop-boooom of the rifle range. (A driver would zip over the roadkilled skunk.) The variety is a reminder that good hiking isn’t something I have to drive to a designated wilderness area to find.

A few weeks ago, a friend-of-some-friends was in town, visiting the Bay Area from Chicago. He and the friends were wondering about the sort of things that make San Francisco stand out; they settled quickly on public nudity. (Bay to Breakers had just happened.) While that’s hard to discount, particularly on a sunny day in Dolores Park, the quick transition from heavily urban to suburban to rural to relatively wild parkland to be found in the Bay Area is, I think, a major attraction of the West Coast. I spent one hour on public transit to get from San Francisco to suburban Dublin. Two hours of walking into the hills and I was in preserved open space with poppies and panoramic views of the freeway. A day later I spent six hours hiking on trails with trees closing in overhead and creeks burbling alongside, less than ten miles from the heavily developed East Bay flatlands.

The endurance part is satisfying because it connects those dots together into a cohesive whole. At the end of the first day of hiking I stood on a grassy prominence looking back through the late-afternoon haze at a barely visible ridgetop in the distance, a clear path between the two etched in my head.

The length of the hike also allowed for developing a meditation-like clarity of mind. Ordinarily I live my life under a constant barrage of philosophical queries -- Who Am I? What Am I? How Am I? -- competing for my attention. But somewhere in the Hollis Canyon, as I was taking evasive action against a herd of angry cows, the clutter vanished under an overpowering single question: Where Am I?

It was quite stimulating.

Where am I? I don't know, but there's no time like the present for moving to the other side of that barbed-wire fence.

Here are the pictures.

I started by hiking west on Dublin Boulevard toward the new developments just north of Interstate 580. I'm pretty sure this is the first time anyone has ever used a sidewalk in Dublin. They were all perfectly cemented, almost blindlingly white, and totally deserted.

From a hilltop in the Dublin Hills open space area, the path rises to the west before diverting around to the north past the clump of trees on the ridgeline at right. The reason for the diversion soon became clear:

A giant new development! These things are terrible for the type of hiking I'm doing, because they just block off the entire area. Once the development is finished, obviously, you can walk right through it on newly paved streets with more unused sidewalks, but for now, there's this huge, huge chunk of the hills that's entirely off-limits. (Presuming you're following the posted signs and placards.) The roadblock forced a lengthy diversion to the north that ended with me in full flight from the harrowing Hollis Canyon. The placement of this particular development is also a bit frustrating. The Bay Area does need more space for people to live, but these are cheap houses thrown up over a huge area with no public transit or walkable retail. Surrounded by rolling grasslands and classic East Bay ridgetop scenery, the developers went instead for the "just try and tell the difference between these houses and a development we're building in twelve other cities across California" look.

The clump of trees from two pictures ago. This felt, for some reason, like some Kansas-style meeting place on the pioneer trail to California: the tall grass, the significant stand of trees. Off in the far distance, on the horizon just to the left of the big eucalyptus, is a small ridgetop prominence that I think is the east slope of Dinosaur Back Ridge.

Here's where all the trouble started. My planned route went through this gate, down into the canyon below, where Google Maps clearly showed "Hollis Canyon Rd." Then I'd follow the road out the canyon, and around to the right into the housing development off on the ridge. I hopped the gate -- that's a pretty common thing to do in the East Bay regional parks -- and looked at the other side of that sign, which read, "This area closed until made safe for the public." Well, hell -- that was the area I'd just come from! I decided to push on into Hollis Canyon. Note, ominously, the little speckled dots on the nearby hill: Cows. Mean cows. As I descended, they started to all run in a giant herd, probably 60 or 70 of them, running up the trail in my direction. I turned and fled back to higher ground. To retrace my steps at this point would take several hours and leave me right back in Dublin, and after all, the sign on the gate said the area I'd come from was the unsafe area. How bad could some cows be? I found a fence and edged along it until I had made my way into the canyon, where there was a dirt road.

I walked past another gate, and turned around to look at this sign. The "No Trespassing" was for the area I'd just come from. I hoped that was a good omen: I was still surrounded by cows on all sides, but maybe at least I'd be off private land. I was not. Over the next hour, I passed at least four more of these signs, and several more herds of cows.

You know what they say about startling a mother cow when its calf is around. Or is that bears? The cows eyed me with hostility but made no overt gestures. To paraphrase Shakespeare, I exited, pursued by a cow.

Finally, the Hollis Canyon merged with Eden Canyon, and I turned north past this red-barn llama farm. There were two llamas out back. On the ridge beyond the farmhouse was the Palomares housing development, which I needed to walk through, so just past the llamas I made another off-trail move and cut up through a horse pasture until I reached suburbia. Relieved, I walked the sidewalks of Palomares for several miles back to the freeway and junction of East Castro Valley Boulevard and Crow Canyon.

Suburbia is kind of pleasant after several hours outside it. Here, the view from the top of the Palomares housing development. It's weird to wander down the paved road and huge sidewalk and consider it part of a hike -- for some reason, the sidewalks more than anything are a reminder of human artifice. They're so ... uniform. So perfectly cemented, so consistently gray.

I turned northeast on Crow Canyon, then veered north into Cull Canyon, where I hiked along the trickling creek and into the Chabot-Garin trail, which is part of the Bay Ridge Trail. After a mile or so, the trail turns abruptly up into the hill, so as the late afternoon sun filtered through the oak trees I sweated a five-hundred-foot elevation gain to the houses at the ridgetop.

From the top of Dinosaur Back Ridge, I had a view of the East Bay and the Chabot basin. The trail winds down the hill into the canyon, then turns north (right) along the valley carved out by Redwood Road, then climbs the next ridge to the Skyline Trail.

The sun came in and out of the clouds while I was hiking, casting wonderful patterns on this meadow near Miller Road and the Christmas tree farm. There was a huge flock of wild turkeys at the far end, including two giant toms with tails fanned out and red wattles visible from hundreds of yards away. It was comparable to some of the great meadow-scenes of my life -- this one in Peru, and this one in Tierra del Fuego, for example -- and a pleasant reminder that sometimes cymbal-crashing grandeur has as much to do with light and wind as with distance from home.

The gun range provided a nice symphonic accompaniment to my afternoon's walk: a few small caliber single-shot rifles, something rat-a-tat-tat-y in the automatic family, and one giant cannoning thing that was probably a .44.

Stumbling along through Chabot Regional Park I took an accidental turn into the Grass Valley, which I hiked end-to-end. If it meant an extra climb later, it was serendipitous scenery-wise; I kept thinking that the description of the Everglades as a "river of grass" was nicely suited to this stretch of trail.

Number #141 here was clearly the vanguard of the herd. While the others tittered quietly in the cover of the trees, #141 stood his ground, a sinister look in his eyes. "Beware the palindrome cow," my friend Brendan says, and he is right. Once again, I exited, pursued by a cow.

A sun-dappled glade of lavender flowers and twisting oak. Unfortunately I had no time to stop and enjoy it; the last bus of the day left Chabot in a little more than an hour and I had a mile left to hike -- comfortable, but not so comfortable that I wanted to dilly-dally in some sylvan idyll. With desperate visions of previous buzzer-beating escapes fresh in my memory, I hoofed it quickly up the hill.

Surviving once again. The view from the Chabot Space & Science Center, where I beat the bus by twenty minutes and rung in another birthday by changing my socks.