Urban Hiker SF

Just a 1.5-hour drive from San Francisco is the perfect day trip for just about anyone. Your drive will take you north to Sonoma — and specifically to Bartholomew Park .  Adjacent to this charming park with three miles of hiking trails, you’ll find Bartholomew Winery with tastings and picnic areas, and the option to go horseback riding with Sonoma Valley Trail Rides .  About the trails If you look at the trail map , you can see it’s easy to make a loop around the park. I like doing a clockwise loop starting on the Grape Stomp Trail and continuing on the You-Walk Miwok Trail.    While the trails are short in distance, you should know that they involve steep and rocky terrain and stairs without railings. You can hike with kids (and dogs are welcome, too), but I might avoid hiking with anyone who has balance issues or trouble with elevation gain, as the route involves about 640 feet of climbing. That said, I think the rocks and the s...

Note: Preorder bonus mentioned at the bottom of this post! On December 21, 2022, I hiked in Pulgas Ridge Open Space Preserve to explore the first route for my upcoming book,  Urban Trails: Peninsula and San Jose .  It took two and a half years to hike the remaining 49 routes, write them up, get them tested, and go through three intensive rounds of editing. After all that work, the book is finally ready for preorder on Amazon !     What's Inside the Book? Writing this book was largely a solo endeavor, so now I'm excited to share my work with you. Here's a bit about the book! The goal was to find hikes within a one-hour drive of San Jose. I chose 50 routes between Pacifica and Gilroy, which is a huge area. Here is a glimpse at the table of contents . I wanted routes with various difficulty levels, and aimed for 25% easy, 50% moderate, and 25% hard. That said, the Peninsula and South Bay are hilly, so here's where we ended up: 14% easy, 62% moderate, and 24...

Over the years, I've met a number of people with a bold goal: walking or running every street in San Francisco . It's a significant undertaking, covering over 1,000 miles—and closer to 1,500 or 1,700 miles if you include hiking trails. One person who accomplished this feat, Travis Monson , also took unique photos of the city along the way. He used a paper map, coloring in the streets he completed with a red pen. I just finished writing my third book , so I’m not committing to such a huge goal right now. Still, I enjoy casually tracking which streets I've visited and which are new to me. While there's something beautiful about the analog method, I knew a tech-based solution would work best for me. If you're looking for an easy way to track how much of the city you've seen, I recommend  CityStrides . To get started, you'll need a Strava or Runkeeper account (CityStrides supports a few other types as well, but I use Strava). Simply record your walks and runs o...

I love the magic of train travel. The soothing movement of the cars, the rhythmic sound of the wheels on the rails, watching the ever-changing landscapes flash by in front of your eyes, what’s not to love? This is exactly why I had a trip on Amtrak’s Coast Starlight train on my to-do list for so long. We finally got to experience this route for ourselves on a trip from the Bay Area to LA in February 2025. The Coast Starlight runs daily between Seattle and Los Angeles. There are six stops in Washington, six in Oregon, and a whopping eighteen in California. The full route takes 35 hours, and the Amtrak website asserts it’s “widely regarded as one of the most spectacular of all train routes.”  For Bay Area travelers, there are three Amtrak stations to choose from: Emeryville, Oakland, and San Jose. Given traffic from San Francisco to the East Bay, and given the train timing, we opted to take Caltrain from 4th Street to San Jose’s Diridon Station. We knew we were going to fly...

Santa Catalina Island (commonly just called Catalina Island) is 22 miles off the coast of Long Beach and a roughly one-hour ferry ride on the Catalina Express Ferry . Catalina is not the largest of the Channel Islands , but it’s the only developed one, with two towns, the larger Avalon and the sparsely populated Two Harbors. If you’re visiting the island for the first time, you’re most likely going to Avalon, where 93 percent of the island’s 3,500 residents live. As someone who grew up on the East Coast, upon landing, I immediately thought, “Oh, this is the Martha’s Vineyard of the West.” There are indeed similarities — the island is buzzing with tourists and once you disembark from the ferry, the harbor is blanketed with t-shirt and ice cream shops. But there are also big differences, for example, in the terrain, home styles, and the flora and fauna. And just a few blocks from the harbor, a mountain ridge rises up behind you, with the tallest peak reaching almost 2,100 feet. ...

I’ve now written three books for Mountaineers Books ( two are published and one’s coming out in February 2026 ), and in each one, we include The Mountaineers Ten Essentials . The Ten Essentials are categories of items you should have on hand on your outdoor adventures in case of an emergency. I do a lot of hiking in urban areas with mild weather, so in reality, I regularly only have seven of these on me at any given time. As someone who’s done thousands of miles of hiking in the Bay over the past number of years, here are my gear picks for each these essential categories. As a heads up, some of these items have affiliate associated with them, so I do make a commission on them, but I actually use these items and endorse them. My Take on the Ten Essentials   1.  Navigation .   Always make sure you have a map with you or that you can pick one up at the trailhead.  Picking up a map on the fly isn't my style, so I always look at maps ahead of time s...