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...