BAY AREA RIDGE TRAIL PROJECT: Up and Down the Ridges of Sonoma and Napa Counties

a view in Hood Mountain Regional Park

It's been a whole year since we hiked on the Bay Area Ridge Trail! How wonderful that we are back on this marvelous trail, this time for an extended visit.

We spent five days hiking and camping along the trail in June. Since it is a fair ways from our homes in Santa Cruz, we wanted to pack in some miles. The general topography of the North Bay as it relates to the San Francisco Bay is such that the trail goes up and down north/south running ridges, which means lots of elevation gains and losses for us hikers. AND it was hot: summer temps of high 80's to 100 degrees every day on our late-June trip.

We camped at Sugarloaf Ridge State Park and Bothe-Napa Valley State Park in between our day hikes. On our first day out, we crossed paths with Karen Buchanan, the tour and education manager for Jack London State Historic Park, and who was on a lunchtime hike herself. In addition to providing us with lots of on-the-spot information about Jack and Charmian London, she told us about the long-term plan of hike-in campgrounds spaced all along the trail, each one a day's walk from the next. We thoroughly enjoyed the peaceful sites we had in the state parks, and the showers were just what we needed after so many miles in extremely warm temperatures.

Sugarloaf's park manager John Roney shared with us that maybe the missing links in the trail can be completed now that the demographic of the land owners is changing. Ranches are being sold to folks who buy the land to retire on or go to recreate on. Having a trail on their property now can mean that their land is connected to a much bigger piece of wild land. Ranchers tended to be reluctant to have strangers walking through. An uninterrupted trek around the Bay would be fabulous!

Here are the maps of the trails in the parks with their links:

10 miles in the North Sonoma Mountain Regional Park into Jack London State Park, a newly completed section of trail in a new park near Penngrove, with Amy and Enrique joining us.

Donna starting up Sonoma Mountain

10 miles in Annadel State Park, including the section not completed yet in Howarth Park near Santa Rosa, with friend Larry joining us.

an old property line in Annadel

pileated woodpecker

manzanita and oak, Annadel

14 miles in Hood Mountain Regional Park near Kenwood (2500 ft. elevation gain) and Sugarloaf Ridge State Park (1550 feet elevation gain, for a total of 4050 feet that day!)