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(More customer reviews)San Francisco is the only major urban area that I consider an outdoor (hiking/camping) vacation destination. Almost all cities have nice parks and short walks in areas where urban and wild (or at least undeveloped) landscapes interface. But the Bay Area has a lot of such lands and an abundance of trails on them. Even East Bay communities, with their thick urban development and nightly traffic snarls, have a parks and open space district that boasts nearly 100,000 square acres and contains over 1,100 miles of trail. The latter figure rivals what one can find in many national forests. But of course the Bay Area also includes towering redwoods in the Santa Cruz Mountains and the spectacular Point Reyes National Seashore.
So where should you turn to explore all this wild territory that surrounds one of the largest metropolitan areas in the world? There are many good guidebooks to the region, but this new edition of Ann Marie Brown's '101 Hikes' is an excellent starting point. The older edition was the first hiking guide I purchased to the Bay Area. It gave me many superb outings and the new edition is even better.
Like many other hiking guides from Moon Guidebooks, this one is long on route description, natural and local history, and includes numerous black and white photos from the author so readers can get a glimpse of the local scenery. Unlike other Moon Guides, this volume also has detailed sketch maps of the trails. The book covers wildlands from the Sonoma Coast to Santa Cruz and extends eastward as far as Napa Valley and Livermore. The four chapters cover each geographical region and the hikes are fairly evenly distributed. Most of the trips Brown offers in this book are half to full day excursions. Double digit mileage is common and hikes from five to ten miles are the norm. The author does, however, include a number of "options" for those who would like a shorter, or longer, hike.
On the whole, this is an excellent book. I can never decide if I like the Santa Cruz Mountains or Marin County more, but I have walked many of the selections Brown describes in these areas and think they are, without exception, the premier hikes in these parks. The waterfall loop in Big Basin Redwoods, the excursion through Henry Cowell, and the trip to Arch Rock at Point Reyes are all personal favorites that I have done many times. Buy this book and start building some memories of the (really) wild side within the greater Bay Area.
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