I’ve been doing some long transit-accessible hikes as a way to get to know the Bay Area again after 10 years away. It’s fun to put together routes that often aren’t single trails, because with the exception of the SF crosstown trail (which I recommend!) most single trail hikes are either way too long or too short for the 18-25 miles I’ve been aiming for. This is the third one I’ve done and the first I’m documenting here.
A fun aspect of this hike is that you get a great ferry ride at the beginning or end depending on which way you go. Overall the hike is somewhere between 20 and 22 miles has +2000 and -2000 ft elevation change. What I did for this hike was:
- Hop on the ferry at Embarcadero to Sausalito,
- go through the pass to the Tennessee Valley (California’s version),
- go over the hills to Rodeo Beach (serious hill 1),
- up the pass to go by the (surely) ironically named “Slacker’s Hill” (serious hill 2),
- across the bridge
- and back to the Embarcadero through the Marina, Fort Mason, Chinatown and Downtown (“serious” hill 3, but at this point an ant hill would have felt serious)
Bring a jacket for this part…
After the ferry ride it’s pretty flat for awhile as you pass by the various marinas of Marin.
I’d never visited the Tennessee Valley area before, so it was very cool to see the full transition from Bay marsh to Oak forest to chaparall to coastal grassland to wetland to beach all within about an hour of walking.
At this point I made a serious mistake and decided to take a “shortcut” trail that was marked on google maps but nowhere else. I think it was an old section of the Coastal Trail that isn’t really maintained anymore because it’s so steep. It theoretically cut off a mile of extra hiking, but at the cost of scrambling up a scree covered hill for 30 minutes. Not fun!
The scramble took so much out of me it was hard to enjoy the Marin Headlands portion of the hike. There was also another pretty serious uphill portion here, but you do get some nice views. Walking across the bridge is pretty miserable. I’m not a huge fan of heights, and with fast road bikers, tourist bikers with selfie sticks out, and people sharing a pretty narrow path, I just wanted to get to the other side as fast as possible. It didn’t help that (of course!) the bridge was completely fogged in.
The SF portion was fine, but my legs were pretty shot at this point so I was just focusing on avoiding hills. It’s always fun to cross Chinatown in the East-West direction which feels less touristy in that direction somehow.
Things I’d do differently:
- just walk a little further instead of climbing straight up the hill
- probably get on a bus across the bridge
- shade is pretty scarce once you hit the beach, so definitely take advantage of that when it’s available
Joseph Harder 
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