Article courtesy of the New York times. http://travel.nytimes.com/2008/02/03/travel/03Explorer.html?ex=1202619600&en=094686ec6cdfac48&ei=5070&emc=eta1
MARIN COUNTY, just north of San Francisco, cradles wealthy bedroom communities in picturesque bays. But nearly half of the county’s 520 square miles is protected open space — bucolic and wild, its tiny towns separated by forested mountains.
San Francisco Travel Guide
Where to Stay
Where to Eat
What to Do
Go to the San Francisco Travel Guide »
Multimedia
Slide Show
The Rambling Trails of Marin County
Map
Marin County, Calif.
It is the kind of landscape, with miles of well-maintained trails, that people travel across the globe to traverse — to Wales, say, or the Cinque Terre. But Marin, particularly its western reaches, offers something for anyone spry enough to walk a mile or two, on any budget.
One Friday afternoon last fall, my wife, Nina, and I rode a bus across the Golden Gate Bridge out of San Francisco with the hordes of commuters. We planned to spend the next three days hiking back to the city. While our route may have been ambitious — covering as many as 20 miles a day — it’s easy to choose shorter routes, or make connections by car or bus if you want to do it in less time.
We got off in Olema, a crossroads in a long valley formed by the San Andreas fault. We already felt a world away in the eucalyptus-scented darkness before the understated wooden form of the Point Reyes Seashore Lodge, where we had booked a room.
In the morning, we headed out into a dazzling fog, climbing east toward the Bolinas Ridge. Ghostly white deer — descendants of fallow deer imported in the last century — looked down on us through dripping stalks of fennel. The air smelled like a cool herbal balm, and our boots grew dark with dew.
At the ridge, fog was pouring in from a neighboring valley like heavy cream. Tomales Bay, where the fault reaches the sea, shone in the distance. All about us was mad morning chirping and grass bejeweled in the sun.
Heading south along the ridge, we met our first human beings at noon. Pierce and Carmen Morris were on a northward walk markedly better organized than our own: having rambled throughout Europe, they had entrusted a local company to plan their trip. We chatted for a bit and, as we parted, Mr. Morris turned and called back in his sweet Georgia accent: “We’re 71 years old, by the way!”
“So,” Nina said as we watched them proceed jauntily toward Olema, “30 more years of this for us?”
Soon, we joined the Coastal Trail, which follows the shoreline at a distance, atop a ridge. In the late afternoon, it broke onto rolling, golden hills and our first view of the Pacific. Hawks and vultures romped in the updrafts, swooping close to the shaggy-maned hills, while paragliders sought to imitate them from a promontory up ahead.
We were above the Bolinas Lagoon Preserve, part of the Audubon Canyon Ranch and one of the first places in the county to be protected — a reminder that these hills are not unspoiled by accident. Freeways and subdivisions planned in the 1960s were blocked by local activism. Instead of sprawl on its slopes, West Marin County has salmon in its streams.
As the sun lowered, the ocean became a molten blaze punctuated only by the Farallon Islands near the horizon. The surf whispered from Stinson Beach below us, and we turned toward it. The woods soon gave way to streets of bougainvillea and Monterey cypress around ’60s-era beach houses with BMWs and surfboards out front.
We were quickly in the center of Stinson Beach: a green, some shops and cars tooling up and down the Shoreline Highway. We made the beach just in time to see the perfect ball of evening fire quench itself across Bolinas Bay off Duxbury Point. The hills we had marked with our footprints seemed improbable pink confections.
“It feels like another country,” said Nina, even though we had been on that beach many times before.
We stayed that night at the Redwood Haus, a bed-and-breakfast that harked back to Marin’s more casual hippie days. In the chaotic living room, we listened to the owners’ tales of life in 1960s San Francisco. Then we went upstairs and slept like logs, the surf sighing through our open window.
We woke at dawn to murmuring in the dovecote by the longboards and the smell of frying potatoes and eggs. Ravens called from above, and we shouldered our packs and headed off into the fog along the Dipsea Trail. We ascended through fantastical, gnarled woods into open, misty heath. Quails, rabbits and an elegant buck — in the mist all the same carob color as the trail — granted us room to pass into a dense redwood forest.
As we climbed, sunbeams pierced the brume to pick out pools of water in bowls of polished rock and carpets of glistening, emerald ferns. Big trees lay over the narrow ravine, their backs covered in moss. As we rambled higher still, blue sky tinted the fog and, suddenly, we were in warm sun on the golden flanks of Mount Tamalpais.
Mount Tam is beloved in the Bay Area, and as we approached the Pantoll Ranger Station, the headquarters of Mount Tamalpais State Park, the trails became crowded. Hikers, bikers, campers, walkers, runners and others swarmed the routes to the mountain’s peak. But a friendly ranger directed us to a trail, Troop 80, that even on a sunny Sunday, was quiet and lovely.