For three years in a row, our veterans day trips had been getting more and more intense. 50 or so miles, 72 miles, 145 miles. There were rumblings of going out and trying to break the Low to High record again, but I decided I wanted to enjoy my last few months living in the Bay Area with a more low-key local trip.
So, on Friday morning, Adam, Matt and I took BART to the bus to the Golden Gate Bridge and started hiking north.
Marin is a beautiful county, with redwood forests, beaches, chaparral and mountains. It is quite well preserved, and there are lots of places to hike. We had a late lunch in Stinson Beach on the first day, and then climbed up to the hills to find a spot to camp. We camped that night with a beautiful view of the Pt. Reyes Peninsula.
The next day we continued on into Pt. Reyes, past Alamere falls and Wildcat Camp, where we saw an evacuation going on.
Eventually we reached Drake’s Bay, and started thumbing it back home. In Pt. Reyes Station someone asked us what we were up to that weekend, and we said we had walked from San Francisco. They were impressed that we had done a car-free trip. There was a bus that didn’t show up in Pt. Reyes Station, so we went back to thumbing some more. An older gentleman picked us up who wasn’t really going our direction, but we stayed in the car anyways because he was interesting to talk to. He dropped us off in Novato. Hitchhiking doesn’t work very well once you get to US-101 (we tried), so we took the bus from there back to Berkeley.
Overall this trip showed me how much beautiful country is accessible from Berkeley via public transit. It would be the first of many longer transit oriented hikes.
Anthony Ottati 