TL;DR
Its pretty incredible that you can hike for 28 miles through the Bay Area while still being in a pretty remote area. Very glad we did it during the spring. Got to enjoy the wildflowers and the moderate weather. If you don’t have time for the whole thing, check out Sunol or Del Valle regional parks. They were my favorite parts.
Thoughts
Where to begin. So the Ohlone wilderness trail has been on our list of things to do for a while. Its local to the Bay Area and has moderate weather in the spring and fall. It goes through Sunol, which is one of our favorite areas to go hiking. In preparation for Peru (and now Whitney), I wanted to do a variety of hikes that stretch our daily mileage and/or deal with elevation change and altitude. The Ohlone trail can be drawn out as long as you want but a lot of hiking overviews I’ve seen do it in two or three days. Depending on where you camp, your daily mileage ends up being anywhere from 3 miles to 25 miles. But I wanted to challenge myself. I had never done this long of a backpacking trip and I had never backpacked 16 miles in a day. So that’s what we did.
The Ohlone Wilderness trail runs from Del Valle Regional Park in Livermore to the Stanford Ave Staging Area at Mission Peak in Fremont. The trail can be done either east to west, or west to east. While the elevation profile is a bit more daunting going east to west, there are a few perks to make up for it. The approximate halfway point lands you in Sunol, one of my favorite places in the bay area. The Ohlone trail is slightly restrictive in where you can camp. There’s a handful of campgrounds you can choose from spread out around the trail. One of these is the Sunol Backpacker’s camp, nestled just inside the boundary of Sunol Regional Wilderness. The other slight benefit to starting in Del Valle is that if you leave a car there, its a bit more safe. A common complaint for cars parked in Fremont is that they could get broken into.
Without really knowing anything about the backpacker camps, I chose Sky Camp thinking that maybe it had a nice view of Little Yosemite in Sunol. Then on April 1, we drove out to Del Valle and started walking. The first 7 miles are pretty much an uphill climb toward Rose Peak. Never. Ending. Uphill. But once you reach Rose Peak, you’re on a gradual decent through an array of Lupine, Poppies, and Sticky Monkey Flower. Sky Camp sits on a hillock all by its lonesome. The next morning the fog had rolled in thick into Sunol Valley. We watched it ebb and flow as the sun came up.
Day 2 simply proved that day 1 had the best scenery. Day 2 was more of an uphill grind as you climb back up what you had lost the previous day. You get some views of the Livermore/Pleasanton area but its a bit lackluster compared to Sunol. Not really many wildflowers. Much more poison oak. Call me a snobby hiker. Hiking on fire roads just isn’t my thing. Mission Peak was in the middle of its weekend onslaught of hikers and runners when we got there. My feet were slowly in the process of dying (and I have since bought new hiking boots). Crossing the gate into the Stanford Staging area never felt more rewarding though. I feel like I can take on the world now….or at least our next epic backpacking trip.
Comments