The San Francisco Bay Area
Where a fog-cooled coast, redwood canyons, and the birthplace of a sport meet a city of seven million.
No other American metropolis wears its wilderness this close. Within an hour of the Golden Gate you can summit a 2,500-foot peak, ride the singletrack where mountain biking was invented, paddle a tidal estuary past harbor seals, and watch the sun drop into the Pacific from a redwood ridge — often all on the same trail system.
The Bay Area is a collision zone, in the most literal sense. Six major earthquake faults, including the San Andreas, cross the region, and the buckling of the Pacific and North American plates over millions of years threw up the Coast Ranges that give the Bay its dramatic relief — Mount Tamalpais and Mount Diablo standing sentinel on either side of the bay, the Santa Cruz Mountains walling off the ocean to the south. That same tectonic drama produced an astonishing diversity of terrain packed into a small footprint: coastal bluffs and pocket beaches, redwood canyons, oak-savanna hills that turn emerald in winter and gold by June, tidal marshes, and chaparral ridgelines. The unifying force is fog. Each summer, hot air rising over the Central Valley pulls cold Pacific air through the Golden Gate and the gaps in the coastal hills, blanketing the coast in the marine layer while the inland valleys bake — a microclimate mosaic where you can drive twenty minutes and change the weather by twenty degrees.
4 more chapters, plus when to go and the gateway towns — included with the Atlas subscription. Every destination in this region is listed below, free.
See plans →The roof of Marin, reached by a serpentine mountain road that ends near the top. The paved Verna Dunshee loop rings the peak wi…
The Bay Area's most famous stand of old-growth redwoods, and deservedly so — trees to 250-plus feet in a fern-floored canyon 12…
The signature urban coastal hike of San Francisco, threading cypress groves along cliffs above the mouth of the Golden Gate. It…
Kirby Cove is the Bay Area's dream campsite — a tiny cove beach tucked beneath the Marin Headlands, directly across from the Go…
Samuel P. Taylor is the Bay Area's beloved redwood escape — a shady grove of second-growth redwoods along Lagunitas Creek in th…
Angel Island is the largest island in San Francisco Bay, and its handful of hike-in campsites offer one of the most unique camp…
The Steep Ravine cabins are the Bay Area's most coveted overnight — ten rustic wood cabins perched on a wild ocean bluff below …
The soul of Northern California surfing. Steamer Lane sits directly below the Santa Cruz lighthouse and the Surfing Museum, sur…
The wave that put California on the global big-wave map alongside Nazaré and Jaws. Mavericks is a right-hand reef break sitting…
Sherman Island, on the western edge of the Sacramento–San Joaquin Delta, is the beating heart of Bay Area wind sports — the mos…
Crissy Field is one of the most iconic wind-sports venues on Earth — a grassy former airfield on the San Francisco waterfront w…
Third Avenue in San Mateo (at the edge of Foster City) is the Bay Area's premier flatwater spot and the place most local kiters…
Waddell Creek — universally known as 'Kite Beach' — is Northern California's wave-riding mecca for kiters and windsurfers, a dr…
Pacifica Pier is a Bay Area legend — one of the very few places in California where you can catch a king salmon from a pier wit…
The Sacramento–San Joaquin Delta is one of the great freshwater-and-brackish fisheries in America — a sprawling 1,100-mile laby…
Mt. Hamilton, rising above San Jose to the historic white domes of Lick Observatory at 4,213 feet, is the Bay Area's biggest an…
Mt. Diablo, the great solitary peak that dominates the East Bay skyline, offers one of California's classic summit climbs — a r…
Old La Honda Road, climbing out of Woodside into the redwoods of the Santa Cruz Mountains, is the single most famous benchmark …
Mt. Tamalpais, the green mountain that presides over Marin County just north of the Golden Gate, is one of the Bay Area's most …
Hawk Hill, at the top of Conzelman Road in the Marin Headlands, delivers the single most iconic view in Bay Area cycling — the …
The Dipsea is the oldest trail race in America — run continuously since 1905 — and its 7.4-mile point-to-point course from Mill…
If the Dipsea is Marin's rite of passage, the Matt Davis–Steep Ravine loop is its finest single lap — widely considered the bes…
The Marin Headlands are the beating heart of Bay Area trail running — a wind-scoured tangle of ridges and coastal bluffs direct…
The Marin Headlands and Mount Tamalpais, rising straight across the Golden Gate from San Francisco, are hallowed ground — the b…
Mountain biking as a sport was invented here. In the late 1970s, Joe Breeze built the first mountain bike frames (calling them …
Demo Forest changed mountain biking. When the Flow Trail opened in 2015, it became the template for flow trail design worldwide…
San Francisco's Central Bay is one of the world's great sailing arenas — a natural wind machine where the summer sea breeze fun…
Few places on Earth pack as much wildlife into one peninsula as Point Reyes National Seashore, a windswept triangle of coast an…
Año Nuevo, on the wild San Mateo coast between Santa Cruz and Half Moon Bay, hosts one of the largest mainland breeding colonie…
Fifteen miles of calm, protected bay running parallel to the San Andreas Fault — the fault that created this long, straight inl…
Napa Valley is the premier hot-air ballooning destination in America — on a calm morning, dozens of balloons rise together at f…
Tucked in the redwoods near Felton, just seven miles from Santa Cruz and about 45 minutes from Silicon Valley, Mount Hermon Adv…
Fitzgerald Marine Reserve at Moss Beach is the Bay Area's flagship tidepool destination — a sprawling flat reef shelf that emer…
Alamere Falls is one of California's rare 'tidefalls' — a waterfall that plunges directly onto the beach and into the Pacific s…
Mount Diablo rises alone above the East Bay, and because it stands isolated from other high peaks, its 3,849-foot summit comman…
This loop is one of the finest day hikes in the Bay Area, linking three classic Mount Tamalpais trails into a circuit that runs…