February 3, 2008
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.
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.
