CALIFORNIA
Tilden Regional Park
Tilden is a regional park in East Bay spanning 2,079 acres between Berkeley and Orinda. Getting there from the Peninsula is no problem but the roads around the park are pretty steep. We drove through some interesting neighborhoods and my car’s clutch tried its best.
We started at Lake Anza and worked our way in a loop to Grizzly Peak, Inspiration Point and back for a 6.8 mile walk:
There’s a lake right at the entrance that I guess in warmer weather people could swim in. It’s very scenic.
I’d say the trails are split between dirt paths and roads that are currently closed to cars. So you have even less immersion at this park than San Bruno Mountain. I put the difficulty down as medium because of the flat paved roads but there are some steep climbs. Additionally it was a little slippery from rain, especially going downhill.
There are some really nice views of Berkeley and Oakland though, especially at Grizzly Peak. Just be careful, people hang out up there a lot and there’s a ton of broken glass and garbage.
For dinner we stopped in Downtown Berkeley on Shattuck. We were trying to decide between pizza places and landed on Jupiter Pizza. We ordered a shrimp pizza and a bbq chicken pizza and split them and it was delicious! Not my habitual post-hike burger but I’ve also been hiking a lot in the last month and eating a ton of burgers. There’s no outdoor seating during COVID here so we took our pizzas and beers a block away to a small park.
I think this puts me at 19 hiking trips this year! One more to go!