Bay Area Ridge Trail - Benicia to Crockett

Looking towards Crockett from Benicia State Recreation Area

On October 17, 2015, I went with my brother on my second segment of the Bay Area Ridge Trail connect-the-dots adventure. This segment was where trying to connect missing sections of the trail became a true art and science of navigation from a printed map that was not that great, a cell phone map, some mixture of logic and instinct, making wrong turns and other mistakes, and just plain luck.

Dad drove us to the Benicia State Recreation Area, where we left off on Dillon Point Road, along the western side of the marsh. We continued to walk south by the lovely wetlands towards Dillon Point and took Substation Road to the left to meet up with the Bay Area Ridge Trail. We followed it to Dillon Point, where the trail winds up and down in the hills towards west Vallejo above Southhampton Bay and Carquinez Strait. This is a good place to pay attention to the ridge trail marker signs and maps, since the trail here connects to a network of other trails, including the San Francisco Bay Trail.

Carquinez Strait and Southampton Bay from Dillon Point

Glen Cove Waterfront Park, Vallejo

Then we hiked northwest to Glen Cove and followed the greener and more flat trail along the shoreline of trees, grasses, and emergent vegetation. This official segment of the ridge trail ends with a loop in Glen Clove Waterfront Park and a sign that the trail beyond this point has yet to be developed. We took a break in the park, then here is where the fun began. The details of our successes and follies that follow may be helpful if any other nut wants to try to connect these trail segments on foot.

Glen Cove Marina

We started navigating the streets of Vallejo's Glen Cove neighborhood to try to pick up the next segment of the ridge trail. We walked up Whitesides Drive, took a left on South Regatta and another left on Glen Cove Parkway. This busy street goes straight uphill, and the next missed turn was my bad because I wasn't paying enough attention to the map. It was quite a wasted expenditure of time and physical exertion. We turned back to take Quiet Harbor Drive to the Glen Cove Marina at Elliot Cove, where we picked up a segment of the San Francisco Bay Trail.

Carquinez Strait from Bay Area Ridge Trail, Vallejo

We hiked west above Carquinez Strait, with beautiful views of the channel and its waterfronts. That brought us back to a small segment of the ridge trail that ascends in elevation and ends at a point overlooking Interstate 80 and the new Alfred Zampa Memorial Bridge, built alongside the 1958 Carquinez Bridge. Nice view, but here's the catch. The next official segment of the ridge trail starts in the town of Crockett on the west side of the bridge. Somehow, we needed to get off the steep hill and down to the bridge so we could walk across it. A little bit of logic and ingenuity was now in order.

Since we couldn't fly down, we took an unmarked footpath we found to our right. The footpath connected to another trail that went northeast through an open-space greenbelt between the neighborhoods. From Seahorse Drive, we found Old Glen Cove Road to the right, which goes through another greenbelt between neighborhoods and ends on Pueblo Way. We stopped for a curbside picnic lunch, where a small section of Pueblo turns into a trail. Then our first right on Palou Street took us to Magazine Street, which to the left was our ticket across Interstate 80. From where we started standing high above the bridge, we wound up going over two miles out of the way in the opposite direction to get across the freeway, and we were tired. I saw a Starbucks off Magazine on Pine Street. Time for a coffee break.

Bridge view of Maritime Academy training ship, the Golden Bear

Since we had to navigate ourselves back at least another mile to the south to get to the bridge, we continued down Pine to Orange and 5th streets to get to Maritime Academy Drive, enjoying some very fun and rather large Halloween decorations along the way. We passed by the athletic facility at the California State University Maritime Academy, the only maritime academy on the west coast for students who want to study and work on ships or boats for sea-faring and other related careers. I would guess many people, as my brother once did, dream about enrolling into this academy's marine programs. At this point, we found the Carquinez Bridge Trail, which took us along the freeway and across the bridge. We enjoyed beautiful views of Carquinez Strait, Napa River, and San Pablo Bay that we would not see from a vehicle speeding across the bridge.

View of Napa River from the Crockett side of the strait and bridge

The bridge was a grand finale to a very long day, and we were more than ready to be picked up in Crockett. We followed the bridge trail alongside Pomona Street to where it ended near Crockett's classic little downtown. Dad met us at Toot's Tavern, where we enjoyed pizza, beer, and a Florida Gators football game (dad was a Florida Gator linebacker in his college years). It was a good spot to pick up again from Crockett on the next leg of our ridge trail journey.