The Bay Area Ridge Trail at Sierra Vista Open Space Preserve begins on a ridge 2,000 feet above the Santa Clara Valley. The trail traverses the face of a steep hillside before rising and then dropping steadily into the valley below. It ends abruptly just past the park’s historic homestead, where a locked gate, yellow caution tape and sign with skull and cross bones make clear that the last two miles are closed indefinitely.
We are hiking the 407-mile Bay Area Ridge Trail. Sign up to follow our progress here.
TRAIL MAPS (date hiked)
- Sierra Vista Open Space Preserve: Sierra Road to Lower Calaveras Fault (Dec. 22, 2023)
- Coyote Creek Parkway North (Kelly Park to William Street Park) (Jan. 1, 2024)
Sierra Vista Open Space Preserve
We’ve seen all manner of views on our Ridge Trail Traverse: Urban sprawl beneath yellow haze. Rolling green hills meeting roiling gray cloudscapes. Dark and distant city silhouettes wedged low against brilliant blue skies. Fog so thick you couldn’t see past the next grazing cow, much less into the valley below. But our view from the Sierra Vista Open Space Preserve trailhead offered something completely different.
Perched at 2,000 feet above the eastern edge of the Santa Clara Valley, we enjoyed a vast caldron of clouds that filled the valley to the brim. Nearby peaks and ridgelines poked through like Islands and promontories where the ocean meets land. So unique. So beautiful. Metropolitan San Jose has never been so close yet still felt so far away.
The trail itself also held some surprises. Not far from the trailhead, the hiking path is carved into a steep, grassy hillside with ridiculously precarious cattle paths criss-crossing the grassland above and below. A sign at the beginning of one 80-foot section serves notice of a landslide risk and advises hikers not to tarry. On the way back, we spotted conglomerate rocks that held petrified sea shells, uplifted from ancient sea shores by epochs of seismic activity. Impressive.
Unfortunately, the Ridge Trail segment has been truncated by an ongoing trail shutdown. Damage from the atmospheric rivers that inundated these hills during the winter of 2023 has closed the last two miles indefinitely. A ranger with the Santa Clara Open Space Authority told us that the agency had not begun to consider how to address the damage as other repairs and projects on Authority land have higher priority. Too bad, but it makes sense. The trail as mapped ends before leaving the preserve, so is a path to nowhere.
Kelly Park to William Street Park
We hiked the Coyote Creek Parkway “north” and “south” segments of the Bay Area Ridge Trail – some 20 miles – way back in January 2022. A detached, 1.8-mile creek-side segment connecting Kelly Park to William Street Park was not marked in the 2019 “Bay Area Ridge Trail” guide book. We spotted the segment on the organization’s updated online map while writing the long-ago blog post.. So, we opened 2024 with brunch and friends in San Jose followed by a short walk from one urban creek-side park to another. The walk was less than spectacular. A chore, really. But we checked it off of our list.
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