The Bay Area Ridge trail at Trione-Annadel State Park begins on a connector path through Howarth and Spring Lake parks in Santa Rosa. It snakes past a pair of reservoirs – Ralphine and Spring lakes – wraps around a bevy of water tanks and crosses an earthen dam. Upon reaching the state park, the trail parallels Spring Creek before rising into wooded highlands on the east side of Bennett Mountain. As the rocky track descends, it passes through a marshy meadow and finally a series of switchbacks through a blackened redwood forest. Portions of the state park were damaged by the 2017 Nuns fire and 2020 Glass fire.
We are hiking the 407-mile Bay Area Ridge Trail. Sign up to follow our progress here.
TRAIL MAP: Spring Lake to Trione-Annadel State Park (Feb. 10-11, 2024)
Our Journal
Heavy winds and rain the previous week had left dozens of downed trees across the trail through Trione-Annadel State Park, turning what we anticipated to be a lengthy but only moderately difficult hike into a tough outing. Rocky trails that sometimes looked more like dry creek beds slowed us down as well.
Fortunately, we split the outing into two days. We began with a warmup 4.4-mile out-and-back hike through the two regional parks on a Saturday afternoon. The next day, we made the 10.8-mile point-to-point trek through the state park.
The highlands and burn areas bore the brunt of the recent storm damage. We found ourselves climbing over, crawling under, squeezing between, pushing through and treading around thickets of branches, brush laced with poison oak and tree trunks that measured up to four feet in circumference. Toward the end we turned a corner and were confronted by a downed redwood with a slick, charred and branchless trunk that nearly reached Dawn’s neck in its prone position. We swore and then we laughed, and we managed to hoist ourselves up and over.
We’re usually pretty good at estimating our time of completion as we step off on a hike. But we were off by nearly an hour. We emerged from the trail with slimed and charcoaled pants, muddy boots and sore feet, but otherwise unscathed.
We’ve been chipping away at the Ridge Trail for nearly three years now. We now have just one hike to go.
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