The Bay Trail is a quiet but significant presence in the San Francisco Bay Area. With the California legislature passing SB100 way back in 1987, the trail was officially founded with the ambition to connect 500 miles of publicly accessible trails that circumnavigate the San Francisco and San Pablo bays. Today, the Bay Trail has 350 miles of completed trails that traverse nine counties and forty-seven municipalities.

Read on for filmmaker Brian Vernor‘s project, Around the Bay, with video and photos, below!

Film by Brian Vernor with Support from Santa Cruz Bicycles

Riding the Bay Trail is a backyard adventure awaiting any Bay Area cyclist with a temperament open to some vague routing with limited signage, and a few significant gaps in connectivity where a rider is left to make up their own route. What the Bay Trail lacks in certainties, it makes up for with unique access to the bayshore, detours through cities often overlooked, and a plethora of food and support options for riders who like to pack light.

The Bay Trail is a victory for organizing in the public interest, and while it’s imperfect and incomplete, the trail is a gift to the Bay Area cycling community.

I was introduced to the Bay Trail in 2012 while living in San Francisco. My first ride exposed me to the South and East sections, and I was surprised by extended car-free miles, access to protected nature preserves, and a mix of surfaces seemingly perfect for our then-popular cyclocross bikes. I was immediately curious about the idea of going all the way around the bay using the Bay Trail.

I moved away from the Bay Area before I could scratch the itch to ride the whole loop, but earlier this year, I revisited the idea of circumnavigating the Bay on now-popular gravel bikes for a film project with Tobin Ortenblad. Tobin is a professional gravel and mountain bike racer from my hometown of Santa Cruz, California. As a racer, he has been in the mix of every big gravel race across the country, and those races have dominated the media landscape of gravel biking.

While racing can make a good story, we wanted to make a film about riding gravel bikes for fun and adventure, outside of the hyper-focused space of elite racing. Tobin convinced his teammate, Ruth Holcomb, to join in a leisurely, by racer standards, two-day loop of the bay using the Bay Trail as a guide.

Sketching out a route with the MTC’s interactive Bay Trail Map, it quickly became clear that a good route around the bay, avoiding long out-and-back detours, would not necessarily include only official Bay Trail-designated miles. Riding only on the 350 Bay Trail miles would be convoluted and frustrating with sections that end without leading to the next and forcing frequent double-backs.

Asking friends for routing suggestions was not entirely fruitful because, to be forthright, routes offered by experienced riders included trespassing and incorporated Navy-controlled land and protected spaces, all either illegal or dangerous for most to traverse. Riding right up on the Bay has potential for land use conflict if you aren’t thoughtful about your route planning.

The Bay Trail is a work in progress, but with that said, with a bit of time, one can connect a beautiful, safe, and legal route around the bay that incorporates many Bay Trail segments. Ultimately, Tobin sorted out a counter-clockwise route, roughly 240 miles in length, which started and ended at San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge, and that is what he and Ruth attempted to follow when we filmed their journey.

As a work in progress, the Bay Trail not only requires advocacy to expand its current mileage, but also to maintain and improve existing mileage. While the MTC coordinates with cities and counties that manage the Bay Trail in their respective jurisdictions, the Rails to Trails Conservancy does some heavy lifting when it comes to advocating for completion and maintenance of the full trail.

Iman Sylvain, RTC Western Regional Director, pointed out, “The number one challenge to completing the trail is funding. In the more recent framework of federal funding, federal clawbacks are a major issue. There are also cross-jurisdictional questions and private land ownership as well. Some of the Bay Trail route is a line through corporate parks or private housing developments, so getting easements through those for the path is also very challenging. That’s why we say the low-hanging fruit has been built. And what remains are the really hard parts of the trail.”

Like any of the organizations vital to supporting trails we feature on this site, we encourage you to support the work of Rails to Trails Conservancy with a donation, or by exploring volunteer opportunities.

Riding a full loop around the San Francisco and San Pablo bays isn’t ever going to be a straightforward cruise. Some sections of the trail dead-end without warning, closures pop up that aren’t on the map, and signage can feel like it was designed by a committee that never talked to each other. As Tobin put it, “Before the ride, I imagined the trail would be a pretty cohesive loop circumnavigating the entire bay, which was not exactly the case.” But that’s kind of the fun of it, right?

A ride around the bay is not like a race course where you put your head down and purposefully smash yourself. After the ride Ruth said: “Even though we had a pre-planned route and on-bike navigation we still got lost a few times and made some interesting detours, putting us in places I didn’t expect and making things even more of an adventure.”

The adventure here isn’t about disappearing into the wilderness—it’s about weaving through cities, skirting wetlands, dodging joggers and the occasional duck hunter, and puzzling out the next connection. When I asked Tobin if the Bay Trail was a proper adventure, he said, “Normally when I think of adventure I’m way out on a bike away from everyone and everything…”

He continued with “Riding the Bay Trail is different because you’re never that far from society; actually, for most of it, you’re smack dab in the middle of it. The adventure is riding through the city, looking out for random road finds (like the wine key I scooped in Napa), finding good food close to if not next to the route, and simply navigating the trail.”

It’s messy, it’s imperfect, and that’s exactly what makes a Bay Trail loop worth doing…

Credits:
Brian Vernor, Director and Stills
Robin Sansom, Cinematographer
Chas, Field Reporter
Supported by Santa Cruz Bicycles

Many thanks to Santa Cruz Bicycles for supporting this story!