Today was a very challenging but beautiful hike from the Skylawn Memorial Park at the intersection of Highways 92 and 35 to Skyline College on the Bay Area Ridge Trail. We finally got to have all four trail goddesses together for a hike, the first time we’ve done it in a year! It was a real treat to be together and I know that for myself having them there made the challenging parts of the hike much easier. I was so happy that my schedule has changed so I could go on this hike with Julie, Gabriella and Michelle. It was a foggy drive from San Francisco but unfortunately the fog didn’t hang around!
The hike was just under 14 miles and didn’t have a huge amount of elevation change, but the temperatures were much higher than anyone expected. The area we were hiking is usually relatively foggy and at least has cool winds, but we had none of that on our hike. In fact, when we started off at 7:30 from Skylawn Memorial Park, a place I definitely want to go back and look around more, there were absolutely gorgeous statues everywhere. Anyway when we started off we left our extra layers in the car because we could already tell they weren’t going to be needed. It didn’t take me long to shed my vest and long sleeve shirt as well. Definitely not what we were expecting. One section of the ridge trail was from the Cemetery Gate to the Portola Gate, which is closed to the public as it is on SF watershed land and only accessible on a docent lead hike. The first couple of miles were nice and shady in amongst the trees, but soon the trail became completely exposed, and there was not a breath of wind until we got closer to our destination at Skyline College. The spectacular views helped to distract us from the heat.
Julie and I definitely felt the heat the most, and had to slow our pace considerably on any hills. The docent, Thomas, was fantastic, coming back to make sure that we were doing OK and letting us know it was fine to go at our own pace. About a third of the group of hikers were hiking the gate to gate section then turn back to the cemetery gate for a total of 17 miles. We had left one car at Skyline College then shuttled to a parking area near the entrance of Skylawn Memorial Park and hiked 2 miles in to the cemetery gate, where the rest of the hikers carpooled to.
Stopping in the shade and catching any bit of wind helped, but by last 3 miles we were running very low on water since we had all drunk a lot more than we had expected to. Another group of four hikers was also very low on water when we arrived at the bathroom that intersected with the trailhead going to Sneath Lane. We were very lucky that two Hetch Hetchy Water and Power maintenance trucks happened to be driving down the road at that time. One of the gentleman in the other group was not doing very well and they asked if there was anyway he could get a ride down the road. The workers weren’t able to do that, but they offered us as much ice cold water from their huge igloos as we could take. We were very grateful to fill up, and a biker coming by gave some glucose chewies to the man in the hopes that it would help revive his energy enough to get him down the last part of the trail.
When we turned onto the Notch Trail, the last mile of our hike we were very happy making our way downhill, and starting to feel a bit of a cool breeze from the fog that was further out in Pacifica. Unfortunately, we learned at about the half mile mark that the trail went back up! We had to climb many stairs before making our final descent into the parking lot at Skyline College. The ice cold water from the Hetch Hetchy workers help to get us through the last few miles of our hike, I can’t imagine what it would’ve been like had we not had that. Near the end we passed summertime hiking up with some kind of signal receiver. Hmmmm
We piled into the car very grateful to sit down, and even happier to find there was a Jamba Juice and Starbucks only a couple of miles away. Michelle bought me a large Jamba juice as an early birthday present – we both had to stop ourselves from sucking them down too quickly as they kept giving us cold headaches! Julie and Gabriella opted for Starbucks to get a bit of a caffeine infusion and then we were back on the road. As we got onto Highway 35 we realized that even at 2:30 in the afternoon there were still a lot of people headed to Half Moon Bay and the cooler weather at the beach, which meant the drive back to the car at Skylawn was twice as long as it had been this morning. Final hugs goodbye to Michele and the presentation of a lovely bottle of wine from Gabriella for my birthday then I was headed back home to let Margo out so she could pee and I could take a much needed and much longed for shower!
I’m really glad I can sleep in tomorrow morning!