Moon 101 Great Hikes of the San Francisco Bay Area (Moon Outdoors) (Paperback)

~ Ann Marie Brown (Author)
Key Phrases: hiking time, coastal trail, perimeter trail, Point Reyes, East Bay, Mount Diablo (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

Avid hiker and experienced travel writer Ann Marie Brown knows the best places to hike in the San Francisco Bay Area from ocean-front and mountain trails to scenic walks through Wine Country. This third edition of Moon 101 Great Hikes of the San Francisco Bay Area includes a new hiking tips section, updated trail maps for each hike, new chapter maps with sites plotted by region, and a new resources section. This guide also has helpful icons indicating access to historic sites, trails that are appropriate for children, wheelchair-accessible trails, and trailheads that can be accessed via public transportation.

Complete with difficulty levels from 1 to 5, Moon 101 Great Hikes of the San Francisco Bay Area provides hikers with first-rate expert advice and all the necessary tools to head outdoors.

About the Author

The author of 12 outdoor guidebooks, Ann Marie Brown is a dedicated California outdoorswoman. She bikes, hikes, and camps more than 150 days each year to avoid routine, complacency, and getting a real job. Ann Marie's work has appeared in Sunset, VIA, Backpacker, and California magazines. As a way of giving back a bit of what she gets from her outdoor experiences, she writes and edits for several environmental groups, including the Sierra Club and National Resources Defense Council. When not riding or hiking along a California trail, Ann Marie can be found at her home just a few miles from Yosemite National Park.

Product Details

• Paperback: 350 pages
• Publisher: Avalon Travel Publishing; 3rd edition (September 28, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1566919452
• ISBN-13: 978-1566919456
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.4 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.9 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #135,236 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Excellent Bay Area Resource, December 3, 2007

By	R.M. Fernandez - See all my reviews

Nature photography is a hobby of mine, so I bought this book as a guide to find local parks. So far, it's been a big help. This book is very well done and thoughtfully organized.

The book is divided into 4 regions of the bay area with maps at the beginning of each section, outlining the locations of each park. Each location has a basic trail map, a 1-2 page write-up, directions, and usually a tip to visit another nearby attraction.

A couple drawbacks: 1) The black and white photographs are poor newsprint quality. Color photographs (and more than one photo for each hike) would be a huge help. 2) Usually within the write-up for each hike, the author recommends the optimum time of the season to visit the park - it would be nice if that tip was included somewhere in the subheader (with the trail distance and difficulty level) so you could quickly scan through the hikes.

Overall, this is a great resource and highly recommended to anybody in the Bay Area looking to get outdoors.

5 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars San Francisco: Outdoor Vacation Destination, October 11, 2007

By	Fritz R. Ward "dayhiker" (Crestline, CA United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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San Francisco is the only major urban area that I consider an outdoor (hiking/camping) vacation destination. Almost all cities have nice parks and short walks in areas where urban and wild (or at least undeveloped) landscapes interface. But the Bay Area has a lot of such lands and an abundance of trails on them. Even East Bay communities, with their thick urban development and nightly traffic snarls, have a parks and open space district that boasts nearly 100,000 square acres and contains over 1,100 miles of trail. The latter figure rivals what one can find in many national forests. But of course the Bay Area also includes towering redwoods in the Santa Cruz Mountains and the spectacular Point Reyes National Seashore.

So where should you turn to explore all this wild territory that surrounds one of the largest metropolitan areas in the world? There are many good guidebooks to the region, but this new edition of Ann Marie Brown's '101 Hikes' is an excellent starting point. The older edition was the first hiking guide I purchased to the Bay Area. It gave me many superb outings and the new edition is even better.

Like many other hiking guides from Moon Guidebooks, this one is long on route description, natural and local history, and includes numerous black and white photos from the author so readers can get a glimpse of the local scenery. Unlike other Moon Guides, this volume also has detailed sketch maps of the trails. The book covers wildlands from the Sonoma Coast to Santa Cruz and extends eastward as far as Napa Valley and Livermore. The four chapters cover each geographical region and the hikes are fairly evenly distributed. Most of the trips Brown offers in this book are half to full day excursions. Double digit mileage is common and hikes from five to ten miles are the norm. The author does, however, include a number of "options" for those who would like a shorter, or longer, hike.

On the whole, this is an excellent book. I can never decide if I like the Santa Cruz Mountains or Marin County more, but I have walked many of the selections Brown describes in these areas and think they are, without exception, the premier hikes in these parks. The waterfall loop in Big Basin Redwoods, the excursion through Henry Cowell, and the trip to Arch Rock at Point Reyes are all personal favorites that I have done many times. Buy this book and start building some memories of the (really) wild side within the greater Bay Area.

4.0 out of 5 stars 101 Great Hikes, January 7, 2009

By	J. Guerrero "friscojg" (San Francisco, ca United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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Pay attention here. This is a really good guide to some fine outings in the Bay Area for those of you who want to walk and enjoy the experience.