The End of the Trail
About an hour before reaching the ridgeline — the entirety of the Marin Headlands spilling out before me, rolling green hills tumbling down to the ocean — I arrived at an unequivocal, unfortunate realization: I’ve hiked every trail in Marin.
Sitting in my apartment, scrolling through AllTrails, I couldn’t find a single track — in all of Mt. Tamalpais State Park or the Marin Headlands — that I hadn’t already hiked, ran or explored, sometimes on several occasions, in the past.
Finally, I settled on the Marincello, Miwok, Old Springs Loop, which departs from the hugely popular Tennessee Valley Trailhead. The Marincello Trail begins as an unremarkable fire road until, as you climb higher up the slope, you realize Mt. Tam is looming behind you, Tiburon — dotted with its waterfront mansions — is knifing into the Bay, inching toward Angel Island, and Mt. Diablo is peeking out off in the distance.
Curiously enough, as I headed up, I noticed how impeccable this fire road was, how easy it would be to drive right up. In an alternate reality, I would be doing just that. I wouldn’t be trudging up the trail, but rather speeding up the five-lane boulevard, heading toward Marincello — the 30,000-person commuter community complete with 50 apartment towers (imagine the views), hundreds of houses and townhomes and even a mall and hotel.
That developer’s dream — the plan was originally green-lit in 1965 and bulldozers even carved the boulevard up the mountain and workers even built the Marincello gates — clearly never came to be. The project was bogged down in the courts and the Golden Gate National Recreation Area secured the land — some 2,100 acres — for $6.5 million, by way of the Nature Conservancy, in 1972.