An Ode to Tennessee Valley

My default Bay Area hiking spot

A first glimpse of the lagoon and beach at Tennessee Valley, as seen descending from one of the trails in the hills. I have many, many photos of this view.

The first couple years I lived in San Francisco, as much as I loved the city, it sometimes got a bit much for me. I know, it’s not the largest city — but it’s still a city, with its attendant traffic, crowding, and noise.

Then I discovered Tennessee Valley. It wasn’t the only amazing hiking spot I learned about after we bought a car and could get around more, but it was one of the most accessible. You could get there in about half an hour from our apartment in the city and feel like you were miles away. You were in fact about 11 miles from where we lived at 8th and Judah in the Sunset, then about 15 miles from where I later lived in the Mission. But it felt so wild, so removed from the city, that we could have been hundreds of miles farther out.

I’ve been able to drive to TV in about 35 minutes (when there’s no traffic) from both San Francisco and Oakland.

So close to the concrete jungle, yet so far. Photo of San Francisco and the Marin Headlands by Doc Searls from Santa Barbara, via Wikimedia Commons.

I wish I’d kept a tally of how many times I’ve been to TV, as my friends and I call it. That first year, around 1987, we were going almost every weekend for a while. That was before smart phones with cameras, but in the past seven years, a period when I’ve been hiking far less than I did in those early days, photographic evidence tells me I’ve gone there about 40 times. I’m quite confident that I’ve been to TV at least 200 times.

Why do I keep returning to the same place?

Now that I live in Oakland, there are closer hiking trails — like the fabulous Redwood Park, which I can drive to in 15 minutes and descend into a magical redwood forest that also feels removed from the city. But most of the other options over here in the East Bay have a more suburban feel to them than the trails in Marin, where TV is. They can get too hot in the summer. And the ocean, with its magnificent coastline, can only be glimpsed from afar, if at all.

The coast is always close at hand in TV. View from Coyote Ridge Trail.

There’s no dearth of amazing parks and trails all around the Bay Area, which we can enjoy all year thanks to the temperate climate. But TV is still one of the closest places to hike where you can really feel the wildness of nature that I crave. It remains my default hiking choice.

Even after 200+ visits, it’s never the same. I’ve been to TV during bright, sunny days and blustery, foggy ones — sometimes on the same day. I’ve been there on warm, clear full-moon nights (a rarity in the Bay Area) and heard coyotes howling, sometimes a bit closer than I would have preferred. When I freelanced in the early ‘90s I would often go to TV for a weekday solo hike. I was there on a moonless night so dark and foggy that we could only see a few feet ahead of us; I was glad I wasn’t alone on the trail that time.

Fog pouring in from the ocean.

I’ve seen turkey vultures, owls, and quails in TV. Heard frogs. Seen lizards and snakes. My ex-husband once swore he saw a mountain lion there, but no one else could corroborate that. I’ve spotted bobcats various times. Recently, my friend Patricia and I saw one up close on two separate visits, seemingly oblivious to the humans around it. But the people who go to TV tend to be respectful of nature, and everyone gave the bobcat space.

Zooming in.

The trail pictured here, the main one going down to the beach, can get packed on weekends. I usually climb into the less-frequented hills before coming back here and to the ocean. After nearly 40 years in Northern California, I don’t consider it a hike if it’s flat.

I’ve heard that Tennessee Valley was a sacred spot for the Miwok, who have a trail there named for them — a sad reminder that they should be the ones roaming the hills, not us. Whether or not that’s true, the place has always felt sacred to me, a feeling enhanced by the fact that the first 100 or so of my hikes there almost certainly involved smoking pot. The combination of nature and being stoned made me feel like TV was my church, the only one I’ve ever belonged to or attended willingly. I mean, I felt this way about all of nature, not just TV, but this place was still special. It not only felt sacred; it felt like home, and Iris DeMent’s song “These Hills” was often the soundtrack in my head when I walked there.

This is the kind of view that makes me think of the Iris DeMent song.

Why is this place in Northern California called Tennessee Valley? Apparently, in 1853 the ship SS Tennessee nearly crashed against the rocks there, instead landing safely on the beach and avoiding casualties. Why that led to renaming what had previously been known to the white folks as Elk Valley, I couldn’t say. In any case, the tule elk that were once common there are long gone, though you can see some farther north at Point Reyes.

This inappropriately named Bay Area treasure came perilously close to being developed into a city of 30,000 that was to be known as Marincello. But the development was halted and the area protected by, of all people, Richard Nixon, who signed a bill in 1972 creating the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, which TV is part of. He wasn’t exactly going out on a limb, as the bill was hugely popular.

When I first heard this story, I was on one of my solo hikes. I had stopped to rest in front of a large rock formation, and as I sat there, some rather pedantic guy approached from behind the rocks with a small group, telling them in great detail the story of TV’s close call. I couldn’t believe my ears when I heard that the main trail leading down to the ocean (which you can see above in the bobcat video) was once destined to be the main road of a major development that had a lot of money being poured into it. What a relief that it was stopped!

Going up the Fox Trail to the Coyote Ridge Trail. San Francisco is in the distance but hard to spot.

Here, you can see a bit of San Francisco; the Salesforce tower is now the tallest building. Still, you feel so far from the city here.

It’s hard to imagine not having Tennessee Valley available for hiking getaways. Even with all the other wild places that we’re so lucky to have in one of the most densely populated urban areas in the nation, Tennessee Valley feels necessary. I hope to be able to visit it at least 200 more times.

At the beach. I guess I’ve never taken a panoramic photo, so scroll down for more.

Arriving at the beach with friends. One intrepid soul braving water that’s so cold it hurts your toes when you dip them in.