Mount Sizer

Henry W. Coe State Park is the largest state park in California, and Mount Sizer sits out near its heart, which means there's no shortcut to it — you earn every foot of this one. The day started in the golden grasslands near the park entrance, oak trees standing alone in fields of dry summer grass, with the sun hanging low and orange through a haze of wildfire smoke drifting in from fires burning elsewhere in the state that August. It gave the whole morning a strange, dim, sunset-like quality despite it being the middle of the day.

The route out of the headquarters drops and climbs through a series of parallel ridges and canyons — Pine Ridge, Middle Ridge, and finally Blue Ridge, each one separated by a creek crossing at the bottom. The connector up to Blue Ridge has a reputation for a reason: it's often called one of the steepest trails in the Bay Area, gaining something like 1,500 feet in a little over a mile with no switchbacks to soften it. It's exactly as relentless as advertised.

Once up on Blue Ridge, though, the trail settles into a long, rolling ridgeline walk with big views opening up on both sides — layers of chaparral-covered hills fading into haze in every direction, the Santa Clara Valley somewhere off in the smoke to the west. Mount Sizer itself, when you finally reach it, is almost anticlimactic on purpose: just a grassy, indistinct high point along the ridge, no summit marker or register, easy to walk right past without a GPS to confirm you're standing on the actual high point of the park. The real reward here isn't the summit moment, it's the miles of quiet, remote ridgeline it takes to get there and back.