Why this blog?

Once upon a time in 2014 your humble blogger started dating a girl with a dog.  It was then I learned just how many wild (and not at all wild) places are off limits to dogs in California.  Pretty much all the state and national parks in this part of the country are extremely dog averse. In some places dog bans are part of a well considered, well balanced, strategy of wildlife conservation.  Most of the time though, dog bans are rationalized with unscientific or disingenuous claims of protecting 'wilderness' that ceased to be anything like wilderness over a hundred years ago.  Usually that BS is fronting for liability issues or rules put in place just to placate a noisy, entitled, minority who think they get to tell the rest of us how to enjoy our public lands.

So what's a guy to do when his girl only goes hiking when her dog can come?  Find all the dog-friendly hiking trails, that's what.  At the time that took quite a bit of work.  A fair amount of information was available online pointing you to all sorts of great hiking trails, but figuring out what was dog-legal and what was off limits usually required figuring out what kind of land the hike was on then going to a particular park or conservation area website to look up the rules.  At some point I started putting together this blog as a list of dog-friendly trails, with clear information about leash restrictions up front.

It turns out that building a catalog of all the dog friendly hikes in northern California with first-hand descriptions gathered on the occasional weekend between working 60-hour weeks in the Bay, is a very long term project.  Since 2014 several hiking guides targeted to California dog-lovers have been published and some of the leading trail-guide aggregators have gotten more systematic about documenting dog rules (e.g. All Trails and Modern Hiker).  So this is never going to be the authoritative list of all the dog trails in the state.

On the other hand, I've come to find that the huge lists of hundreds of possible hikes are only useful when I know an area pretty well already and I'm looking to find all the different nooks and crannies to explore.  If I don't know an area well at all, I don't want a big list, I just want to be pointed to the most scenic hikes first.   That way, I'll use my limited opportunities to visit there well.  Also, while the wisdom of the crowds is good at scooping up basic info on lots and lots of hikes, some of the details such as what the leash regulations and permit requirements are often incomplete or incorrect.  So this blog will be two things: a running list recent adventures I'd recommend to other dog owners, yes, but more importantly I'll try and focus attention to the most awesome hikes I've done in different areas of the state, and make all the rules for humans and dogs on those trails more clear.

-Sam
May 19, 2019