Point Pinole Regional Shoreline

Yesterday, my daughter and I both finished school for the year. Although I have work to do still, I submitted the final grades last night to the registrar for all the classes that I teach, and she had her last Zoom circle for her toddler class of the 2019-2020 year. So we decided to celebrate today by exploring a new park: Point Pinole Regional Shoreline, which offers amazing views of the San Pablo Bay and the mountains to the west in Marin County, such as Mount Tamalpais.

We've mostly stayed very close to our hometown of Livermore since the shelter-in-place started. My governing logic has been that I only go to parks that are close enough that I won't mind turning around immediately if I arrive at the parking lot and see it overcrowded.

I think that this is a fairly good rubric, and usually that means that we only go to places that are about 30 minutes away or less.

But we went a little further out today, only because it was mid-week and during the morning. I would not have made the hour drive to this park on the weekend or on an afternoon. I did want to do something a little special to celebrate making it through to the end of the academic year, so that is the main reason why we branched out a little further than usual. I wanted to go to a new park to see something fresh and exciting to us.

On our maiden voyage to this park, we hiked a little less than 2 miles taking the loop on the map in a clockwise direction. There is a lot more to explore for serious hikers; however, this was the kid-friendly route that I opted to do with my almost-3 year old.

Starting from the parking area, we hiked over Badger Bridge and the turned to the left to get on the Bay View Trail. We stopped in the shade to have a little picnic and then continued down an unofficial path to the beach along Giant Marsh. This was my daughter's favorite part of the hike. She kicked her shoes off and ran along the beach, climbing on driftwood and checking out rocks, dried seaweed, and a shell or two, washed up from San Pablo Bay. I let her run all her crazies out, and then we retook the Bay View Trail.

The sun is intense in some places, but there is also a nice breeze blowing off of the bay. It was a little hot today, but not as bad as a few weeks ago. Between her stroller and her walking on her own, we made it to the trail's intersection with the Giant Station Trail. We took that through the eucalyptus forest over the small hill. Then we were able to join the paved multi-use trail, Point Pinole Trail. Here, she rode her balance bike for part of the way. This completed the loop back to Badger Bridge, and then we made our way back to the parking lot.

One of the most exciting parts of the hike was seeing two crows and a red tail hawk engaged in what could only be called aerial warfare. I have seen smaller birds band together to pester red tail hawks so that they go away. Usually, the hawks don't want to deal with the annoyance of small birds, so they just fly away. My mom is an avid birder, and when I told her what I saw, she surmised that the red tail hawk must have been a female defending her nest. The hawk would lower her flight pattern and lure the crows into diving towards her to peck at her, then she would swivel midair and position her talons so that the crows would fly into a trap. Of course, she could not maintain altitude in this position, so she could only hold this offensive position for a short time. She was definitely holding her ground and trying to use the crows' instinct to attack her against their own interests. My mom says that crows can be pretty vicious about invading nests, and that this behavior is unusual enough for a red tail hawk, that it must be connected to the maternal instinct to protect her nest. It was fascinating!

Another fun tidbit about this park is that it is the site of an old dynamite plant. There is an informative historical marker near the Giant Highway Staging Area that mentions that the Giant Powder Co. moved to this once-remote location in the early 1890s. Although the properties changed hands, gunpowder and dynamite were processed here for almost 100 years until the property was sold to Bethlehem Steel and then eventually to the East Bay Regional Park District. That is why this 2,432-acre parkland exists, even though it is surrounded by densely populated Pinole, Richmond, and San Pablo. It's an island of open space parks in the middle of a fairly dense urban area. But you can see the petroleum processing plants across from Giant Marsh and I could hear booming sounds. It made me think about the gun powder explosions that plagued Giant Powder Company.

I can definitely see us returning to this park. In non-COVID times, there is a shuttle that goes around the park. This would make it even easier for families with young children to go deeper into the park. In one of my favorite hiking guides, 101 Great Hikes of the San Francisco Bay Area, author Ann Marie Brown says of Point Pinole that it is "a little park with a big heart." That seems just about the perfect way to describe this park to me, even after what was only an introductory hike today.