Cover photo shot by LG @jayasimha78 collage of shots on the trail
I will introduce San Francisco Bay area Hiking Trails, through these series of posts. This is 15th post of this series. In this post I will take you to River View and Saddle Trails which forms a loop, which are located in Black Diamond Regional Preserve in Antioch, CA. This preserve is part of East Bay Regional Park District.
Checkout my other posts here: Bay Area Hiking Series
This loop shown below is combination of River View and Saddle Trail. This loop is around 3.5 Miles Long. We did the hike in the morning and in early spring. It is a great time to enjoy reasonably mild weather and wild flower blooms on the trail. Scenery is definitely prettier in the spring with all those wild flowers.
Here is the shot of the parking lot, which is close to the River View Trail head. Of course it has accessible parking spots as well. Black diamond Preserve itself has several parking lots, this is one of them. They also have a overflow lot right next to this, since this park is pretty popular and has around 65 Miles of trails. It is going to be a long time till I explore this preserve completely!
As soon as we started the hike on River view trail, we could see these purple wild flowers on the hill.
From the trial head River view trail is a steep climb, very soon we reached top of the hill.
Here is a shot during the steep climb, you can see overflow parking area with those red cones.
Within half a mile of hike, we were almost on the top of the hill, here is the shot of parking lot from the top.
You can see San Joauin and Sacramento Rivers in a distance from the top.
Some pretty wild flowers with the rolling hills in the background.
This is back side of this hill, which is greener than the other side. It all depends on how much sun it gets, hills have started turning in to brown these days, since we didn’t have much rain recently.
Here is a much better view of the River and Antioch bridge.
There is a huge wind farm on the other side of the river. You can see those several wind mills.
Shot of colorful wild flower bloom on the hill.
This is a popular trail for Mountain Bikers as well.
Another shot of the trail!
Here you can see Mt Diablo in the background, one of the tallest peaks in the Bay Area,
Here are few shots of Saddle Trail
On the back end of trail, it is pretty much down hill to get back to the parking lot.
Shot of few random trees on the hill.
