As of right now, these are the most popular Two-Heel Drive posts since I started counting in the summer of 2007. Since two-thirds of my visitors are Googlers, the results offer hints on how search engines match surfers with links.
1. Best of the Best in Bay Area Trails: This of includes the wonderful Berry Creek Falls Loop at Big Basin and the Steep Ravine Trail at Mount Tam, but the main reason it’s number 1 is use of the word “best”: Nobody’s searching for half-assed, mediocre trails: they want the best ones.
2. Best places to take your dog hiking. This combines the craving for greatness with a key question dogging (sorry) a significant minority of hikers: where can I legally take the pooch along?
3. Hiking clubs of note in the Bay Area. Once you know where to go, you want to know whom you can go with, especially if you’ve got no dog. If you’ve got no social skills, like me, you go solo.
4. Big Basin Redwoods State Park. My most-read Mercury News park profile. As local state parks go, there’s Big Basin and everything else — it’s the only one with a significant stand of old-growth redwoods and gorgeous year-round waterfalls.
5. Mount Diablo State Park. The most dominant hill in the Bay Area with some of the best hiking, especially in winter and spring. It’s not bowl-you-over beautiful like Big Basin, but has lots of cool nooks and crannies.
6. Alum Rock Park. A bit of a surprise because because there’s really one decent four-mile loop here, but it’s the only hike right at the edge of a city of just under 1 million.
7. Mount Madonna County Park. This would be a state park in many areas of the country. Its campgrounds are about the most popular in the South Bay, and its mix of oak woodlands and second-growth redwoods is quite nice.
8. Sunol Regional Wilderness. Sunol is tucked into an out-of-the-way corner of the Diablo Range, which makes it a bit hard to reach, but the hiking — and the scenery — are excellent.
9. “Hiker roughed up in Mountain Lion Attack”. Google News juiced the page views for this one. I’m glad it got in the Top 10 because authorities later concluded it was most likely a hoax.
10. Purisima Creek Redwoods Open Space Preserve. Purisima is much like Sunol: adored by hiking purists, unknown by everybody else, but its Top 10 status shows more people are catching on.
The only glaring omission from the Top 10 is a post recommending the best gear to take on local trails. My “10 essentials for happy hiking” barely broke the Top 25, which suggests I need a better title (hardly anybody Googles “happy hiking,” I guess.)
Hey, hey! Go easy on the Mt. Madonna promotion – heh. We got quite a surprise the first time we camped there and it rained (nowhere else – just there). It seems that when the fog rolls-in from the coast at night, it sets in amongst the treetops of the Tan Oaks campground, up high on the mountain, and creates quite a downpour. It really is a great place to hike, particularly in the summer since there is plenty of shade to help with the heat.
Roy: my sympathies: we went there for Fourth of July weekend a few years ago when it was totally sweltering in the Valley. We practically froze our fannies off up there: the campgrounds sit almost right at the marine layer level, which keeps a permanent chill there (nice for campfires, but makes for chilly camping).