Lobos Creek Valley Trail at the Presidio

This is my sweet spot.
It’s beautiful, especially in the afternoon hours when the sunlight echos through the trees, the dust in the air casts a sepia glow on the dunes around you.
The Presidio is vast and tends to draw you towards Baker Beach, but if you allow yourself some extra time to explore… stumble upon the little San Francisco secrets we are lucky enough to indulge in.

This is a beautiful, intimate inner-​coastal trail tucked away in the Presidio just behind Baker Beach which many volunteers spent countless hours restoring to near-​pristine dune habitat from what used to be a scrap heap for the military. A scrap heap! Old tires, refrigerators, demolished building materials… all kinds of junk sitting there just a little over 10 years ago. Now it is home to dozens of rare and endangered species of native coastal plants and a few neat insects and birds too. I’m not sure what rae b.‘s idea of «nature» is, but you can’t get much closer to it in SF than here amongst the wildflower scattered dunes (which bloom profusely in the spring).
Looking at it now you would never guess its former incarnation. Go to the end of the trail and look up towards the fancy houses on the cliff and you can see Ansel Adams’ childhood home.
And no the creek water itself is not accessible (though it is in plain sight under the baby oaks, see the green watercress on top?), because guess what, this is what the people who live and work in the Presidio drink and it doubles as the city’s very scant backup water supply should we ever have an earthquake and get cut off from our regular supply in the Sierras. So no thank you but I don’t want people’s dogs trampling through it.
P. S. don’t expect a fat-​burner workout either. This trail is less than 1 mile and mostly flat. And wheelchair accesible, which I find super cool.

I would have put this in active life if it hadn’t sucked. But it sucked.
You walk this boardwalk in the middle of a dune and try to look over a giant fence to see the creek. Because supposedly there is a creek down in a valley somewhere, but theres a giant fence between you and nature.
And then theres this sign.
«US GOVERNMENT WATER SUPPLY; KEEP OUT»
Whlle I do find the Presido’s obsession with Ohlone culture particularly ironic on a good day, this was just the icing on the cake.