We found ourselves back in the East Bay, but this time a bit closer to home, to tackle the three peaks found in Tilden Regional Park: Vollmer, Grizzly and Wildcat. Twice the size of Golden Gate Park, Tilden is sandwiched between the cities of Berkeley and Orinda. It’s one of the oldest parks in the East Bay and is truly a gem, with miles of trails for humans and horses, areas for picnicking and camping, a golf course, a garden, a lake (that you can swim in), a steam train and its own farm.
The three peaks aren’t difficult to summit, and are easily accessible with a short drive of each other, making it feasible to hike all of them within a few hours. Tilden is also one of the East Bay parks closest to us so it was a nice change of pace to not have to get up early and rush out in order to have time to finish all our hikes.
To fuel ourselves we started with breakfast at Im Moment Kaffe, a quaint Oakland cafe where we got a bagel with salmon and cream cheese and an Eritrean specialty called habesha ful (similar to fava bean stews found across the Middle East). We were quite full (no pun intended) and I was ready to walk off the calories.
Looking at a map, there are multiple ways to access each of the peaks, and it’s possible to string together a more challenging hike. However, given our ambitious plans to complete all 90 peaks in one year, which meant mostly weekend hiking, we focused on optimizing for time. Since we were in Oakland we decided to tackle the peaks from south to north, starting with Vollmer, followed by Grizzly and ending with Wildcat.
To read more about our hike to each of Tilden Regional Park’s Nifty Ninety peaks, click on a peak below:
- #22 Vollmer Peak, 1,905′
- #23 Grizzly Peak, 1,740′
- #24 Wildcat Peak, 1,211′
Follow our progress bagging the Bay Area’s Nifty Ninety here.