Mount Tamalpais is the hill every San Francisco rider eventually points a front wheel at. It stands just across the Golden Gate in Marin County, with the east peak at roughly 780 metres, which sounds modest until you remember that it rises almost straight out of the bay, so the whole thing reads as a proper mountain. The Miwok people saw a sleeping woman in its outline, and from certain angles in the city she still lies there, flat on her back against the sky. Kentfield, Mill Valley and Larkspur lie at its foot, and any of them will sell you petrol and coffee before you climb.
The road up is the Panoramic Highway and then Ridgecrest Boulevard, a narrow, twisty strip that clings to the flank with wide sightlines on one side and redwood shade on the other. The bends are tight but steady, the surface is variable, with patches and the odd frost heave, and traffic is a mix of cyclists, tourists in rental cars and locals who know every apex. Go early on a weekday if you can, because weekend mornings fill with lycra and Sunday drivers. The famous moving feature is the fog. A bank of it often pours through the Golden Gate in summer and sits below you in the valleys, and riding above it with the sun on your visor and the city's towers poking through the white is one of the best things Marin can offer.
The mountain has a quiet place in outdoor history. Mountain biking in its modern form was shaped on these fire roads in the 1970s, when local kids used old single-speed bikes to bomb down trails and timed their runs. Below the summit, Muir Woods holds a grove of old coast redwoods that survived because the valley was too steep to log profitably, and they are well worth a detour if you can bear the crowds. On the summit ridge, an old fire lookout and a trail around the top let you stretch before the view, which on a clear day reaches the Farallon Islands and the Sierra.
Dress for a ten-degree swing in temperature between the valley floor and the ridge, and watch for deer in the dusk.