This is the East Bay, the side of the bay that gets less attention than San Francisco and has more hills to ride. The point is in the hills above Berkeley, near Kensington and Orinda, where narrow streets climb steeply past eucalyptus trees and houses perch on slopes with views of the bay and the Golden Gate. A line of ridges, the Berkeley Hills, runs along the whole east side of the bay, and the Hayward Fault lies at their foot, which is something people here think about more than they mention.
The road along the crest is Grizzly Peak Boulevard, which curves through Tilden Regional Park and gives a series of views over the bay, with the city skyline and Mount Tamalpais on the far side. Tilden has a small steam train for children, a botanic garden of California native plants, and tracks through eucalyptus and bay woods. The road is narrow with sharp bends, and cyclists and hikers share it.
Further south, Skyline Boulevard continues along the ridge through Oakland, through Redwood Regional Park, where a grove of coast redwoods stands on slopes that were logged heavily in the nineteenth century. The park's second-growth trees have grown tall, and the road beneath them is dark, cool and quiet. In 1991 a firestorm swept across the Oakland and Berkeley hills, destroying about three thousand homes, and the rebuilt neighbourhoods carry that memory.
Berkeley, down below, is worth a stop. The university campus, with its bell tower, the cafés of the Gourmet Ghetto and the lively Telegraph Avenue make for a vivid, slightly chaotic afternoon, and the town was where the California food movement was born, around a restaurant opened in 1971. Fuel and food are easy in the flat part of the city and in Orinda.
The best time to ride is a weekday morning, when the fog has lifted from the hills and traffic is light. In summer the fog often rolls through the gaps in the ridge in the afternoons, dropping the temperature sharply, so a layer is useful. Autumn can bring hot, dry winds and fire warnings, and winter rain makes the hillside roads slippery, with mud and leaves on the surface.