Disquiet

There’s little chance that Saturday didn’t amount to the longest continuous* walk I’ve undertaken, nearly 14 miles across San Francisco, from the southeast (Fort Funston, which had so many dogs walking their humans that you’d think you’d stepped into a chapter of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials) to the northwest (Pier 23, following a trail-ending descent of the twisty Greenwich steps).

This route is called the Double Cross Trail, and it’s a twin to the Crosstown Trail, the two meeting atop Miraloma. By my iPhone’s telling — and these things differ by device generation, even by device, so I’ll note mine is an iPhone 13 Pro — the urban hike amounted to 71 flights and well over 30,000 steps. We started off at 10:41am and were done at 5:50pm, or just over seven hours. The trail is designed not for expediency but for green spaces and variety and vistas. It’s marked in blue in the image shown here: beginning at Fort Funston, then on to Lake Merced, then Stern Grove, then up through West Portal to Miraloma, up and down through Twin Peaks, Tank Hill, and Buena Vista Park, over to Alamo Square, then up Van Ness and over into Chinatown and North Beach, past Washington Square, up to Coit Tower, and down.

The next day I felt fine, though my calf muscles registered the impact. Two days later, I’m back to normal. Gonna try the Crosstown Trail next, likely starting in the southeast corner and continuing northwest, where it ends near where I live in the Richmond District.

I can’t recommend the Double Cross Trail highly enough. It’s fantastic to experience in one stretch of time not just a sense of the range of people and places here, but also how interconnected they are. I have never stood in Washington Square and thought, “Hey, let’s head over to the Embarcadero,” or driven down Sunset Boulevard and realized just how close Fort Funston is, even by foot. Long familiar landmarks, such as the statue of Juan Bautista de Anza at Lake Merced and the Painted Ladies alongside Alamo Square, took on new meaning as I thought of them not just as proximate to other areas, but as points along a greater, city-spanning itinerary.

I expected to take tons of photos and record lots of audio, but I only took a dozen or so of the former and one of the latter, this bit of a wind chime as we we approached West Portal. On the one hand, I can be disappointed when a sound can’t easily be isolated from apparent noise; on the other hand, I found myself reflecting on the combination of all the sounds, and how that correlated with the numerous connections (geographic, cultural, environmental) revealed over the course of the walk.

More on the trails at crosstowntrail.org.

*stopped briefly for lunch in West Portal and tea in Alamo Square