Great Bike Rides/Hikes

Some trails are simply so gorgeous, such a continual source of sensory overload, that you almost hanker for a boring, scruffy section, if only to ground you in reality and remind you to watch your step.

To: Schoenberg, Deb, landscape architect, Feather River Ranger District, Plumas National Forest

Know what's been missing in Great Treks, our monthly guide for trail runners and hikers looking to forge new paths in Northern California?

This town, a study in contrasts, weaves the old and new, the wealthy and weathered, so seamlessly that you hardly notice.

Robin Hood once cavorted here – OK, so it was Errol Flynn in the 1938 movie "The Adventures of Robin Hood." In any event, he was smart enough to dress in leg-warming tights.

A meaningful adventure on a bicycle includes things we know, a few things we might anticipate and, with any luck, one or two pleasant surprises.

Tell someone you're going for a hike in Oakland, and you're liable to receive all sorts of snarky comments.

Your first sighting of Mount Diablo comes just outside of Dixon while driving west on Interstate 80. Far from awe-inspiring, it mostly looks like a brown smudge, something a blast of windshield-wiper fluid could erase.

Foresthill Divide Loop is a 10-mile trail with both easy and longer routes.

The winding, undulating, motion sickness-inducing drive from Mill Valley up, up, relentlessly up Mount Tamalpais on the Panoramic Highway offers nothing less than a tutorial on that curious meteorological phenomenon – the Bay Area microclimate.

There's one sure way to keep high gas prices from ruining your summer road trip.

There are days, hot and oppressive, when you just want to chuck it all – job, family, all those terribly important obligations – and drag your sorry life-of-quiet-desperation self to the beach.