Today, we went looking for Claremont Canyon Regional Preserve. After reading about it, I was intrigued to learn of a regional park behind the Claremont Hotel. We followed the road up the hill and I was so distracted by discovering the environment above the hotel, I completely missed the turnoff to get to the park.

We kept driving up hill on Claremont and made it up to Grizzly Peak before we confirmed we’d messed up. Coming back down the hill, we spotted turnout and the entrance to a firetrail and decided to park and start climbing. Once we were done and found a map, we discovered we were hiking on University of California land, rather than East Bay Regional Parks land, and we ended up on the Panoramic Ridge.

We didn’t have too much time to explore, but we found some sweeping views of Oakland and spotted a number of trails worth exploring. On the way back down the hill, we did actually find the turn-off to Claremont Canyon. At some point, we’ll go back to where we intended to begin and see if we can make our way up to where we ended up.

• Weather: Beautiful day, you’d think it was spring.
• Distance: Unknown
• Time: 30 minutes
• Highlights: Quiet, peaceful, no one around. All you could hear (besides our kids) was the creaking of the eucalyptus in the wind. Reminder of how easy it is to “get away” without even leaving town.