Length of hike: About 8 miles
Difficulty: Moderate
Best time: For the wildflowers, April and May
To get there: From Highway 29 in Napa, exit east on Imola Avenue. Follow Imola, past the big shopping center at Soscol Avenue, to the park entrance, a bit out of town on the right just as the road makes a sweeping turn to the left. Entrance fee is $5.00 per car. Although the park is well signed, it's a good idea to pick up the free map at the entrance kiosk since several important points are not posted on the trail.
The trail: Skyline Wilderness Park, part of the Bay Area Ridge Trail, contains twelve trails and fifteen miles of hiking. Its 850 acres are the surplus wildlands belonging to Napa State Hospital, originally Napa Asylum for the Insane. The land is leased by the county of Napa from the state and then subleased to a citizens association, which, together with other community groups, operates the park with minimal government funding. This is truly a people's park.
I like to do an eight-mile loop of Lake Marie Road and Skyline Trail at the height of springtime. Since I visit this park only once a year, I'm always challenged to find the beginning of the route, and signs in the parking lot that warn of rattlesnakes, wild pigs, poison oak, and ticks are guaranteed to distract me. The obvious path out of the southwest corner of the lot begins by winding up past the Martha Walker Native Habitat Garden and then peters out at a picnic area. I have learned to angle to the right across the paved road in order to find the actual beginning of the trail through an old-growth oak woodland with a thick understory of blackberry vines. At the sign for Camp Coombs, part of Napa State Hospital, I veer right and continue on the dirt path as it passes between two ponds with pretentions, Lake Camille and Lake Louise. I follow the chain link fence and at the fork continue straight on broad Lake Marie Road. I thought I had been well informed about the dangers here, but the next thing I see is a warning about mountain lions. However, I have encountered only poison oak at Skyline.
At first, I see only vetch, mustard, and radish, those familiar roadside denizens. An old, neglected orchard—peach, fig, olive, and walnut—slumbers on the left and, to the right, the hillside meadow ascends to dense oak forest. Then I spot the white and pink linanthus, goldfields, blue dicks, and popcorn flowers growing among the beige grasses. If you are a fan of grasses, you will be thrilled at Skyline, where many native and alien species thrive. I can identify a few of them, such as rattlesnake grass and the proverbial wild oats, which actually look quite innocent and well behaved. Coast live oaks and Kellogg oaks shade the verge, along with bay, willow, buckeye, and madrone, all typical species of the California foothills. Looking back over my left shoulder, I see the town of Napa nestled under a tapestry of trees. Flat-topped Mount St. Helena rides in haze on the horizon.
Rocky, rutted Lake Marie Road climbs steadily into the woodland, past a water trough and bench and a dark cave hung with ferns. The trail alternates between dim forest and bright open meadow. Where it levels off, the wine-red, contorted trunks of manzanitas appear in the landscape. Large black boulders covered with lichens litter the hillside. On the left reigns the Fig Tree, at one hundred years old a well-known landmark, its huge canopy of branches reaching to the ground. At the nearby picnic area, a sign includes directions to the replica of an old-fashioned outhouse.
As the trail begins its rollercoaster ups and downs toward the lake, signs for other trails capture my attention, and there are many to choose from, but I keep to Lake Marie Road, the middle of the road—the poison oak here grows ten to fifteen feet tall with palm-sized leaves that seem to be reaching for human skin to fondle. Marie Creek sings away at the bottom of the ravine. The forest gets shadier and the trail passes the ruins of an old stone building and what looks like buttresses carved out of the hillside. Local historians have no definitive answers as to who built them and why.
All of a sudden I arrive at Lake Marie, and from the bench at the overlook I spot cormorants and coots on the placid waters. The bass fishing here is said to be pretty good. It usually takes me about an hour and twenty minutes to get to this point, about two and a half miles from the parking lot.
I cross the earthen dam and follow narrow Chaparral Trail as it clings to the slope above the lake. This area is open to the sun and full of chamise, artemisia, and sticky monkey flower, all lovers of the hot and the dry. The trail becomes treacherous with loose rocks as it descends to the lake and I'm glad I brought my hiking stick. In a few minutes, I enter the woodland that leads to Marie Creek. At the fork, a right turn puts me on Skyline Trail, even though it's signed only for Chaparral Trail. This climbs again into the woods where the welcome shade is filled with the small white flowers of nemophila and woodland star as well as tiny pink erodiums. It's lovely and cool, home to ferns and bird song. Soon I come to a red brick chimney and the tumbled stone remains of a house.
At the next fork I take the uphill trail marked Skyline and come out of the forest on to a sunny hillside. East Napa drowses below to the right. The grassy rise on the left bears traces of a faint path through lupines and poppies to a bench that looks out over the Napa River and Highway 29. Highway 37 passes from right to left toward Vallejo through the Napa Marshes State Wildlife Area. San Francisco Bay glints in the distance and, on a clear day, Mount Tamalpais shimmers in far-off Marin County.
I continue along Skyline Trail. At several junctures I'm given the choice of turning off on to Buckeye Trail and this lower route is also worth taking. It comes out at the same place Skyline Trail ends.
The quiet of the woods is broken when I hear gobble, gobble, gobble and turn to see two large male wild turkeys strutting behind a female who seems uninterested in this attention. The low stone walls along this part of the trail were probably built in the nineteenth century to mark property boundaries. An old basalt quarry soon comes into view. I keep spotting new wildflowers to the very end of the hike—blue iris and yellow, red and blue larkspur, owl's clover, and my favorite, blue-eyed grass, not a grass at all but of the iris family, its six purpley petals framing bright yellow stamen. Such a wealth of species at this park.
Skyline Trail drops steeply to its terminus. I turn right and, at the chain link fence, go left to return to the parking lot. The views, the flowers, the hint of a mysterious history have contributed to a fine day on the trail.
