East Bay Sites
Started: 2025-06-17 20:28:25
Submitted: 2025-06-17 22:43:32
Visibility: World-readable
Camping on Angel Island: having the island to ourselves after the ferries leave, and seeing San Francisco's skyline lit up at night
Angel Island's marketing copy says it's the "largest natural island in San Francisco Bay" (emphasis added). When I think about artificial islands in the Bay, the first island I think about is Treasure Island, which was created from fill in the middle of the bay. But Treasure Island is still smaller than Angel Island. This clarification distinguishes Angel Island from Alameda, which used to be a peninsula until a channel was cut to improve water circulation in Oakland's inner harbor, which also had the side effect of cutting Alameda off from the mainland and making it an island.
I've visited Angel Island multiple times (most recently when I visited the immigration station in 2023), including two separate team events six years apart for two different companies, always as a day-trip. But there are a handful of backpacking campsites on the island. Angel Island is a state park, so the campsite reservations go live at 08:00 Pacific time, six months in advance; and then the best ones fill up by 08:01 Pacific time. I set my alarm on the morning of December 7 last year and grabbed a reservation for East Bay campsite #2, which the Internet told me was a good site, "tucked away under some trees on a hillside".
The only way to get to Angel Island is by boat, and the easiest way to do that is catch a ferry from San Francisco (at the Ferry Building) or Tiburon. To get to the Ferry Building we parked in Daly City and took BART to Embarcadero. This meant that our hike to the campsite, carrying our full-sized backpacking packs out of the parking garage, through the fare gates, up the escalator, onto the platform, and into the train. I had the four-person backpacking tent strapped to the bottom of my backpack, and it turned out to be a bit too wide to fit comfortably through the new fare gates that BART is installing to try to combat fare evasion. After sliding awkwardly through the first normal-sized fare gate I looked for the larger fare gates.
We arrived at the Ferry Building with plenty of time before our ferry left at 14:05. (Golden Gate Ferry now has the franchise for passenger service from San Francisco, and they're still running their winter service, which has only three ferries per day on the weekends.) This gave me the chance to check the Solari board for our departure, and to eat lunch on a bench facing the bay in front of the ferry.
We boarded the ferry Marin for the trip across the bay to Angel Island. I tracked our course on the nautical chart I brought, cross-referencing the navigational aids we saw on the chart. The ferry stopped in Tiburon to exchange passengers, then continued across Raccoon Strait to Angel Island, docking in Ayala Cove to let us off on the island.
We checked in with the park ranger at the kiosk on the ferry dock, then headed into the interior of the island. The campsite was a short 1.3-mile walk from the dock, though our total distance walking should include the distance we walked through the BART stations and down Market Street and through the Ferry Building, carrying our full backpacking packs (albeit only with enough food and clothing for a single night, with multiple people to carry common cooking gear, so my pack felt a bit empty compared to longer trips where I have to carry all of my gear myself).
The first part of our hike climbed a set of stairs leading from the dock to the perimeter road; then we crossed the paved road and continued up the other side on the North Ridge Trail, a single-track trail where oak trees towered above the hillside and the trees offered views of the northern part of San Francisco Bay, the Tiburon peninsula, the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge, and the golden hills of the East Bay.
We reached the unpaved fire road circling the island above the perimeter road and followed it to our campsite. On the map the backpacking campsites are labeled as "environmental camping", with a lowercase "e" that is rendered on the signs in front of the campsite to look like a Greek letter theta. "Environmental" is not the word that comes to mind when I see an "e" next to something; my first though is that it's "electric" (probably battery-powered, instead of gasoline-powered).
Our campsite was neither electric nor gasoline-powered (though there was a small and ineffective light in the privy that only seemed to be lit during the day). There were only three campsites in our area, served by a water spigot and equipped with trash cans. (My formative experiences backpacking are in the Colorado wilderness, so this was luxurious by comparison.) The campsite was perched on the grassy hillside on the eastern side of the island, offering views of the East Bay and the New Bay Bridge through the trees. I could hear the marine engine on the occasional ferry or cargo ship transiting the deep water east of the island.
We set up camp and set out on a hike to Mount Livermore, the summit of the island. By this time the last ferry had left the island for the day, and few people were left on the island. We walked clockwise along the fire road, and our view of the bay shifted and revealed more of the East Bay hills and finally the city of San Francisco itself, nestled under a delicate layer of fog that seemed like it was resting on the top of Salesforce Tower. The late afternoon sun was bright and it might have been hot except for the breeze blowing across the island, through the Golden Gate and across the bay towards the delta and into the Central Valley.
We turned inward to ascend the trail climbing towards Mount Livermore. Here our view changed again, revealing Alcatraz and the indistinct low-rise sprawl of the Marina District, and offering a view of the Golden Gate Bridge, nestled between the Marin Headlands and the Presidio with fog rolling in from the Pacific Ocean. (It was late enough in the afternoon that the day that the fog and the bridge were backlit so I couldn't get a properly-exposed shot; and I only had my phone so I didn't have my real zoom lens.) I looked behind me at the right moment to catch this shot, which looks like it could be the cover photo for the band's long-awaited LP Angel Island.
While we hiked to the summit of the island the rest of my family called for breaks in the hike, and I revealed that the way to nerd-snipe me (if one wanted to take a break from the hike) was to gesture vaguely in any direction and say "I wonder what that is" and then my Dad instincts would kick in and I'd have to pontificate at length on whatever I thought it was.
We reached the summit, which seemed somewhat anti-climatic since we had seen all of the views on the approach and there was very little else to see, except that we could see it all at once. The summit was adorned with some unidentified hardware (which looked like it must have been the foundation for a now-removed antenna, either military or for navigation).
We left the summit and returned to our campsite by the North Ridge Trail, making a loop that returned us to the fire road at the point where we joined the fire road on our hike to camp from the ferry dock. The view on our descent to the north was mostly across Raccoon Strait to Tiburon and the wooded hills of Marin County, with some views of the oil tanks on the hills west of Richmond in the East Bay, painted to try to blend in with the hillside. We didn't see a single other person on our entire hike; it felt like we had the entire island to ourselves.
When we returned to camp it was time for supper. I got Calvin to light the single-burner Coleman backpacking stove and we boiled water to rehydrate our backpacking meals, then took notes to try to remember what we liked and what we didn't. (The Backpacker's Pantry lasagna was a surprising win: everything rehydrated, even the noodle (it was a bit of a stretch to call it "lasagna") and everyone liked it.)
Everything was going well until I tried to restart the camp stove for hot chocolate for dessert. The pump wasn't working to pressurize the body of the stove so that the fuel could be raised up through the generator into the burner; I could push the pump lever back and forth but as soon as I tried to cover the hole at the end of the pump to force air through the check valve into the body of the stove I could no longer push the lever. (I had tested the stove in the week before we left and it worked fine. When Calvin lit the stove the pump wasn't working but there was enough residual pressure in the stove that it would still light.) After trying and failing to do anything with the stove I remembered that, when I was a kid, my father still had his old 1970s backpacking stove where the only way to light it was to dump fuel over the stove to heat up the pressure vessel enough to bootstrap the generator so it could maintain its internal pressure. I moved the stove from the picnic table to the fire grate, carefully dumped some spare fuel over the burner of the stove, and set it on fire. The stove burned bright yellow while the liquid fuel burned off, then it began to generate enough pressure that it sustained itself long enough to get warm water for hot chocolate and to clean our dishes.
We retreated to the tent after supper, which was cozy because we were squeezing four people into a four-person tent. (Julian is not yet adult-sized, but his sleeping bag takes up most of the space that an adult would take.) Eventually I got up to use the privy before going to bed, and then I decided that, since I was already up and out of the tent, I might as well walk along the fire road until I could see the lights of the city of San Francisco.
Julian decided that he wanted to join me, so we set out along the fire road, following the same route we took earlier in the afternoon while it was still daylight. The moon was almost full, providing more than enough light when we could see the fully sky. I turned on my head lamp when we were under trees so we didn't trip on the rocks on the fire road. It was a totally different experience hiking at night. The moon cast a pale monochromatic light that only lit what it touched; everything else remained in darkness. The bay, where I could see it, was black. Lights twinkled in the East Bay. The moonlight was too bright to see many stars.
The bulk of Angel Island hid our view of San Francisco until we had walked a half-mile down the fire road. I could see the Bay Bridge, reaching across the bay to the city; then we rounded a corner and saw the city laid out before us at the same time as we were exposed to the wind blowing in through the Golden Gate. Julian didn't want to stay out in the cold any longer than necessary, so I tried to get a picture of the view (which turned out better than I expected, through the magic of computational photography) and we headed back to the campsite for the night.
