Best Trails near Oakland, California

Beautiful public space... lovely to see people out and about ... the walk offers a panoramic view of Oakland's cityscape ...

Very easy and family friendly hike (more a walk than a hike though). Not to much shade so I do not recommend doing it in the middle of a hot sunny day! :) however always great to go all around the lake :)

This is our second attempt to find the Cinderella Trail. Starting out at the Sunset Trail on Skyline, we made a right to Castle Park trail instead of left toward Cinderella because we wanted to loop back toward it instead. The Castle Park Trail is a steep rocky and slippery decline, so be careful. When we got to the fork at Sunset Loop, we couldn't find Cinderella and the parallel trail to it was Sinawik trail. After .2 miles, our map was showing us away from Cinderella so we crossed the river/creek down and up to what we discovered was Palos Verdes trail. It was about a 500 ft descent sling s very narrow slippery trail -- you're mostly walking on tree roots across the path. Well, that took us to a dead end road so we climbed back up 500 ft to Sunset Trail, which is the connecting trail for all the others in this regional park. We finally found our way to Cinderella Trail but little did we know that it is a steady and continuous 500ft ascent to Bayview Trail and out to where we started on Skyline--very challenging for 62 year old hiking newbies.
Third time's a charm, so next time, we will surely go left at the fork and hike Cinderella going down to the rest of them trails waiting for us.

I love this mini trail, scenic, safe, and beautiful. I like how it is exactly 1 mile around, because I can decide during the hike how long I want to go for (looping few or many times) versus a longer loop/out and back where you are stuck doing the entire length. Halfway around you can take the hillside (incline) or the lake perimeter (flat). There is cell service here so I often find myself having looped 7 or so times on the flat route while looking at my phone, easy way to get the steps in!

We went up through the Sunset Trail and at the end of the trail, it recorded 2 miles. We were trying to find the loop back from Sunset Trail but it was a dead end after the goat farm. So we went back down Sunset and took the Sunset Loop Trail which we should have done to begin with. We took the Sequoia Bayview Trail which was supposed to take us to Cinderella Trail and down back to Sunset. But we couldn't find Cinderella Trail so we took the Fern Ravine Trail that connected us back to Sunset. All in all, a total of 5.6mi-- 2 miles up and 3.6 mo looping down with up to about 1200ft elevation. We will do this again and start with the loop and find Cinderella Trail for the complete loop as the map shows.