I recently ran a 31-mile trail race around Lake Chabot. It was the longest distance I’d ever run by about 10 miles. I ran past redwood stands, poison oak, fern. Occasionally—alerted by a sound of life off-trail, a bird call above—I looked up or around. In a clearing to the side of the trail: parked green excavators, piles of felled and stacked logs, rutted tracks of heavy machinery, signs of the work of trail-building.
The East Bay Regional Park District manages over 100,000 acres of land. More than a thousand miles of trail. You can follow any path or network of paths for hours and hours, from woodland to grassland to creek habitat, without seeing more than the swath of cut land in front of you, the gently graded road. I memorize routes not by landscape or terrain, but by a sequence of turns. Decades of work, acres of world, condensed into a list of names: Grass Valley to Brandon Trail to Towhee to West Shore.
I have been thinking, these past months as I’ve been training—running loops and loops through Oakland parks—about knowing a place through its quickest paths. A trail is a way to move fast. Rocks and roots, the open mud and slick grass of recent rain, a bright ridgeline with its long view—mist on the lake, Mount Diablo to the east—are obstacles to overcome. The climb hurts. The ridge too hot. This is where I caught my foot beneath a root, nearly flew into a ditch. This is a paradox of trail running, and especially trail racing: I want to move quickly enough to miss the rock, the root, the mountain, for the trail.
There is pleasure in this kind of forward movement: unimpeded, constant progress. I follow the work that has been done. The trail moves, and I move with it.
But there are other trails than these. Near the end of a long training run, 18 miles of rolling hills from Bort Meadow to the Lake Chabot Marina and back, my right hip aching and my right hamstring aching, I ran into a friend. They mentioned that another hiker had seen a mountain lion, crossing near the power lines a few minutes up the trail. By the time I passed the spot, the lion—if it had ever been there—was long gone.
Trail-building is world-building. Cleared of brush, empty of cover, the trail marks a boundary between worlds. When animals see me on a trail, I see them leave. Brush rabbits dive back into long grass. A coyote slips between bent oaks. A bevy of quail erupts to the sky. If I’m quiet, I can hear the sounds of another place—the one just off the trail—as I go by: someone picking their way, carefully, through another realm.
But I move too quickly to know it well. A few years ago, on an early summer backpacking trip in Shasta-Trinity National Forest, the trail my wife and I were following disappeared beneath five feet of snow. Stepping through snow, without trail markers or even blazes to guide our way, we took 90 minutes to cover half a mile. Returning to a trail felt like stepping onto a conveyor belt. We moved with such strange assurance.
A mile through uncleared land is a long way. Thirty-one miles on a trail can pass so quickly. It is hard, when going fast, to notice what is not visible—the world displaced so that we can move with ease. Just the sounds of human voices, the softer noises of hiking, may be enough to cause deer and sheep, wolves and bears all to turn in their tracks, remain hidden until dark.
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A few days after my improbable-but-possible near-encounter with a mountain lion, I ran along one of my favorite loops on an early weekday morning, few cars in the parking lot, mist above the hills. I did not look only at the trail in front of me. I looked up and around, scanning for tawny paws dangling from a mossy branch, that long, black-tipped tail switching beyond a curve. But the path was always clear.
I will likely never see a cougar in this world. To move so freely is to be a powerful beast. Look how everything avoids my path. Look how they run.
