Lands End Trail Where the City Meets the Pacific

A Coastal Walk at the Edge of the Continent

Lands End is the northwest corner of San Francisco, where the city simply stops and the Pacific begins, and the trail that runs along its cliffs is the most dramatic walk you can take without leaving a major American city. I have walked it in every season and every weather, and my favorite is a foggy morning in late summer, when the cypress trees along the path are dripping and the foghorn on Mile Rock is sounding its two-tone warning - a low, mournful note followed by a higher one, like a conversation between a tuba and an oboe about the futility of navigation.

The main trail runs 1.5 miles from the Merrie Way parking lot near the ruins of the Sutro Baths to Eagles Point, just above the Legion of Honor museum. It is paved and mostly level, accessible to strollers and wheelchairs for much of its length, and it is also, improbably, one of the wildest places in San Francisco. The cliffs drop away to your right, straight down to rocky coves where the surf explodes against sea stacks and the remnants of shipwrecks are visible at low tide - rusted ribs of iron poking through the sand like the fingers of drowned ships.

I started at the Sutro Baths ruins, the concrete skeleton of what was once the world's largest indoor swimming complex. Adolph Sutro built it in 1896 - six saltwater pools, a freshwater pool, slides, trapezes, seating for ten thousand spectators - and it burned in 1966, leaving behind a foundation that the sea has been slowly reclaiming ever since. At low tide, you can climb down to the ruins and stand in the old pools, now filled with seawater and algae, and imagine the Victorian bathers in their wool swimsuits, plunging into water pumped directly from the ocean.

The trail heads south through a forest of Monterey cypress, planted a century ago and now twisted into shapes that look like the trees are trying to escape the wind and failing magnificently. The canopy here is dense, and on foggy days the trail feels like a tunnel - dark, dripping, atmospheric. Then the trees break open and you are on the cliff edge, and the view hits you: the Golden Gate Bridge to the east, its towers emerging from the fog like the masts of an enormous ship, the Marin Headlands beyond, and the Pacific stretching west to the horizon, endless and gray and profoundly indifferent.

At Mile Rock Beach, a short side trail descends steeply to a rocky cove that is the unofficial heart of Lands End. The labyrinth - a pattern of stones laid by a local artist on a flat rock outcrop - is here, facing the sea, and on most mornings someone is walking it slowly, a meditation practice set against one of the most dramatic backdrops in California.

Bring layers. The wind off the Pacific is cold even in August, and the fog adds a damp chill that goes through cotton like it is not there. The trail is open daily, no fee, and the best parking is at the Merrie Way lot. Come at low tide for the Sutro Baths. Come in fog for the atmosphere. Come anytime for the proof that San Francisco earned its reputation the old-fashioned way - by being genuinely, outrageously beautiful.