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How many miles of trails in Sonoma County?
Published February 4th, 2008 in Country Property, Sonoma Lifestyle, Buyers, Horses and Wine Country. by Pam Buda, Coldwell Banker Tags: No Tags.Many people live in Sonoma county or want to buy real estate here in order to take advantage of the great access to hiking, horsebackriding and mountain biking trails. Road bicycling is another draw–just ask local bike racer Levi Leipheimer where he trains during the off-season when not competing in the tour de France.
I was curious just how many miles of trails there are–especially for horsebackriding. My personal favorite. The Sonoma County Horse Council compiled a list and I did some totalling. This is a partial picture of a page at their site.
Sonoma County Regional Parks total 2659 acres of parks with 30 miles of trails.
California State Parks that allow horsebackriding total 16460 acres of parks with 111 miles of trails, including 11 miles of trails along the Sonoma Coast at Bodega Bay–great on a hot summer day! Annadel State Park with over 5200 acres and 35 miles of trails in the heart of Santa Rosa is borded by many horse properties with direct access to the park, and deserves its own post. I think I need to take a ride out there and tell you more about it.
The Army Corp of Engineers runs Warm Springs Dam at Lake Sonoma above Healdsburg which is a spectacularly beautiful location with stunning views and 35 miles of trails on 17,000 acres.
Many of these parks allow camping and some allow horse-camping. Much of Sonoma County is within an hour or so trailer ride to Point Reyes National Seashore and its campgrounds as well.
3 Responses to “How many miles of trails in Sonoma County?”
- 1 Pingback on Jun 20th, 2008 at 2:21 pm
For anyone hitting this blog because they are considering buying a house with horse property, you are onto the best kept secret of location and person power. Well, I guess its not really a secret given Google these days…but having to write most of time for work I usually avoid spending any additional time at the computer crafting responses/testimonials/ etc…I’d rather be out riding a cross country course! However, Pam was such an extraordinary real estate agent that I can’t resist singing her praises so more stellar horse people end up in Sonoma County. Perhaps you are like us…two horses, two SF based jobs, thinking that you had to wait until retirement to get into a nice horse property. In the meantime you are writing those hefty boarding checks each month for small stalls, limited turnout, extra charges for trailer parking, blanketing, less and less places to ride outside of an arena, etc. Not true!
We thought we couldn’t afford anything within commuting distance to SF but Pam changed that perception and made it a reality. With tight work schedules, competing demands on free time and a budget, we were probably not a real estate agent’s dream couple, and we were very, very picky about what kind of place we envisioned as ideal for the horses and ourselves. Pam was exceptional. She sent frequent email postings of properties, worked completely around our work/horse showing schedule, lined us up with talented bankers, insightful consultants, crunched numbers for us, fed us at fabulous restaurants to keep the energy levels up and never complained that she wasn’t out riding when we made her drive us around every square inch of two counties on the weekend. She is extremely bright (that helps with complicated country property purchases where the contracts read like IRS manuals), perceptive (figured out what we liked and didn’t like faster than we did), knowledgeable (had or found the answers to every horse/property question that we came up with) and was lotsa fun in the process (and I think house buying is a pain to be honest). Did I mention she is also persistent? We would never have ended up in our fantastic 5 acre place with such happy horses if we hadn’t finally followed her advice that we see this one property “that I think has everything you want”. Well we saw it, bought it, and as they say in the fairy tales of old “lived happily every after”.
Aw shucks CK, thank you for the nice thoughts. For the sake of accuracy though, you guys deserve credit not only for being so great to work with and fun to spend time with, but you footed a bill for a few of those lunches as well! Cheers, Pam