If I were to rate Sierra Vista Open Space Preserve based on my first visit, I would award it just two stars out of a possible five. But that was four years ago and things have changed.
Penitencia Creek cuts a deep gash into the Diablo Range where it bounds the northeast corner of San Jose. Historic Alum Rock Park fills the floor of that valley, but Sierra Vista OSP rides the high hilltops that curl around it. When I first hiked the preserve, only a small portion of it was open to the public, and the only access was through Alum Rock Park. While the Santa Clara Valley Open Space Authority charged no day use fee, Alum Rock Park did. In effect, I was paying Peter to visit Paul.
The parking lot in Alum Rock Park left me 1,000 steep trail feet below my hiking destination at the top of the Boccardo Loop Trail. On that day, I huffed and puffed far too much for just average spectator value. A two-star rating is generous.
Things are very different now. On a recent Saturday, I turned into the new visitor parking area at the top of Sierra Road and looked over the edge of the slope down onto the hilltop I had worked so hard to ascend years before. Today, that hill, which was the only portion of the preserve open to the public at the time, comprises but a small part of the preserve at its west end. Beyond, most of the hill country you see high above the Penitencia Creek drainage is the new and improved Sierra Vista.
The improvement I liked best is that my car—not my legs—did the work that brought me to this perch 2,000 feet above the valley. And what’s more, while the preserve’s 1,678 acres and ten miles of trails across rugged country, most of the trails angle across these steep slopes rather than directly attack them.
On this visit, my wife Renée and I had come for a stroll, not a death march. We crossed Sierra Road and stepped onto the Aquila Loop Trail, a short 1.2-mile loop on the very north end of the preserve. The trail rolled over and through an open grassland of round hilltops dotted sparingly with an occasional valley oak. The world fell away in every direction. The landscape was immense. Only the receding cloud cover limited our view toward the bay, but inland the sky had cleared, and we looked across miles and miles of the Diablo Range. What a perch this would be on a crystalline day or at sunset.
The Aquila Loop Trail is well named, as it foretold a special event for Renée and me. Aquila is Latin for eagle. Sure enough, as we paused to look across the hills, a golden eagle drifted across the slope in front of us until it caught a column of rising air and climbed nearly out of sight. We could barely see the raptor as he folded his wings, tipped forward, and in a stooping dive, blazed across the sky to the next valley and new column of rising air.
Sierra Vista Open Space Preserve has earned two additional stars. The landscape and the views from this perch above the bay are wonderful. Our stroll along the Aquila Loop Trail whetted my appetite for a longer route on the Sierra Vista and Calaveras Fault Trails. I look forward to returning.
