The Park El Cerrito Built Itself: A Walker's Guide to the Hillside Natural Area

Walk up from Schmidt Lane on a weekday evening and you'll eventually hit a wooden bench, a hand-laid labyrinth pressed into the grass, and a view that stretches past the Bay to the Golden Gate. Nobody put up a sign explaining any of it. There's no plaque with a donor's name, no trail marker numbering the path you just climbed. If you ask a longtime regular how they found it, the answer is almost always some version of "I just kept walking until I recognized where I was."

That absence of signage is not an oversight. It is the clearest evidence of something most people who walk this hillside every week have never quite put together: the park does not belong to the city the way Cerrito Vista Park or Arlington Park does. It was assembled in pieces, mostly by residents, and it is still run day to day by the same handful of volunteer groups who have been showing up with loppers and grant applications since before most current homeowners moved in.

A park stitched together, not planned

The Hillside Natural Area did not arrive as a single parcel with a groundbreaking ceremony. Much of the original ground came from private gifts, including land from the owners of the old Hutchinson rock quarry, whose scarred hillside is still visible if you look over the fence above the Recycling and Environmental Resource Center on Schmidt Lane. A 1964 park bond once earmarked part of the area for playgrounds and ball fields, a plan that was quietly shelved once the city recognized what it actually had: a stand of coast live oak that had never been logged, still threaded with small creeks.

The most consequential addition came decades later, and it came from residents rather than City Hall. In 2013, a group that included the El Cerrito Trail Trekkers, the El Cerrito High School Mountain Bike Club, and Friends of Five Creeks learned that an 8-acre parcel wedged between the park's north and south sections, the Madera property, was about to be listed for sale. If a private buyer got there first, the two halves of the Hillside Natural Area would likely stay permanently split. The coalition formed the El Cerrito Open Space Campaign, raised more than $100,000 in private donations, and helped secure a $250,000 National Park Service Land and Water Conservation Fund grant plus roughly $120,000 in Measure WW park bond money. The Trust for Public Land held the property as a bridge buyer until the city could complete the purchase, which finally closed in 2014.

That history explains something practical you can feel underfoot today. The city's own pages don't even agree on how big the park is: one lists the Hillside Natural Area at about 107 acres, while its own "Natural El Cerrito" page puts the figure at 165 acres. Neither is wrong exactly. They're measuring a park that grew in disconnected acquisitions over sixty years, gifted, bonded, campaigned for, and eventually stitched into something that reads as one hillside from a bench but was never surveyed as one property.

Who actually keeps the gate open

If the land came from a patchwork of donors and campaigns, the upkeep comes from an even smaller patchwork of volunteers. El Cerrito Trail Trekkers formed in 2010 as an offshoot of the city's Environmental Quality Committee, inspired by Berkeley's Path Wanderers group next door. In the years since, Trekkers have built new trail segments, worked with the National Park Service's Rivers and Trails program to design the waymarking signs you occasionally spot, and put out roughly two dozen guided hikes a year on top of an annual spring Hillside Festival. Trekkers still sell a $6 paper trail map at Pegasus Books on Solano Avenue, the same kind of low-tech, member-run infrastructure that keeps this whole system running.

Friends of Five Creeks has spent more than fifteen years pulling invasive French broom out of the hillside by hand, work that both protects native plants and reduces the kind of dense, dry fuel that burns fast in a fire. The interpretive walk near the labyrinth, fifteen signs installed by the El Cerrito Rotary Club in 2020, has already been vandalized once, with a sign ripped out and thrown to the side of the trail, a small but telling reminder of how much of what you see up here was built by a civic club rather than a public works crew.

None of this is hidden. It's written directly into the city's own planning documents. When El Cerrito drafted its Hillside Natural Area Fire Resilience and Forest Conservation Management Plan, adopted by City Council in June 2025 after nearly two years of public workshops, the community input sessions repeatedly circled back to the same request. Residents wanted the city to formalize what volunteers were already doing for free.

"Invest in education, management, and appreciation of volunteers to manage costs."

That line, pulled from the city's own summary of public comment on the plan, is about as direct an admission as you'll find that the Hillside Natural Area runs on volunteer labor because the alternative is expensive. The finished plan lists Friends of the HNA, Make El Cerrito Fire Safe, and Trail Trekkers as named implementation partners alongside city staff, not as an afterthought but as the actual delivery mechanism for fuel reduction and trail maintenance work across the hillside.

What changed last year, and what you're seeing now

The Fire Resilience Plan matters beyond paperwork because the Hillside Natural Area sits inside a Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zone, surrounded on nearly every side by houses. The plan itself notes that community concern about fire risk had "significantly increased" in the years leading up to its adoption, and it lays out a prioritized, cost-tiered list of clearing and access work rather than a single one-time cleanup.

If you've walked the hillside this year and noticed a stretch of trail that looks freshly cut back, or a fire road that's suddenly wider than you remember, that's very likely this plan in motion rather than routine landscaping. Friends of Five Creeks has also noted that El Cerrito's fire department kept doing controlled burns on the hillside long after most Bay Area jurisdictions abandoned the practice, and has leaned into it more as bigger regional fires have made the case for it. Fall, after the driest months and before the rains return, tends to be when that kind of fuel work is most visible on the ground.

Walking it without the map (or with one)

Because the trails were never laid out as a single system, they still don't read as one. The main entrances sit at:

• The Schmidt Lane trailhead, just below the Recycling and Environmental Resource Center at 7501 Schmidt Lane, marked by the El Cerrito Foundation Memorial Grove sign
• The top of Snowden Avenue, the shortest walk from El Cerrito del Norte BART, and the starting point for the Julian Steps route up Motorcycle Hill
• Navellier Street and the top of Blake Street, both lower entrances on the western side
• King Court and the north end of Potrero, feeding into the park from the south

There are no public restrooms anywhere in the park, the city's own rules call for dogs to stay on a leash and under an owner's control, and the trails themselves are unmarked enough that even AllTrails reviewers regularly mention getting turned around before finding their footing. The unofficial rule locals use, when in doubt, head downhill, still works.

The Julian Steps, reached by walking east from the end of Snowdon Avenue up Motorcycle Hill, have become something like the neighborhood's informal stair workout, a steep, largely shadeless climb that rewards you with a genuine view rather than a treadmill incline number. Partway up, a right turn onto the Madera Julian Trail drops you into the park's southern section, the very ground that almost stayed permanently cut off from the rest of the hillside if that 2013 campaign hadn't come together in time.

Trail Trekkers hold their Hillside Festival each spring, typically in May, with guided walks covering everything from hillside geology to edible and medicinal native plants. Organizers called the spring 2026 edition their most successful yet. It's worth putting on next year's calendar less as a one-off event and more as a chance to meet the people who are quietly responsible for the bench you sat on last week.

The takeaway for anyone who walks this hill

The next time you're up there at golden hour, it's worth sitting with the fact that almost nothing you're looking at, the labyrinth, the interpretive signs, the trail itself, was handed down from a city planning department. It was built, funded, and is still maintained by a rotating cast of neighbors who decided a piece of open space was worth showing up for, year after year, often for free. That's a different kind of civic ownership than most people think about when they picture a public park, and it's the reason this hillside feels less like a municipal amenity and more like something the whole neighborhood quietly co-owns.

If you're the kind of person who wants to understand a place at that level of detail, whether it's a trailhead, a block, or a whole submarket, that's exactly the lens I bring to every conversation about buying or selling in El Cerrito. If you're weighing a move and want a local's honest read on any pocket of this city, Suzie Koide offers a complimentary home valuation and plan built around exactly this kind of neighborhood knowledge.