Step It Up - Introduction

We have always loved walking, but it wasn’t until 2012 that we discovered Berkeley’s extensive network of pathways and walking turned from a mode of transportation to a form of adventure, becoming an athletic pastime and hobby that we pursued passionately. This was not hiking. On a hike, one loads up the car with picnic supplies, drives to a favorite park – be it regional, state, or national – and embarks on a planned loop which, often, they will devote most or all of the day to. Though hiking is a fabulous pursuit, our Berkeley walking was different entirely, because we left from our houses, sometimes with only a half-hour-long window, and simply explored the nearby area, getting lost in the process and constantly discovering new paths and trails. Though many of Berkeley’s paths are just a short block away from major streets, they offer a respite of wooded hills, grazing deer, and stately redwoods that is otherwise hard to find in the bustling Bay Area.

When we grew tired of getting lost looking for paths, we turned to the Berkeley Path Wanderers Association’s map of the city, on which each path is shown in blue in such a way that they pop out, making incorporating them into walks as easy as walking any street. In the corner of the map is a checklist of the paths, and, goal-oriented people that we are, we each decided to try to walk every one of them, triumphantly checking each of the one hundred and three boxes as we did so.

In 2013, Aviva Gerwein and Jacob Lehmann Duke, co-authors of the new book Step It Up, walked every path in Berkeley in one day.

Over the course of the next four months, we were introduced to over one hundred lanes, staircases, trails, and slopes winding their way through Berkeley’s hills, as well as (less intentionally) a wide variety of driveways down which we wandered in search of the elusive paths. The fact of it was that, even with a map, these paths were not easy to find. Many have no street signs or emanate from people’s driveways, and some are even marked with “No Trespassing” signs, though they are public easements to the city. To avoid getting lost, what we needed was a guide book, and we discovered that there was not one that served this need.

Though excellent books exist on walking tours of the architecture and history of Berkeley, even featuring the paths, no book took an athletic adventurer’s angle. No book focused on the paths and trails of Berkeley as great places to get exercise and ways to escape into nature without ever getting in a car to drive down the drive and park at a park. We needed a guidebook that was directed at the passionate walker, someone who walks not to look at houses or to get to the grocery store, but to discover the mysteries of the hills and connect their house with the East Bay’s incredible 1300-mile-long network of trails. Such a book did not exist, and so we have written it.

Aviva Gerwein, now 17, has biked across the United States and parts of Canada and Mexico five summers in a row, collectively covering 20,000 miles, going over mountain ranges, through deserts, and along rutted dirt roads that, fifty miles from the nearest town, dead end at raging rivers. Aviva has loved storytelling since preschool school, and is currently in the creative writing program at Oakland School of the Arts. Jacob Lehmann Duke joined the board of the Berkeley Path Wanderers Association unofficially at age 13, officially becoming the youngest ever board member at age 14, and now, at 16, serving as their walk coordinator. In addition to walking the paths, you’ll see him out running through the hills and Tilden training for cross country and track.

Together, the authors have walked 50 miles in a day, from Downtown Berkeley to Antioch via the top of Mount Diablo almost entirely on trails and, perhaps more famously, have walked every path in Berkeley in one day – a 35-mile affair with 5,000 feet of elevation gain and over 10,000 stairs – six years in a row, beginning when Jacob was 11 and Aviva 12. In 2014, they led a series of six walks for the Berkeley Path Wanderers which collectively covered all the paths, in 5 to 8 mile increments. They carefully designed the routes for each, trying to make the walks both pleasant and efficient, and these routes, along with thirty-five other favorites, are described in detail in this book. Since then, Jacob and Aviva have led numerous other walks on paths and trails for the Berkeley Path Wanderers, sometimes guiding groups of nearly one hundred, showing the paths and sharing their original walking routes with everyone from dog walkers to ultra-marathoners.

Though there are many stories about the building of the paths, their names, and their histories, all these stories are unwritten and many paths are unsigned, so most people do not even know that these incredible shortcuts through Berkeley’s hills exist, much less the tales of their construction. Other local walking books take a historical or architectural angle, rather than including walks done primarily for adventure, great exercise, and enjoyment of nature. It was this that prompted us to write a guidebook, instructing readers on how to find paths and trails in Berkeley and Beyond (a term that for our purposes encompasses the East Bay Regional Parks, North Oakland, Albany, Kensington, and El Cerrito), and leading the interested walker on forty- one of our favorite walks, ranging in length from one to thirty-five miles. Once you have done a number of these walks, you will be able to easily locate the paths without the book, and string together your own path-based loops.

In the writing of this book, we often felt as if we were using words such as ‘superb’, ‘splendid’, and ‘marvelous’ quite a bit, to the point of overuse, perhaps. But of course, this was not the case: these words are simply accurate descriptions of these superb walks in this splendid city on the marvelous paths and trails of the East Bay. We hope you enjoy the walks in this book and inherit our love of Berkeley’s small streets, secret paths, and surrounding trails.

~Happy Walking!~

Jacob Lehmann Duke and Aviva Gerwein

Addendum: I began working on this book in eighth grade. Aviva joined the project and the book gradually grew as we discovered new trails and led more walks for the Berkeley Path Wanderers. We had hoped to publish it, of course, and we made inroads into doing so in 2019, but as teenagers and first-time authors, we ultimately failed. In the fall, we’ll both be in college, Aviva as a sophomore at NYU and me as a freshman at Williams, and regardless of profitability we would like this book to be used and enjoyed by the Bay Area’s community of walkers. Right now, with social distancing measures in place and all group gatherings prohibited, I see more than ever a demand and a need for self-guided walks, and so I hope this book can meet that need and can – in the form of gorgeous views, little-known trails, and legendarily steep climbs – offer you some respite during these troubling times.

Jacob Lehmann Duke, 2020

To contact the authors, please write to stepitup@berkeleypaths.org