Attractions and Places To See in Crockett Hills Regional Park - Top 4

The Sugar City Trail features some small, jumpable bumps, table tops, and curvy banked turns. This attracts both intermediate riders and those seeking more excitement. While some sections are exposed, the bumps can be safely rolled over or taken with more speed to get some air. However, cows can damage the trail during wet weather, so be cautious. The trail ends on a flat section at the bottom of Big Valley Trail, allowing riders to climb back up and take multiple runs.

The Tree Frog Trail is an exhilarating flow trail designed by the same team that created the Tamarancho Flow Trail. It has quite a few turns and bumps that make for a rollercoaster ride. While it can be ridden in either direction, it's more enjoyable and safer when ridden downhill. The trail then descends through rolling hills and forest, offering shade as well.

Usually a great trail with lots of flow. But the cows have destroyed the trail recently. Lots of deep hoof prints lead currently to a less fun ride. Hope it is better when you get there.

Tree Frog got a great climb and the descent back down is twisty and fun. Definitely worth a try!

This trail is essentially the singletrack alternate to Sky Trail (a fire road) for getting to the trails in the southeastern half of the park. It meanders along, following the edge of the flattish area atop this ridge. Your traversal in the first half of the ride will be in the "climbing" direction of this trail, but it's not much of a climb and the trail alternates between long, flat sections and brief, moderate climbs (with the grade never exceeding 10%). The trail has virtually zero tree cover and the views to the west, south, and east along the way are top notch, and they're even better during your return over it. Along with Two Peaks Trail, Soaring Eagle is actually one of the singletrack trails in the park that predates the flow trails and it's been around for years. To be honest, if these older trails were still the only available singletrack here, a 13-mile ride here that included these to result in a singletrack percentage for the ride of something like 30% would have qualified as "not too shabby for an East Bay park" anyway.

Sugar City Trail connects to Northern Harrier and is a narrow singletrack that descends a bare hillside by very economical use of elevation loss via very wide switchbacks, and sometimes even incurring a little elevation gain.

Your 0.3-mile fire-road climb on Tree Frog Loop will involve about 250 feet of elevation gain, implying a painful overall average grade of over 16%, and there are several spots on the climb where the grade temporarily exceeds 20%. In the end, though, this is still a short climb that can just as easily be walked. At the top, the singletrack portion of Tree Frog Loop branching off to the left signifies your arrival at the second flow trail on the ride (which I've also seen named separately as "Peregrin Trail"). You actually need to pedal for nearly the first quarter mile of this stretch, but then the fun descent begins and doesn't end for 2.5 miles as you connect to Rumsen Trail along the way and continue on that to its end. There are a couple more stretches along the way where you need to pedal, but no real climbs. This descent is very similar to Sugar City Trail in terms of speed and character, but it's longer, goes through significant tree cover in a number of places, and features better banked hairpin turns, as far as I'm concerned. There was one thing about this descent that bothered me, though: the trail was off camber at a number of places and sloped downhill on many flat sections. I fear that this doesn't bode well for its sustainability, especially in those places where it takes a quick dip followed by a sharp rise, where the speed gained during the dipping part makes it harder for the rider to follow the curve on the off-camber rising part, tending to force one off the downhill edge of the trail and resulting in a trail that will slide downward in the long run. A couple of turns were already showing signs of this during my ride, only a few months after the construction of the trail.

Soaring Eagle Trail ends by bringing you very conveniently to the top of the first flow trail on this ride, which is Sugar City Trail (also referred to as "Northern Harrier"). This is a narrow singletrack that descends a bare hillside by very economical use of elevation loss via very wide switchbacks, and sometimes even incurring a little elevation gain. It features numerous berms along its 1.5-mile length, some flat-topped and some rounded, some spread apart widely and some arriving in quick succession. One thing I noticed on Sugar City Trail is that its hairpin turns could use banks that are a bit higher, and I'm not even a fast rider. This is something that may have already been remedied by the time you read this. By the way, Sugar City Trail seems to have been named as a link to local history, given the fact that the town of Crockett owes its existence to a sugar refinery.