San Pedro Valley Park is nestled deep in Pacifica with numerous trails and countless examples of natural beauty and is a great place to go when you just want to enjoy the splendor of nature.
San Pedro Valley Park is home to the San Pedro Creek that winds its way through the Linda Mar area of Pacifica. It’s a creek that forks once before the park and again numerous times within the park, with the source of one of these forks being a beautiful waterfall you can see from the Brook’s Creek Trail. If you keep following Brook’s Creek Trail it will lead you up the north side of Montara Mountain.
The waterfall is one of the big attractions in the park and is especially beautiful this time of year with its 175 foot drop. When you’re hiking up the hill and you see a bench, you should have good visibility of the waterfall. This bench is a great place to sit and just watch and listen to the waterfall as the valley it feeds into provides quite a nice echo.
As someone who doesn’t get a whole lot of exercise, getting up to the point to view the waterfall wasn’t too much of a challenge, and I would recommend seeing it to just about anyone as a result. If you’re feeling extra adventurous, the trail goes much further and you can even get all the way to Montara if you’re feeling up to it.
The park also has one trail that’s manageable on a bicycle or in a wheelchair, which is nice as there are several nursing homes in the area nearby. This trail takes you through a valley where many animals are regularly seen. During the day, the most common animals you’ll see are deer, quail, rabbits, and bobcats. As dusk comes, the rabbits become more abundant, mountain lions will occasionally be seen hunting, and owls become almost as abundant as the rabbits. Other animals can be seen in the park, which aren’t nearly as common but are interesting to see: foxes, weasels, and the rarest yet, which I’ve only heard of one local seeing, was a ring-tailed cat.
The park is about a 20 to 30 minute drive from Skyline College, and overall the park is filled with delightful sights, sounds, and smells and is worth the trip when you need to relax and recharge.
