Ask three different Claremont Hills neighbors how they get up into Claremont Canyon and you may get three different trailheads, three different names for the same dirt path, and at least one story about eucalyptus stairs somebody built by hand. That's not confusion. That's how this canyon actually works, and it's the thing that separates someone who's hiked here twice from someone who lives off Alvarado or Hiller Drive and treats the ridge like a backyard.
The canyon has three entrances the East Bay Regional Park District will point you toward. It also has a fourth, and that fourth one isn't on the Park District's map, isn't on UC Berkeley's map, and shows up on Google Maps under a name the people who built it don't even use.
The Three Ways In That Show Up on the Official Map
Start with what's documented. The Park District's own page for Claremont Canyon Regional Preserve describes the main entrance as a .75-mile climb from Stonewall Road to the ridgetop, steep enough that the reward is the point: a full panoramic sweep of Oakland, Berkeley, the Bay, and the Golden Gate Bridge from a trail most people just call Stonewall-Panoramic. It's the entrance behind the Claremont Hotel, and it's the one that shows up first in every search.
Second is Gwin Canyon, reached from the far end of Norfolk Road on the south side of the canyon. It's a different kind of hike entirely, a single-track path through native woodland that descends about 0.6 miles before it runs out just above Claremont Creek. There's no crowd here because there's nowhere to put one. The trailhead has room for three cars and nothing else, no restrooms, no signage beyond a Park District marker.
The third entrance sits above both of these, on UC Berkeley land off Claremont Avenue at a spot the Conservancy still identifies by number rather than name: Signpost 29, directly across from the orange-streaked rock face known as the Claremont Chert. From there, the Summit House Trail and the Willow Trail split off and run roughly parallel up toward Grizzly Peak Boulevard, one more of a fire road, the other a narrower path that crosses small footbridges over seasonal water.
Three entrances, one preserve, and already two different landowners behind them: the Park District at the first two, the University of California at the third. Widen the view a little and there's a third owner in the mix too. The City of Oakland holds Garber Park outright, a 13-acre oak and bay woodland just south of Claremont Avenue that connects into the same trail network. That's the part worth understanding before you ever leave the driveway. This isn't one park with one gate. It's a patchwork of agencies, and the trails don't always know whose property they're crossing.
The Fourth Way In, and Why It Has No Official Name
Here's the part that doesn't show up in a Park District brochure. Above the Clark Kerr Campus, starting near the top of lower Dwight Way, there's a trail that climbs through a eucalyptus grove, forks near a graffiti-marked boulder, and connects hikers directly to the Stonewall-Panoramic Ridge without ever touching an official trailhead. For years it was simply the way Panoramic Hill residents got out of the canyon in an emergency, an escape route nobody engineered and almost nobody maintained.
It was also dangerous. Deep ruts, exposed roots, poison oak crowding the narrow sections. Around 2015, two people decided to do something about it. Steve Glaeser, who leads path-building work for the Berkeley Path Wanderers Association, and Jim Rosenau met on the trail itself to talk about the failing stairs at its base. Because the path crosses land owned by both UC Berkeley and the East Bay Regional Park District, and because neither agency had it on a formal maintenance schedule, the two of them formed a volunteer crew under Berkeley Partners for Parks and gave it a name of its own: Take to the Hills.
What they built is still there. Several hundred stair treads milled from local eucalyptus, a bridge over Derby Creek, cleared brush, and enough erosion control to turn a hazard into something UC students now use on a normal Tuesday. The group has referred to it as the Derby Canyon Trail. Google Maps, which picked up the route at some point without input from anyone who actually built it, labels it the Clark Kerr Trail. The Conservancy's own map includes the path as an unnamed Y-shaped line. Three names, one trail, and not one of them came from an agency with jurisdiction over the whole thing.
That's the detail worth sitting with if you live here: the canyon's most reliable shortcut exists because two neighbors decided to fix it themselves, not because UC Berkeley and the Park District ever agreed on whose job it was.
The Same Trees, a Different Fight
The wood in those stair treads didn't come from nowhere. Eucalyptus has been the most contested tree in these hills since long before Take to the Hills ever picked up a shovel, and the argument hasn't fully resolved even now.
Elizabeth Stage, a board member of the Claremont Canyon Conservancy, put it plainly in a piece on Oakland's wildfire prevention efforts: she isn't anti-eucalyptus, she's "anti-burning-to-death." The Conservancy has spent years pushing for eucalyptus removal on land owned by UC Berkeley, arguing the trees carry more fuel than native species. A separate group, the Hills Conservation Network, disagrees just as firmly, pointing to the shade and fog drip that tall trees provide as their own form of fire protection. Both organizations trace their founding back to the same event: the 1991 Oakland Hills fire that destroyed more than 3,000 homes across these same slopes.
That standoff finally moved in June 2023, when the state Court of Appeals cleared UC Berkeley to remove trees on its Hill Campus land, ending a legal fight that had stalled a fuel reduction plan first funded by a 2017 Cal Fire grant. The removal work is still underway.
Two more changes are shaping the canyon right now. Oakland's Measure MM, a wildfire prevention parcel tax, began collection with the 2025-2026 property tax period, funding the kind of ongoing brush clearing that a single grant never could. And when Cal Fire released its redrawn 2025 wildfire hazard severity maps, the Conservancy's own newsletter described the reaction plainly: the maps created confusion rather than clarity for residents trying to understand their own risk. If you've noticed your neighbors talking past each other about what those new zones actually mean, that's why. Even the people who track this canyon for a living are still working out what the new maps say.
Where the Trail Actually Lets You Out
None of this changes what a Saturday morning here looks like. It just explains why the trail feels the way it does underfoot, why some sections are freshly built and others are still rutted dirt, and why the fire road smell of eucalyptus follows you the whole way down.
Most loops that start at Stonewall-Panoramic or drop down through Derby Canyon end the same way, funneling back toward the small cluster of businesses across from the Claremont Hotel on Domingo Avenue. Fournée Bakery sits right there at 2912 Domingo, closed Mondays and Tuesdays, open from 7 a.m. Wednesday through Saturday and 8 a.m. on Sunday, and known for selling out of its better pastries well before noon. Peet's Coffee anchors the same corner, across from the hotel and the Berkeley Tennis Club courts. Further down Claremont Avenue, the neon sign at Star Grocery marks the other end of the loop, the point where the trail stops being a trail and turns back into a neighborhood.
That's the real shape of a Claremont Hills weekend. Not one official gate and one official map, but four ways up, a decade of volunteer labor holding the least official one together, and a bakery line that starts before the fog burns off the ridge.
If you're weighing a move to a hillside property here and want a clearer read on what a specific address actually offers, from canyon access to the practical realities of buying on a slope, Shalaya Shipman can walk you through it. Get your free home valuation and start the conversation.
