Bear Creek Redwoods Open Space Preserve

Great place

WARNING: This review may be overly detailed. Please skim through and read only what is relevant to you.
I want to give Bear Creek Redwoods 3.5 stars, but since I can’t rate in 0.5 increments I’ll just have to round up to four stars. Overall, I think it’s cool to visit if you live nearby, but it’s not worth driving far for unless you have a thing for creepy abandoned buildings. There are many impressive redwood parks in the bay area. While this park is quite pretty, it definitely cannot compete with the redwood state parks (Big Basin, Henry Cowell, Fall Creek Unit, etc.).
Trails
We pretty much went to every trail on the south side of the park in an afternoon. The trails are virtually all wide fire roads, sometimes overgrown. Definitely possible to get a little lost with the bad map, so have a compass handy and don’t cut it close to sunset like we did. There are no trail names, and one map mistake caused us to need to backtrack about half a mile to get back to where we wanted to go. A short connector trail is shown connecting the southernmost trail on the map to the trail that heads out of the west park boundary. This trail does not exist.
I’ll try to describe the trails the best I can, but it may be confusing since there are no trail names or signs. The «Access by permit only» text obstructs part of a trail. Fortunately, there are no forks in the trail on the obstructed section. That’s not a trail that I would recommend anyways, as it is just a steep, overgrown fireroad that is mostly exposed near the top.
There is a pond to the side of the parking lot with ducks. The highlight of the park is at the beginning where the abandoned buildings are. Walking in the southeast direction, you will come across another pond that is visible on the map. This seems to be an old swimming hole, judging from the old ladder extending into the pond. Water doesn’t look very clean.
If you look on the map, directly northeast of the pond is a trail that goes in a little circle. This is where the old water tank used to be. The tank is huge (to me), with at least a 20 meter diameter. You can peek inside the tank through the fence, but this is a spot that you can skip without missing too much.
As you walk south on the trail that leads to the southernmost end of the park, you will enter into actual forest with patches of redwood, bay laurel, big leaf maple, and another tree that I can’t name (almost as big as redwood but the bark doesn’t look the same). One section of this trail is filled with big leaf maple, which I assume would be gorgeous in the fall. At some point you will exit the forest, and the trail becomes exposed and bushy. You will then see a barn sort of structure as well as a fork in the road.
The southernmost end of the park has the most beautiful patch of redwoods in the park. To get here, turn left at the old building at the fork. Unfortunately, it’s a dead end trail, so you’ll need to do some backtracking to get back to the car. After backtracking, you can turn left and walk west out to the park boundaries. Here you will either need to turn back or walk past the clearly marked private property sign (not recommended). I looked on Google satellite images, and the private trail pops you out at a place called Presentation Center.
Some other impressions of the park:
— Permits: The permit requirement is both a pro and a con in my opinion. It guarantees that you’ll probably be the only one there, which is relaxing but a bit unsettling at times. Applying for the permit is easy, and they sent me the permit through email only a few hours after I applied. Don’t think of coming here without a permit. A couple that I met on the trail got a ticket from the ranger for not having one: o
— Ranger: A nice ranger was on-​duty in the park when I was there, which is a good sign. It’s strange why the ranger was patrolling the park for only two people (my dad and me), but I appreciated him waiting by our car for us to come back.
— Cool abandoned buildings: The broken down buildings (which are mostly fenced off) right at the beginning of the park looked especially creepy with the sun setting and no one else in sight. The buildings seem to have been vandalized and tagged by youngsters with nothing better to do. Apparently, the man (who got a ticket) that we met on the trail used to go to that school, which is why they were there checking it out. He told me it was a «hippie school» back in the day. Amazing what nature and vandals can do.
— Horse poo: Looks like equestrians are the main users of the park. I hope they will allow bikes too in the future. No blind corners and trails are relatively wid

Pros:
1) Permit required for entrance. There was no one else there the Saturday that I went — I had the whole place to myself.
2) Cool deserted buildings. A Google search after the hike revealed that the buildings are part of Alma College, which has been abandoned for decades (hence Alma College Road).
Cons:
1) The park is a little bit hard to find, but nothing overwhelming. See attached picture of entrance gate.
2) Being all by yourself in an open space preserve = a little bit creepy.
3) The trails aren’t marked at all, nor are they well preserved. The further up the hill you go, the worse the condition of the trails. On the bright side, you couldn’t get seriously lost in here unless you tried; the park just isn’t big enough.
4) No dogs allowed. :(
All in all, it’s not a bad place for a short hike. I still think it’s weird that there was no one else there on a Saturday @ 10:00 a.m. Surely the permit requirement isn’t scaring everyone away?