Coyote Hills Regional Park

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article or section needs sources or references that appear in reliable, third-party publications.
Primary sources and sources affiliated with the subject of the article are generally not sufficient for a Wikipedia article. Please include more appropriate citations from reliable sources, or discuss the issue on the talk page.
This article has been tagged since August 2007.

View across wetlands of the Coyote Hills park from the hills

Coyote Hills Regional Park is a regional park administered by the East Bay Regional Park District. The park is located in Fremont, California, on the southeast shore of the San Francisco Bay. The Coyote Hills themselves are a small range of hills at the edge of the bay; though not reaching any great height, they afford tremendous views of the bay, three of the trans-bay bridges (Dumbarton Bridge, San Mateo Bridge, and the Bay Bridge), the cities of San Francisco and Oakland, the Peninsula Range of the Santa Cruz Mountains and Mount Tamalpais. In addition to the hills themselves, the park encloses a substantial area of wetlands.

There are a number of archaeological sites within the park, preserving evidence of habitation by Native Americans of the Ohlone group of tribes, including shellmounds. Access to these sites is not allowed for casual visitors, but they can be visited by arrangement.

There is a substantial network of hiking trails in the park, most of them also available to horse riders, and 3.5 miles (5.6Km) to cyclists. Most of the trails are wide fireroads that go around the hills and the marshes, and one fireroad that runs north-south through the hills ridge. There are few narrow trails, and all are off limits to bikes, although the rules are seldom enforced. These trails connect to others in the east bay, and the San Francisco Bay Trail passes through the park. Cross country meets for local schools are held occasionally in the park. The waters to the south and west of the park form part of the San Francisco Bay National Wildlife Refuge, and a great deal of wildlife can be seen from the park trails.

[edit] History

Coyote Hills is home to the remnants of a large Project Nike missile base. It has intact facilities that are in disrepair and are being used as a radio transmission station. After the NIKE Missile Base was decommissioned, the Stanford Research Institute occupied the base and area, and used the marshlands as facilities for Advanced Sonar Research, harboring many marine mammals, including dolphins.