The Crosstown Trail, which runs roughly eleven miles from Candlestick Point in the southeast to Lands End in the northwest, has been quietly accumulating these kinds of converts since the route was formalized in 2019. The hiker who posted about it Sunday on Reddit had started south of Golden Gate Park — skipping the northern stretch they already knew — and worked through territory that doesn't appear on most visitors' mental maps of the city: the open slopes above McLaren Park, the narrow passages where the trail dips between backyards, the sudden appearance of a community garden where you half-expected another staircase.

"Really impressed with the variation of scenery and spaces," they wrote, which is a modest way of describing what the trail actually does, which is move you through something like eight distinct micro-climates and land uses inside a single afternoon — maintained parkland giving way to wild scrub giving way to residential blocks giving way to more parkland, the whole sequence feeling less like a hiking trail than like a slow argument that San Francisco has more square footage of quiet than anyone budgets for.

The trail doesn't have a trailhead in any traditional sense. You find it marked on poles, on the AllTrails app, on the occasional painted blaze on a sidewalk. People do it in sections. People do it wrong and still have a good time.

Anyone walking the stretch near Crocker Amazon tomorrow would notice the trail markers at the park's edge — small, easy to miss if you're driving, hard to miss once you're looking for them — pointing toward the next green corridor, and the next.