The Bay Area 100, a 100-mile point-to-point ultramarathon with 18,000 feet of climbing, ran for the first time on June 13, 2026 — from Cal's Memorial Stadium in Berkeley, up through Tilden and Wildcat Canyon, out to Las Trampas and Lake Chabot, down through Redwood Regional, and finishing on the track at Skyline High in Oakland. It took founder Adam Ray roughly five years of permit negotiation with the East Bay Regional Parks District to make it happen. The result is both a genuine addition to a century of Bay Area endurance lore — Dipsea, Gordy Ainsleigh, Dick Collins's Firetrails 50 — and a quiet, unresolved question about who the hills are actually for.

There is a fire road above Berkeley that you can reach in about twenty minutes of walking from the rim of Memorial Stadium, and from it, on a clear morning before the fog has burned off the flats, you can see the whole inheritance at once: the Golden Gate, the two bridges, the container cranes at the Port of Oakland that George Lucas allegedly turned into AT-ATs, and — directly below — the bowl where the California Golden Bears now play a conference schedule that sends them to Chestnut Hill and Tallahassee and Pittsburgh, because the Pac-12 died and the map got redrawn by television executives who have never once stood on this fire road. I think about that a lot. I think about it more than is healthy.

So I want to be honest about why a 100-mile trail race got under my skin this week. Part of it is that the start line is right there — the Bay Area 100, which ran for the first time on June 13, gun-to-tape from Cal's Memorial Stadium to the track at Skyline High in Oakland. The hill that has eaten so much of my grief is, it turns out, also the first climb of a brand-new ultramarathon. The realignment took the schedule. It didn't take the hill.

The route

Let me give you the shape of the thing, because the shape is the story.

One hundred miles, point to point, roughly 18,000 feet of climbing — call it three-fifths of an Everest, on dirt, on your own two feet, mostly in the dark for part of it. It starts at Memorial Stadium, climbs into Tilden Regional Park and Wildcat Canyon, runs out to the Las Trampas Wilderness, drops toward Lake Chabot — the aid station there sits at mile 60.75, which is a profoundly cruel mile to be told you are only at — and then comes home through Redwood Regional Park before finishing on a high-school track in the Oakland hills. Twenty-three aid stations, spaced three to six miles apart. The field was capped at 150, sold out, with a waitlist. Entry was $425.

The organizers like to say the course crosses four climate zones, and the irritating thing is that this is true. You start in the fog-wet Bay-view hills, grind through the arid scrub-oak exposure of Las Trampas, get the lake and its big sky around the middle, and then disappear into the cool redwood forest for the back third. Anyone who has spent a summer afternoon in the East Bay hills knows this is not marketing — it is a real and slightly insane fact of microclimate, that you can be cold, then parched, then cold again, all within one county, all under the same sun.

One hundred fifty-five runners started. One hundred one finished. Amy Chinn won it, in 32 hours, 44 minutes, and 23 seconds — which is to say she ran through an entire night and most of two days, and was first, and the gap between that sentence and my own life is the entire appeal of the sport to a person who watches it from the couch.

The lineage

What the Bay Area 100 is quietly claiming is a bloodline, and it's a real one.

Northern California is, arguably, where this whole derangement began. The Dipsea — 7.4 miles from Mill Valley to Stinson Beach, America's oldest trail race — was formally established on November 19, 1905. In 1974, a man named Gordy Ainsleigh, whose horse had gone lame, decided to run the 100-mile Western States Trail ride on foot to see if a human could do in a day what a horse did, and finished in 23 hours and 42 minutes; three years later that stunt became the Western States 100, the race that effectively invented modern American ultrarunning. (Fourteen people started the first official one. One finished under the 24-hour cutoff.)

And the part that matters most for our hill: in 1983, a Bay Area runner named Dick Collins founded the Firetrails 50, stitching together five East Bay regional parks into one race. Thirteen people finished it that first year. Forty-some years later, Adam Ray — a Piedmont resident, a fifteen-year race-directing veteran, a Western States finisher himself — spent something like five years negotiating permits with the East Bay Regional Parks District to run an even longer thread through some of the same dirt. Five years. That's the detail I keep turning over. The race is two days of suffering on the trail and half a decade of suffering in meeting rooms, and the second kind is the kind that actually decides whether the first kind is allowed to exist.

We have the receipts on what happens when it isn't. The Mt. Tam Trail Run got abruptly killed in October 2019 when the federal government shut down and the National Park Service couldn't issue the permits. The Dipsea itself nearly died in 1977, until a man named Jerry Hauke literally built an alternate trail — Hauke Hollow — to satisfy the authorities who wanted it gone. In the Bay Area, the trail is never just the trail. It's the permit, the agency, the watershed master plan, the $10-a-year access card. The wilderness is administered.

Who the hills are for

Here is where I have to stop being charmed and tell you the part the press release skips.

Trail running, nationally, is about 69 percent white. Roughly a third of participants earn six figures. And the gap underneath that is structural: majority-non-white neighborhoods have access to something like 44 percent less park acreage than majority-white ones. A $425 entry fee for a sold-out race full of people who can take two days off to run through five parks is not a scandal — it's a sport being a sport. But it sits on top of a map where the parks themselves are not evenly handed out, and the East Bay hills, gorgeous and public and right there on a clear morning, are not equally right there for everyone in the flats below them.

The Bay Area 100's organizers have, as far as any reporting shows, said nothing public about access or diversity. That's not a crime. It's just a silence, and silences are worth naming, because the most Bay Area thing imaginable would be to celebrate a 100-mile tour of our collective backyard without asking who has a key to the gate.

I don't run ultras. I will never run an ultra; I'd like to be clear-eyed about that the way I'm clear-eyed about a bad number. But I've stood on that fire road above the stadium plenty of times, usually nursing some grievance about a conference I can't get back, and I think the race got the geography exactly right. The hills outlasted the Pac-12. They'll outlast the ACC scheduling too. The question the Bay Area 100 raises — without quite meaning to — is whether the hills belong to all of us, or just to the 150 who got off the waitlist.

The fog will burn off either way. It always does, around ten.

Sources: bayarea100.com; Oaklandside; Piedmont Exedra; Endurance Sportswire; Ultrarunning History; the National Park Service; RunRepeat.