One of my hobbies is finding “secret” parks or trails. “Secret” to me means that even if the parks appear on the city or park district map, they have an “out of the way” or “lesser known” vibe. Anywhere I live, I usually end up finding a few. Sometimes I discover one within a few hours of visiting a city for the first time. Secret parks start with “I wonder where that goes” or “I wonder if I can get over there.”
Stephanie Uchida
Sabercat Trail is a perfect “secret park” in Fremont because it’s a riparian corridor hidden in the hills between Irvington and Mission San Jose. Unless you live nearby, or stumble across one of the entrances, you could live your whole life in the city and never go there.
I decided to try hiking the trail, and 20 minutes turned into 40, and I had only covered a tiny section of the park. It was amazing. There I was, up in the foothills with the McMansions all around me that I’d seen hundreds of times while driving up 680. Even though the sound of the freeway was constant, hills of oak trees and blackberry brambles soon cut me off from the rest of Fremont. The area reminded me a little bit of Sulphur Creek in Hayward, which is also off a neighborhood street but feels like an undisturbed pocket of nature.
I parked by the Via Orinda entrance, passed the ruins of a winery, and hiked up Antelope Knoll, which was much steeper than I expected. But at the top I could look out over the city, and see 680 crawling up into the hills to the east and stretching south below me. I felt like I was communing with an aspect of the spirit of Fremont I had never met before.
Fremont is currently working to improve and extend the trail, with construction starting in 2027. This is the best news ever to a park fan like me. I definitely need to go back and try the Pine Street and Paseo Padre entrances. I will probably drag my husband along, because he’s used to it by now.
