Ask a Hillsborough resident where they walk and most will say the same thing without thinking twice: down to Sawyer Camp Trail, along the reservoir, maybe as far as the old laurel tree and back. It is the town's unofficial backyard, the six miles of asphalt that sits just outside the fence lines on the west side. What most people have not connected is that the trail everyone treats as a given and the streets that lead to it have been running on two completely different timelines. One is nearly a century old and extremely well cared for. The other just got its first rulebook, in the same season a bridge on the way there needed emergency repairs, and both of those stories are still working themselves out today.
Six Miles, Never a Leash
Sawyer Camp Trail runs six miles through the San Andreas Fault rift valley, tracing the edge of the Crystal Springs Reservoir on a fully paved, San Mateo County-maintained surface. It is a segment of the larger Crystal Springs Regional Trail, and it is the one segment nearly everyone in Hillsborough has walked, run, or biked at some point, whether they know its official name or not.
Here is the detail that surprises longtime residents as much as newcomers: dogs are not allowed on the trail at all, leashed or otherwise. Not a Hillsborough quirk, a countywide rule for this stretch, and it sits oddly next to a trail this popular with families and joggers. If you are walking a dog most mornings, the honest answer is that Sawyer Camp is not your trail. Pulgas Ridge Open Space Preserve in Redwood City, a short drive south, allows leashed dogs throughout and has an off-leash area as well. Worth knowing before you load the car with a water bowl and a leash you cannot use.
The Busiest Six Miles in the County
The numbers on this trail only make sense once you compare them to the rest of the system it belongs to. The full Crystal Springs Regional Trail runs 17.5 miles when complete, connecting San Bruno to Woodside, with 15.3 miles currently built. County figures put annual use across that entire trail at roughly 325,000 visits a year. Separate counts for the Sawyer Camp segment alone put its use at approximately 300,000 people annually.
Read those two numbers side by side and the picture changes. One six-mile bite of a 15-mile system is absorbing nearly all of the traffic on the whole trail. That is why the posted speed limit through Sawyer Camp is 15 miles per hour, stricter than the open sections further north and south, and why weekend mornings there feel more like a commute corridor than a nature walk. If you want the reservoir without the crowd, the quieter stretches lie north toward San Andreas Lake or south along Cañada Road, not on the paved six miles closest to town.
Halfway along Sawyer Camp, at roughly the 3.5-mile mark, stands the Jepson Laurel, a California bay laurel estimated at more than 600 years old and named in 1923 for botanist Willis Linn Jepson. San Mateo County built a picnic area near it in 1981, with restrooms on site but no drinking water, so it works well as a turnaround point if you plan ahead. It is the kind of landmark that turns a routine trail walk into an actual destination, and it gives out-of-town guests something more specific to aim for than "the trail by the reservoir."
The Bridge That Reminded Everyone Tartan Trail Road Exists
Most of the year, nobody thinks about Tartan Trail Road. It is one of the routes that carries residents toward Crystal Springs Road and the western edge of town, and it crosses San Mateo Creek on a bridge that had quietly done its job for decades. Last fall it stopped doing that job quietly.
According to the Town of Hillsborough's own current projects page, the Tartan Trail Road Bridge has been compromised by erosion, pavement failure, and subsurface issues tied to a failed PG&E conduit trench. The town describes it as a critical access point into Hillsborough for many residents, which is not a phrase municipal staff use loosely. Because the bridge sits on San Francisco Public Utilities Commission property, in unincorporated San Mateo County, technically outside town limits, no other agency had clear authority to fix it. Hillsborough took the lead anyway, launching an expedited design-build procurement last fall specifically to skip the years-long timeline a typical bridge project would follow.
The location matters here. The intersection tied to this work is Tartan Trail Road and Crystal Springs Road, which places the repair right along the corridor that feeds the western trail access points. A bridge failure on a road that shares its name with the reservoir system is not a coincidence worth ignoring if you regularly drive, walk, or bike that direction to reach the trail.
A Plan Where There Wasn't One
The bridge crisis is not the only mobility story that surfaced in Hillsborough last year. Town staff spent months developing the town's first Bicycle and Pedestrian Master Plan, a document that did not exist in any form before this process began. They held two community workshops, consulted local schools, and folded that feedback into a draft that reached the Town Council for adoption consideration on November 10, 2025.
That single word, first, is worth sitting with. Hillsborough has managed streets, sewers, and storm drains for generations, but it has never had a standing plan for how people move through town on foot or by bike until this cycle. The plan is meant to guide future projects, improve safety, and expand walking and biking opportunities across the community, according to the town's description of it. What that looks like in practice, whether it means new crossings near school zones, formal connections toward the reservoir trails, or something else entirely, depends on which recommendations survive the transition from draft to funded project. The town has posted recordings of both community workshops for residents who want the specifics rather than the summary.
What This Means for the Rest of This Year
Put the two threads together and the picture is clearer than either one alone. Hillsborough sits next to one of the most heavily used trail segments in San Mateo County, a trail that has operated under the same paved, dog-free, county-managed rules for years. At the same time, the town's own connective tissue, the roads and paths that get you from your driveway to that trail, is in the middle of its most active stretch in recent memory: an emergency bridge repair on one access route and the town's first formal plan for walking and biking infrastructure moving through adoption.
If you already treat Sawyer Camp as part of your weekly routine, a few practical takeaways follow directly from this. Time your trail visits around the fact that the six miles closest to town carry the overwhelming share of regional trail traffic, so early mornings or the quieter northern and southern stretches will feel less congested than the section right off Crystal Springs Road. Leave the dog home or head to Pulgas Ridge instead, since Sawyer Camp's no-pets rule is not going to change. And if your regular route into or out of town runs through the Tartan Trail Road corridor, keep an eye on the town's project updates, since an expedited repair schedule can still shift.
None of this changes what makes the trail worth the walk. The reservoir views, the shade along most of the route, the Jepson Laurel sitting there since before the town existed in any form, all of that holds. What has changed is the infrastructure conversation happening around it. For the first time in Hillsborough's history, the town put its first-ever plan for walking and biking in front of the Town Council in the very same season one of the roads that reaches the reservoir needed emergency attention. That timing is not a coincidence residents should shrug off. It is the clearest sign yet that the town is starting to treat how people get around, not just where they live once they arrive, as something worth planning for.
If you are curious how these kinds of neighborhood-level shifts, from trail access to town infrastructure planning, tend to shape long-term value in Hillsborough and the surrounding Peninsula communities, Allison T. Paulino tracks these details as closely as the market data itself. Reach out to Allison T. Paulino to talk through what is actually changing in the neighborhoods you care about most.
