Elizabeth Byers, a Mill Valley resident and native Northern Californian, has lived in the San Francisco Bay Area for most of her life. As a child and teenager, she explored the beautiful mountains of Carmel Valley and Big Sur near her home. Her love of the outdoors led her to study environmental planning in college and graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley. She began working in the land conservation field in the mid-1980s, for 16 years as a project manager, program director, and writer at the Trust for Public Land (TPL) and then as a consultant for many nonprofits and agencies, including the Garden Conservancy, the Bay Area Ridge Trail Council, and TPL.

In 1988, while at TPL, Elizabeth became one of the founding board members of the Bay Area Ridge Trail Council, and she stayed connected to the organization over the years. She coauthored the second edition of The Conservation Easement Handbook, copublished by TPL and the Land Trust Alliance in 2005, and was a photographer and project coordinator for the 2014 Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy publication Alcatraz Gardens: Remembered, Reclaimed, Reimagined. She is a mom to two children in their 20s who grew up on the lower slopes of Mount Tamalpais.

Elizabeth hiked, biked, and photographed the Ridge Trail to update this guidebook, often with family and friends, and this journey reconfirmed for her the magnificence of the Bay Area landscape.

Jean Rusmore, the author of this book’s first three editions, grew up in what was once the small town of Anaheim, California, in the county that boasted orange and lemon groves as its namesake. She took her first backpacking trip at age 16, when she and a cousin ascended the slopes of Mount Wilson in the San Gabriel Mountains with some food and a jacket rolled up in a blanket. Her outdoor experience was enlarged through her husband, Ted, whom she met at the University of California, Berkeley. They skied and backpacked with their six children, and all looked forward to their annual Sierra backpacking trip.

When the Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District was established, Jean and her friend Frances Spangle decided to write a book about the new foothill preserves, Peninsula Trails, followed by South Bay Trails, both published by Wilderness Press. When the first segments of the Ridge Trail opened, they wrote pamphlets about each leg. These were later combined and published as the first edition of this book.