Shoreline Lake Park was originally a landfill accepting garbage from San Francisco, but the city of Mountain View turned it into a 750-acre recreation area with an 18-hole golf course and driving range, a 50-acre artificial lake filled with water pumped from the Bay, and nearly eight miles of trails, many of them along sloughs and marshes. You...
Shoreline Lake Park was originally a landfill accepting garbage from San Francisco, but the city of Mountain View turned it into a 750-acre recreation area with an 18-hole golf course and driving range, a 50-acre artificial lake filled with water pumped from the Bay, and nearly eight miles of trails, many of them along sloughs and marshes. You can hike, golf, boat on the saltwater lake, fly a kite, let your dog run free at the off-leash dog park, eat at the lakeside café, or loll around on lawns. Benches are plentiful throughout. At the restored, accessible Rengstorff House (ca. 1876) you can take a free docent-led tour of one of the finest examples of Victorian Italianate architecture remaining on the West Coast. The huge white tent of Shoreline Amphitheatre (a music venue), just outside the park, is visible from many parts of the park. Moffett Airfield is not far away, so lots of planes fly by.
A string of parks and preserves allows hikers to explore the Bay to the north and south. The undeveloped areas east and north of the lake are crisscrossed by a couple of miles of pleasant, unnamed paved and hard gravel paths, including a more than 2-mile paved section of the San Francisco Bay Trail. This trail connects to the Adobe Creek Loop Trail in the
Palo Alto Baylands. On the trails you may meet cyclists pedaling the colorful bikes Google furnishes to its employees. Shoreline and Baylands parks harbor lots of wildlife, and you may see common birds such as ducks, avocets, swallows, sandpipers, and white pelicans.
Accessible spots are in the lot on N. Shoreline Blvd. that serves the kite-flying area, the boathouse lot, at Michael’s Restaurant, the golf links lot, Rengstorff House, and at the Terminal Blvd. entrance.
At the boathouse, near the Terminal Blvd. entrance, and at Michael’s café. Accessible portable toilets are in the kite-flying lot and at the dog park.