The San Ramon Valley is the stretch of the 680 corridor running from Walnut Creek down through Alamo, Danville and San Ramon. Mount Diablo on one side, the Las Trampas ridge on the other, and a valley floor that was walnut and pear orchards within living memory.
It gets written about, when it gets written about at all, as a bedroom community. That's accurate and incomplete.
Downtown Danville
Hartz Avenue is the spine — a few blocks of low buildings that have been the center of town since the railroad came through. The old Southern Pacific depot is now the Museum of the San Ramon Valley, which is small and genuinely good on the agricultural history most people here have forgotten.
The Iron Horse Trail runs where the tracks used to. It goes from Concord down to Pleasanton, about thirty miles, and it's the reason you see so many people on bikes at 7am. If you live within a few blocks of it you use it constantly and stop noticing it.
Blackhawk
East of downtown, up against the base of Mount Diablo where Camino Tassajara runs out. Blackhawk is best known outside the valley for two things: the plaza, and the automotive museum attached to it.
The plaza is an odd and pleasant thing — a shopping center built around a creek and a series of ponds, with ducks that have no fear of anyone. It functions as the neighborhood's town square. The museum next to it holds one of the better collections of classic cars in the country and most people in the Bay Area don't know it's there.
Behind all of it is the ridgeline. Blackhawk sits closer to Mount Diablo than anywhere else in the valley, and the mountain is genuinely the defining fact of the place — it's what you see out the window, it's what the light does in the evening, it's the reason the roads bend the way they do.
Crow Canyon
Crow Canyon Road cuts west out of the valley toward Castro Valley and the 580, climbing through open hills that turn gold in May and stay that way until the rains. It's one of the prettiest drives in the East Bay and one of the more technical — motorcyclists know it well.
The name attaches to the whole area around the road on the San Ramon side: the canyon itself, the neighborhoods at its mouth, and a stretch of country that still reads as rural the moment you get a mile off the freeway.
Alamo and San Ramon
Alamo is unincorporated, has no downtown to speak of, and likes it that way. Big lots, old oaks, and Round Hill up against the western ridge. It's the quietest three miles on the corridor.
San Ramon is the newest and the largest, built out mostly since the 1980s around Bishop Ranch. City Center gave it the downtown it spent forty years not having.
What's actually out here
Mount Diablo — the summit is drivable and on a clear winter morning the view is supposedly one of the largest of any peak in the world. Go after a storm.
Las Trampas Regional Wilderness — the western ridge, steep and mostly empty, with Rocky Ridge and Bollinger Canyon on the San Ramon side.
Tao House — Eugene O'Neill wrote The Iceman Cometh and Long Day's Journey Into Night up in the hills above Danville. It's a National Historic Site. You have to reserve a shuttle to get up there, which keeps it quiet.
Sycamore Valley and Diablo — the older residential canyons east of town, worth a drive if you want to see what the valley looked like before the 1970s.
Rep the valley: the Danville collection has our California bear flag design made for Danville on shirts, hoodies, hats, mugs and more. Up and down the 680: Walnut Creek, Alamo and San Ramon.