Calaveras Road

Calaveras Road is the back way between Milpitas and Sunol, and it gets rural fast. From Piedmont Road on the edge of Milpitas it climbs straight up the hills, through Ed R. Levin County Park and a run of tight hairpins and blind corners, until the houses are gone and the road tops out above the valley.

Then it settles into the Calaveras Valley and follows Calaveras Reservoir north. This is the largest of San Francisco's five Bay Area reservoirs, held back by a replacement dam finished in 2019, and the land around it is closed watershed: grass, oaks, chaparral and grazing cattle, with no towns at all. A pair of bald eagles has nested at the reservoir for years. The road stays narrow and winding through the oak hills and ends at Highway 84 by Sunol, close to I-680.

It's driven north from Milpitas, so the steepest, tightest climbing comes first and the reservoir stretch is the easy finish.