Wander Wine Country at Skyline Park

Napa Valley is home to more than 200 wineries but only one wilderness park--Skyline--located on the outskirts of the city of Napa. Autumn, when temperatures and tourism are way down from their summer highs, is a fine time for a wine country walking adventure, particularly at Skyline Wilderness Park, which offers the most hiking in Napa County.

What is now parkland was once the grounds of a state mental hospital. When the Napa Asylum for the Insane was constructed in 1875, it was widely regarded as the most outstanding public building in California. Picture a gigantic Gothic-style farmhouse, five stories high, a mile in circumference.

Some, though, were critical of the building, designed in a style called “Domestic Gothic” by its architect, who topped it with towers and decorated it with gargoyles. To critics it looked creepy, the setting for a horror film.

The diagnosis and treatment of mental illness was not exactly a well-developed science in the 19th century, and many folks who were simply poor, homeless or unlucky in love and business ended up housed with the truly insane. Funds for the facility were limited, so patients were put to work tending vegetable gardens, orchards and vineyards or feeding pigs and milking cows.

The farm work, as well as spending leisure time in a tranquil, beautifully landscaped setting, had therapeutic benefits for many patients.

Wine country tourists of the 1920s and 1930s drove through the lovely hospital grounds and stopped to swim and picnic. By the 1940s, modern medical treatment of the mentally ill required indoor clinical facilities. Napa State Hospital, as it was later called, was judged unfit for human habitation and demolished.

The property (owned by the State of California) lingered for decades, slowly reverting to nature. Conservationists, spearheaded by the Skyline Park Citizens Assn., rescued the land from private developers and created an 850-acre park in 1983; the association manages the park today for the county of Napa.

Fifteen miles of hiking trails tour grassy meadows, oak woodlands and alder-shaded creeks. Deer, wild turkeys and feral pigs are among the wildlife commonly sighted in the park.

The walk to Lake Marie offers a good introduction to the park. For a longer and more rigorous excursion, return to the trail head via Skyline Trail.

The park is located very near the city of Napa, commercial center of the wine country; you won’t have to go far for post-hike refreshment.

Directions to trail head: From California Highway 29 in Napa, take California Highway 121/Imola Avenue exit and drive east on Imola Avenue to the entrance for Skyline Wilderness County Park.

The hike: The path leads past a California native plant garden, skirts a picnic ground and soon reaches a junction with Lake Marie Trail, a dirt road. The wide path leads past remnants of Napa State Hospital’s old orchards (olive, walnut and fig trees), once cultivated by patients, and ascends to a park viewpoint at 0.6 mile.

The trail descends to a junction with Bayleaf Trail at the hike’s halfway point. Here you’ll find (can’t miss) an enormous fenced-off Fig Tree, believed to be more than 100 years old. Bayleaf and Buckeye trails invite the hiker to jaunts on the other side of Marie Creek, but stick with Lake Marie Road and soon drop into a shady environment of oak and bay laurel.

Just 0.1 mile short of Lake Marie, you’ll pass a connector with Skyline Trail and soon reach Lake Marie. Contemplate it from a bench or from atop the lake’s earthen dam. For a longer but scenic return, double back to Skyline Trail, which parallels Lake Marie Road for a mile or so. Two moderate ascents deliver hilltop vistas of Marie Creek Canyon and rolling hills, as well as peeks at San Pablo Bay.

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Lake Marie, Skyline Trails

Where: Skyline Wilderness County Park, Napa

Distance: To Lake Marie is 5 miles round trip with 600-foot elevation gain; return via Skyline Trail is 7 miles round trip.

Terrain: Rolling, oak-dotted hills.

Highlights: Wine Country vistas; California mental health history.

Degree of difficulty: Moderate.

For more information: Skyline Wilderness Park, tel. (707) 252-0481. Napa Chamber of Commerce, tel. (707) 226-7455.