Google Street View offers tours of Sonoma County parks

Direct from Google: It’s your favorite hiking trail.

The tech behemoth and Sonoma County Regional Parks on Thursday launched 360-degree Street View images of key elements of the county park system, making dozens of miles of open space and trails available in the same way virtually every street in the world can be seen.

Google Street View now provides virtual tours of 15 local parks and trails in crystal-clear resolution, from Spring Lake Regional Park to the Joe Rodota Trail, from Sonoma Valley Regional Park to the trails at The Sea Ranch.

“We’re really excited to give the people the opportunity to see what the different parks look like from the ground and help them make a decision about where they want to go and what they want to see,” Regional Parks Director Caryl Hart said.

“Instead of imagining it, they get to see it in real time,” she said.

It was tougher to map the parks and trails than the streetscape, which requires only a car and a passable road, said Deanna Yick, Google Street View program manager.

“The roads are pretty well covered,” Yick said. “Really where the gaps are are in the areas that require folks to be on foot.”

Google contract workers wearing a 40-pound backpack dubbed a Trekker - it has 15 cameras that take photos every 2.5 seconds - spent six- to eight-hour days in the parks and covered 60 miles of trails.

“It’s basically the same system as the cars, but shrunken down to backpack size,” Yick said.

The locations - there are hundreds of others in the state, including the East Bay Regional Park system - were chosen together with the parks agency, and generally selected on the basis of their popularity and use.

“Wow,” said Paul Grammens of Santa Rosa, who hikes daily with his wife and dog, of the new option.

“I think it’s very valuable to be able to see in advance,” he said. “When I organized hikes, I often studied very carefully, because we always wanted to go to new places and when you take a bunch of people out who haven’t been there before, it’s nice to see what you’re getting into.”

The company’s street view mapping of inhabited areas in particular has raised privacy concerns. That has happened much less in connection with the parks, but Yick was careful to point out that the faces of people encountered on the trails, or the license plates of cars that Trekkers passed by, were blurred out.

She said it’s not known which other locations might be next, or if more trails will be shot.

“We need to work it out with our partners - are there more places they would like us to go and where they would like us to go next?” Yick said.

“We’d like to see this continue,” Hart said.

“It fits into the whole modern era of social (media) and sharing,” she said. “And if we want to get people out into the parks, we’ve got to do everything we can to encourage them and let them know what the experience can be like.”

Other nearby sites include Angel Island State Camp, and parts of Mount Tamalpais, including the Dipsea Trail and Steep Ravine.

Staff Writer Jeremy Hay blogs about education at extracredit.blogs.pressdemocrat.com. You can reach him at 521-5212 or jeremy.hay@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @jeremyhay.