For years, the standard version of the Old Rail Trail walk went like this: park near Blackie's Pasture, walk far enough to see the bronze horse and the gulls working the Richardson Bay mudflats, then turn around before the crowds around the ferry landing got thick. Few residents walked the whole 2.6 miles into downtown and back, because there wasn't much reason to. Downtown had the restaurants. The pasture end had the parking and the view. You picked one.
That calculation changed this year, and not because of anything the town did. Two restaurants opened on opposite ends of the same trail within a couple of months of each other this year, and together they turn what used to be an out-and-back stroll into an actual point-to-point walk with something waiting at the finish either way.
Two Ends, Finally Both Worth Reaching
The Old Rail Trail runs along the route of the old Northwestern Pacific Railroad, which is why locals also call it the Tiburon Historical Trail or the Tiburon Linear Park depending on which decade they learned the name in. It starts at Blackie's Pasture on Greenwood Beach Road and ends 2.6 miles later at the Angel Island-Tiburon Ferry terminal on Main Street, with a short stretch near the two-mile mark where the paved path gives way to an on-street bike lane along Tiburon Boulevard before it drops you into downtown.
That geography matters more than it used to. The pasture end sits close to Tiburon Boulevard and the Cove Shopping Center, on the inland side of the peninsula. The Main Street end sits at the tip, facing the bay. For most of the trail's life, one end had a place to eat and the other had a place to park. Now both ends have both.
What's New at the Blackie's Pasture End
Troya Mediterranean opened at 1 Blackfield Drive in the Cove Shopping Center in May, serving its first meal on May 1 and adding Sunday-through-Thursday dinner service on June 15. It's the second restaurant from Berk and Betul Kinalilar, who have run a Troya on Fillmore Street in San Francisco since 2006, moved to Marin in 2018, and settled in Corte Madera at the end of 2020. The space replaced a fried-chicken shop called Flybird, and the Kinalilars kept the design quiet: arched alcoves, natural textures, a mural from local artist Yalcin Temel.
Betul has said the idea took a while to make sense to them. Marin diners kept telling the couple to bring the restaurant north, and for a long time that didn't track with two people running a restaurant in the most food-dense city in the country. Then they actually moved to Marin and noticed how thin the sit-down Mediterranean options were.
"Tiburon and Marin needs more Mediterranean."
That's close enough to a mission statement, and it happens to sit a few minutes from the Blackie's Pasture trailhead, which means it now works as a real bookend to a walk instead of a separate errand.
What's New at the Main Street End
Down at the other terminus, Main Street picked up Mog Asu, a family-owned wine bar built around Portuguese hospitality with a list pulling from more than 40 countries. It fills a gap that had been sitting empty for a while: Main Street has had The Caviar Co. running a tasting-room format for a few doors down, and Salt & Pepper, Waypoint Pizza and Sam's Anchor Cafe covering the daytime and casual end. What it hadn't had was a slower, sit-and-stay wine bar built for an hour of actually talking rather than grabbing a glass and moving on.
Reservations are recommended, which tells you something about how the town has already voted on it.
Why This Only Works Right Now
Tiburon in July and August is a town built around visitors: ferry crowds, full parking lots at Blackie's Pasture, Main Street restaurants running at capacity through the dinner rush. Fall runs differently. Local tourism guides describe September through November as the peninsula's actual sweet spot, with warmer, calmer days and noticeably less fog than the marine layer that hangs over summer mornings. The crowds that make a September evening on Main Street feel different from a July one aren't imagined. They're seasonal, and they're already thinning by the time this piece is published.
That's the window this walk needs. A 2.6-mile trail with a destination on each end only works if you can actually cover the distance without fighting for a sidewalk the whole way, and fall is when Blackie's Pasture stops needing a parking strategy.
The Foundation for Reed Schools points at the same window from a different angle. Its annual fundraising fun run, Run4Reed, starts and ends at Blackie's Pasture and follows a stretch of the Old Rail Trail past McKegney Green before circling back with food trucks waiting at the finish. It's a fundraiser, not a public festival, but the fact that a school foundation schedules its signature run on this exact stretch of trail once the calendar turns to fall says something about when the path is actually usable for a crowd.
Here's what marks the route from one end to the other on an ordinary week:
- Blackie's Pasture itself, where a life-size bronze sculpture of the retired cavalry horse Blackie has stood since 1995, a gift from the family of Gordon Strawbridge, Tiburon's first mayor
- The Richardson Bay mudflats, a stretch of tidal habitat that draws well over a million migratory birds a year, along with year-round herons and egrets
- McKegney Green, the soccer field and open lawn where local kids' games run most fall afternoons
- A small memorial gazebo overlooking the bay, one of the quieter stops on the trail
- The transition point near mile two, where the path becomes an on-street bike lane along Tiburon Boulevard
- Shoreline Park and the ferry terminal, where Main Street picks up and the trail technically ends
The trail also keeps going past the Tiburon line into Belvedere, a detail most people only learn once they've walked the whole thing at least once. It's a reminder that this stretch of shoreline was working waterfront long before it was scenery. Cargo trains ran this route daily in the early 1900s, and one of the line's odder footnotes is that Al Capone passed through here by rail on his way to Alcatraz in 1934.
The Walk Itself, This Month
The practical version of all this is simple. Pick a weekday evening in the next few weeks, before the December rain shifts the trail's character again, and walk it end to end instead of turning around halfway. If you start at Blackie's Pasture, treat Troya as a pre-walk lunch or a post-walk dinner rather than a separate outing, since it sits close enough to the trailhead that there's no real detour involved. If you start at the ferry landing instead, Mog Asu is the reasonable place to end the evening, especially now that a reservation gets you an actual seat rather than a spot at the counter.
Either direction, this is the first fall where the trail has a genuine reason to be walked in full rather than in half, and it's worth doing while the weather still cooperates.
For more on how this stretch of the peninsula fits into the wider Tiburon picture, our Tiburon neighborhood guide has additional detail on the area.
BrokerLuxe covers the daily texture of life across San Francisco and Marin, from trail conditions to what's new on Main Street. If a fall walk through Tiburon has you thinking further ahead about what it would mean to actually live here, schedule a private consultation with Bryant Kowalczyk.
