Bernal Heights is a village wrapped around a grassy hill, and the pleasure of it is the climb between the two — a main street at the bottom, secret stairways up the slope, and a summit that hands you the whole city at once.
Start on Cortland Avenue, Bernal's small-town spine of cafés and storefronts, and take a coffee before the work begins. Then find the staircases that stitch the hillside together — Esmeralda, Prospect, the slide park among them — and climb. Getting slightly lost is part of it; the steps are the local shortcut and the best way up. Pause at the Esmeralda Slide Park, where people still ride a concrete chute on flattened cardboard, then push to the summit: a rocky, off-leash, fenceless crown with a 360-degree view of downtown, the bay and the southern hills. It's free and usually windy. Walk the dirt path around the top for the full turn.
Come off the western slope toward the Bernal Cut and on into Glen Park's pocket village, where the BART and a last drink are waiting.
