Telegraph Hill: the steps and the tower
The Filbert Steps through the Grace Marchant gardens, the wild parrots, and the murals inside Coit Tower. This is a Claude-drafted route awaiting the editor's walk.

1. Filbert Steps — base at Sansome
Start at the bottom, where Filbert Street gives up being a street and becomes a wooden staircase climbing the cliff. Look up; the whole walk is in front of you. Take it slowly — this is the steepest pleasant climb in the city.

2. Grace Marchant Garden
Halfway up, the steps run through gardens one woman spent thirty years planting on what was a rubbish-strewn slope. They're private but kept open; stay on the steps, don't pick anything, and just walk through the green tunnel.

3. Napier Lane
A wooden-plank boardwalk branching off the steps, lined with cottages from before the earthquake. Listen for the wild parrots — a feral flock of cherry-headed conures lives in these trees and screeches over them most afternoons.

4. Pioneer Park
The top of the hill, the green collar around Coit Tower. Catch your breath on a bench under the trees and turn around for the bay you just climbed away from before you go into the tower.

5. Coit Tower murals
Go inside, not just up. The ground-floor walls hold 1934 frescoes painted by Depression-era artists under the New Deal — California labour, city life, a little quiet radicalism that caused a stir at the time. Free to see; the lift up the tower costs.

6. Coit Tower observation deck
Pay for the lift and take the 360 at the top — the bridges, the bay, the grid falling away on every side. Or skip it and keep the view from the base, which is most of the reward. The 39 Coit bus runs back down from the lot.

Telegraph Hill: the steps and the tower