Coyote, San Jose, CA

Coyote is the part of San Jose most people forget the city even owns: the rural valley at the far south end, where the tract homes give out and the land goes back to farms, ranches and open grassland along Coyote Creek and the Monterey Road and Highway 101 corridor. After years of development fights, much of it has been deliberately protected from building, with open-space preserves rising into the hills on either side and the valley floor kept in agriculture. Homes are few and far apart, mostly farmhouses and rural properties set among fields and ranch land. Much of the valley floor and the hills on both sides are protected from building, so the view from most porches is ridgelines and pasture rather than rooftops. Getting outside is the whole point of living out here. On the west side, the Coyote Valley Open Space Preserve has the Arrowhead Loop, which winds past serpentine outcrops and oak woodland with views of Mount Hamilton and Mount Umunhum, and birders come for the golden eagles. Across the valley, the ridge preserve called Máyyan 'Ooyákma carries a long stretch of the regional Ridge Trail through serpentine grassland. Down on the valley floor, a paved trail follows the creek north toward Hellyer County Park, with a trailhead lot beside the small lake on Monterey Road. Recreation on the flat land leans practical. A golf club runs two full courses, the Tournament and the Valley, and a sporting clays range nearby has skeet and trap fields for anyone who shoots. Errands take a car and a little planning. There is no neighborhood shopping, so the drive for groceries heads north into the city or south to Morgan Hill. Breakfast out usually means heading up to Bill's Cafe on Cottle Road, and the nearest coffee worth the trip is Con Azucar Cafe on Silver Creek Valley Road, a fair drive north, known for its horchata espresso, spiced chocolate lattes and conchas. It is less a neighborhood than a landscape, best understood as farmland and open space with a scattering of homes. For anyone whose picture of San Jose is sidewalks and shopping centers, this is the deliberate opposite of that, and for a small number of people that is exactly the point.