Up with the sun the other Sunday, full of spring energy and enthusiasm. A perfect day, I thought, to revisit Mount Tamalpais.

Tamalpais is Marin’s backyard mountain, close to San Francisco and distant at the same time. “The city’s window on the wilderness,” artist Tom Killion calls it.

The Sunday morning traffic was light, and it was easy to drive across the city, across the Golden Gate Bridge and up the winding highway through Tamalpais Valley and up the hill to the Mountain Home, a restaurant and inn on a ridge where Tamalpais begins.

You always feel as if you have gone somewhere when you get to the Mountain Home. On one side is Marin suburbia, on the other the tall redwoods of Muir Woods, and just to the north Mount Tamalpais. It’s not a big mountain, only 2,571 feet above sea level, but it has class and a touch of grace.

Artists have painted it, poets have celebrated Tamalpais in verse, romantics have compared it to a sleeping maiden. It is a mecca for mountain bikes and a haven for wildlife. But most of all, it is a mountain for walking.

So I walked. I’ve roamed Tamalpais since I was a small boy, all over the mountain, to the rocky East Peak, down to the beautiful north side. I’ve been all over the mountain and am always surprised by it. Killion remembers how one afternoon he came face to face with a rattlesnake. One Sunday morning years ago, I came upon a mountain lion. This Sunday, I saw only the first bloomings of wild iris.

I began by walking up a paved road to the Throckmorton Ridge fire station, then up a dirt road to a trail junction. To the left is the Matt Davis Trail, which, if taken to trail’s end, leads over hill and dale 8 miles to the Pacific Ocean at Stinson Beach. It’s a classic Tamalpais trail, built in the 1920s — the golden age of Tamalpais hiking — by Davis himself, a San Francisco man who was a demon trail builder. I saw a picture of him once, a small man with a pack and a rain poncho.

I took the trail for a mile or so, past Fern Creek, which tumbles down a rocky draw. There is a small dam there, once used to tap the creek for drinking water. Around the corner and up a little grade is a miniature redwood forest. The redwoods in Muir Woods are hundreds of feet tall and very old, but these, only a mile away, are short and spare, and close together, as if they were a crowd of teenage trees.

A half mile on, the trail becomes rocky and leads through buckeye, oak and low-brush country.

It is here I once saw the mountain lion. A man running the trail had stopped just ahead. “Look,” he said, “A bobcat.” But it was no bobcat. The animal was a big, beautiful animal with a long tail and a tawny brown coat. It stopped stock still and looked at us with the sort of idle curiosity that cats have. I remember noticing how big the eyes were. It gazed at us for a minute or two then moved on.

That encounter must have been 20 years ago. I had never seen a mountain lion in the wild before and have not seen one since. This lion was less than 20 miles from San Francisco.

“It makes you feel remote from the city so quickly,” poet Gary Snyder wrote about Tamalpais. “Close to San Francisco, yet so far away.”

In a quarter mile, I came to Laurel Creek, a small stream, but a plucky one that runs year round. I took a side path, the Nora Trail. From there, uphill, following the creek, up through the small trees for a half mile up to the West Point Inn.

There are six switchbacks where the trail doubles back on itself. When I was younger, I used to pride myself on steaming up the Nora Trail without stopping, leaving hiking companions in the dust. Older and slower now, I stopped only once, to listen to the silence. There was no wind, no sound. It was as if the 7 million people who live in the Bay Area did not exist.

I remember what Snyder once said when he was camped at Potrero Meadows one May Day: “I advocate the overthrow of all governments by peace and quiet.”

Snyder and Killion wrote a book called “Tamalpais Walking,” words by Snyder, woodcuts of the mountain by Killion. I got the book for Christmas, the season of rain and toyon berries on the mountain. It is a Tamalpais book for all seasons.

At the top of the Nora Trail, I sat on a bench and looked out at the cities around the bay, glistening in the distance. “Tamalpais Walking” quotes a Lew Welch poem about Tamalpais. “This is the last place. There is nowhere else we need to go.”

Carl Nolte’s column appears Sundays. Email: cnolte@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @carlnoltesf