New to the Bay Area

Hello all,
My girlfriend and I will be moving from Chicago to SF in June. I recently learned to lead trad and feel pretty comfortable on 5.4 and 5.5. Just looking for some local input on good beginner crags in the bay area (within a couple of hours) for both trad and sport! Thank you ahead of time for your feedback.

Pinnacles is good for both ~2.5 hours (note: the West side and the East side cannot be connected without an hour car rise or hour + hike over the peaks)

Castlerock's crap for ropes climbing but great bouldering offsets the rangers that hate climbers a bit.
~ 1 hour

Pine Canyon side of Mt Diablo has nice sandstone sport routes. (Good for a day or two max)
Less than 1 Hour

Off-the-radar sport to be had up in St Helena with a long approach buy-in ~1.5 hours

Mickeys Beach is good for a day of sport climbing unless you're into projecting 12+ sport routes. ~1 hour

Auburn Quarry is good sport climbing with a short approach (limited access depending upon the day of the week) 2.5 hours

Tahoe and Yosemite are both 3.5-4 hours away.

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For specifically beginners,
Pinnacles has good beginner sport (check out Corona and/or Flumes Wall Area on the West side) but beignets should not attempt trad there.
Quarry has some beginner sport, maybe more now that development is happening there again.
Mickeys Beach has the Egg formation nearby for a couple short beginner sport routes

Awesome Kevin, thank you very much. Based off of what you told me, any guide books you would recommend? Pinnacles looks like it would be extremely beneficial.

If you just want a nice day with a ton of moderates, many which can have TRs set up without lead climbing, try Table Scraps:

mountainproject.com/v/table…

As mentioned previously, Auburn has quite a few good moderates as well.

mountainproject.com/v/aubur…

Neither has any trad climbing though.

"Bay Area Rock" by Jim Thornburg is a great book with good pics and maps.

"A Climbers Guide to Pinnacles" by Brad Young is your go to book for Pinnacles. Make sure to get the newer brown cover edition as opposed to the older blue cover.

I've also had great luck meeting new people and learning new areas with meetup.com. I was skeptical at first, but so far everyone I've met has been great.

Cheers!

get Thornburg's guidebook.

at that grade, I can only think of first sister at Pinnacles and Table Scraps if you want to lead sport climbs. Table scraps would be a good choice to climb several safe lead climbs in one spot.

The egg at Mickey's Beach would be good too, but kinda runout on the right side 5.6 and weird setting up topropes.

Trad - I'd go to hogsback at lover's leap and start with knapsack crack

also think about getting the supertopo bay area toprope guidebook. Plenty of routes to toprope around here.

Thanks again for your posts. We're finally in the area and moving into our apartment next week. Once settled, it sounds like I need to get some static line for TR, so I was wondering if you guys have any recommendation on footage for the area? I was thinking 50 feet of 10mm...

Sorry, that was poorly worded. I have a 60m x 10.2mm dynamic rope.... I'm referring to the appropriate length of static rope required to extend TR anchors over the edge in this area.