Walking the Ridge Once Again

Rai, your parents are constantly on the lookout for a new trail to hike in the Bay Area. We've walked the famous, the popular, every well-trodden trail dozens of times. Now, it's the unknown, the overgrown and forgotten, the 'secret', off-the-beaten-track trails that we're after. The good news is, we're quite good at finding them.
Our main technique for discovering 'secret' trails is to use Google Maps and search for large, road-less expanses of land. Those places usually have no roads for good reason: they are impossibly steep or wooded and where there are steep hills and forested lands, there are trails. Then comes the hard part: finding a trailhead. Google Maps' satellite feature has proven useful in this regard, but only for finding wider, more maintained trails which can easily be seen as scars in the land. Often the trails we've found this way begin and end in people's yards or on private lands.
That has not deterred us one bit. Just last weekend, I was searching for trails that access Lake Pilarcitos, a 'secret' lake hidden in the mountains south of San Francisco. My search turned up a network of trails that crisscrosses the mountains from the well-known San Andreas and Crystal Springs Reservoirs right across Sweeney Ridge and to Montara and Pacifica on the Ocean side of the ridge.
There were many trailheads, but we chose the one that gave us the quickest access to Lake Pilarcitos. Less than 30 minutes after completing the research and drawing a rough, pencil map we arrived at the end of a dead-end block in Pacifica, parked our car in front of a two-storey home, and looked to where the street dead-ended at a large horse stable. According to our calculations, the trail began behind and to the right of the stable.
We ignored the gate and private property signs and headed inside. The trail was easy to find; it was the horse trail that led from behind the stable, steeply up the hill. Pushing you in your stroller was no easy task but, finally, we made it up to the top of the ridge, connecting with one of our favorites, the Sweeney Ridge trail, at a point along the trail we'd never made it to.
To our dismay, just minutes down the trail, we arrived at a huge fence and locked gate. This, apparently, was the boundary to a Fish and Game Refuge protected by the S.F. Water Department. We had seen a similar fence near the Crystal Springs Reservoir in the past so now we could see that the huge area surrounding the collection of reservoirs was locked up tight. Somewhere in that locked wilderness lay Lake Pilarcitos, the 'secret' lake that was our destination.
On this day, we turned back, disappointed and, on our way back downhill, we came across a warning sign with a sense of humor. At the ridge top beginning of the horse trail that we had hiked up was a sign that read: Private Trail. Violators will be violated and eaten. Nothing fancy. Just BBQ. We laughed, we were scared but, ultimately, we descended the way we had come knowing that we had an impenetrable defense: you. No one would violate and BBQ a baby, right?
On the way back, we also found a rough trail that seemed to lead off into an abyss of poison oak and thick bushes. Investigating, we found that it was a shortcut that bypassed the main fence and led to a single spot in the fence where a tiny hole had been cut out. Here it was, THE spot where intrepid hikers such as ourselves could enter that gated wilderness in secret.
We vowed to return sooner than later and when we do, you'd better be in the mood for being strapped to one of us, little guy. We won't be pushing that stroller up those 40% grades once again, that's for sure!