Customer Reviews

Hiking the California Coastal Trail, Volume 1: Oregon to Monterey (2nd Edition)

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My husband and I spent three weeks traveling up the California Coast using this guide and it served us very well. For starters it is of no fault of the authors of this book that the coastal trail is still incomplete (i.e. there are sections along the road) This has more to do with the privatization of the CA beaches and the difficulty to get the right-of-way to travel the coast.

Hiking near to a road may not be a wilderness experience but it allows for a more flexible trip, as we were able to make it to the Oregon border through very successful hitchhiking efforts. The coastal trail, unlike some of the more famous wilderness trail allows for a more European type of backpacking that can include an occasional motel and restaurant, consistent grocery shopping, and people to chat with along the way. It is a great opportunity to a more casual hiker to experience a long-distance hike without the isolation. That said there is still plenty of wild spaces as most of the car-bound world is concentrated and it's easy to step away from it.

The maps on this book are at a very walkable scale, unlike any road atlas you might have, this books' maps shows the turns and bends and trailheads at the necessary detail for traveling on foot. When your whole day only makes up a half inch of map, it's pretty hard to navigate.

This book also lists resources for the area including lodging options, park contact information, places where you'll need special permits and places that are difficult to cross on foot. The whole Lost Coast is away from the road and detailed in this book, though additional maps are helpful. This is an invaluable resource for traveling the California coast without a car, something everyone should get the chance to do at least once in life.

This book's content could be summed up in the phrase, hit the road. A California road atlas will provide most of the information offered in this book. The coastal trails, when present, parallel the Pacific Coast Highway, however, most of the "hiking" is walking on roads. Perhaps, the State of California will further develop a "Coastal Range" sojourn that would be detailed in a book such as this. Walking highways is not hiking.