Customer Reviews

The Santa Cruz Mountains Trail Book

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

It says a lot about a book that it is continuously in print and updated for 30 years. This edition, the 10th and printed in 2006, preserves the nice features of previous editions and also offers the author's reflections upon what remains to be done for conservation and recreation in the Santa Cruz Mountains.

The general format of the book has not changed. Every county park, state park, open space preserve, or land otherwise available to public access in the Santa Cruz mountains is described (in alphabetical order) with special attention to the hiking opportunities in each. Trail descriptions are a bit sparse, but Tabor includes a decent map of each area to allow you to find your own way. The book is also chock full of "Special Sections" which detail local and natural history and also discuss such practical matters as where you can actually walk a dog in this part of the distinctively 'canine unfriendly' Bay Area.

Tabor's suggestions for the future of the Santa Cruz Mountains are worth noting. He urges the construction of more campgrounds and backcountry trail sites, an absolute necessity. It is almost impossible to get camping reservations on weekends. He also suggests practical ways to extend trail systems and increase the salmon and steelhead runs in mountain streams. I'm less sympathetic to his demand that the gun club near Castle Rock be shut down. I'm not a gun owner, but I never felt I was near a "war zone" when visiting this state park. In my opinion, antagonizing outdoor sportsmen will not promote conservation, but I could be wrong on this. On the whole though, this book is an excellent guide to the region and hopefully it will inspire more efforts at conservation and preservation in the area.

I'm really surprised at the number of 5 star ratings here. I was going to give this book 2 stars, but tried to squeeze more out of the book, putting in more effort, and finally decided on 3, max.

While the focus is on trails to a degree, it's also about the parks. It's not geared toward a hiker who wants to plan in advance, wants to know changes in elevation, if the trail is mostly exposed to sun or not, and also mileage on all trails. Mileage is given in many cases, but for instance, the author author describes one as a "short trail". Is that 500 feet, or 2 miles? What's a short trail? Some trail maps have mileage, some don't, or mileage is missing from some legs. There are also typos too, the kind that spell-check won't catch. I expected a list of trails by length, and a list of trails by area. The book's table of contents is based on parks, it seems.

I do like little features like the page that shows what certain animal footprints look like, and I like the little anecdotal notes here and there. But, even though it's been updated it's still not a clean read.

We live in Bay Area and have been using 9th edition of this book for several years exploring Santa Cruz Mountains. It has been a great experience!

The book has a map of Santa Cruz Mountains at the beginning of it, with the parks marked on the map and the list of the park names. There are pictures for you to get an idea of the area, and very good educational description of the park.

I'm an avid hiker as well as a plant geek by choice and profession. This book stays in my car with me for a quick reference of new plant communities to explore and butt kicking hikes to endure. Overall a lovely compact book jam packed with information including maps of hiking trails for 73 different parks, natural and local history, inside scoop of the best times of year to check out specific parks and what makes each place and region unique plus tons of special sections including wildlife tracks, dog friendly parks, and interesting articles on local gems such as the San Andreas Fault, ancient marine terraces and tafoni. I highly recommend this book as it has not only introduced me to many places I would have otherwise never visited, but also gotten me out of some trouble- buried deep within my backpack the easy to read maps have re-oriented me and a group of hikers that got lost chasing butterflies. Keep in mind it is compact and concise- so some vignettes are just that- a quick crash course in redwoods, mountain lions or a particular state/county park- but it's just enough to steer you to a fun day trip adventure. Great great great! I just wish they had volumes for the central and northern coast too!

The Santa Cruz Mountain Trail Book is concise, well-written, accurate, well-organized, and comprehensive. Tom Taber has done an excellent job of providing the right information on city, county, and state hiking trails of the peninsula, from south of San Francisco to Santa Cruz, and from highway 101 to the ocean -- an invaluable resource.

There can't be many living places on Earth more desirable for dedicated hikers than Santa Cruz, California. The weather is suitable for hiking all year, if you don't mind a warm drizzle sometimes. It's never too hot or too cold to hike. You can take your choice of blue skies or gray nearly every day, or of flat versus steep, sun-drenched or shady, and best of all, of coastal bluffs and beaches or forested canyons. The possible thrills include giant redwoods, elephant seals, bright yellow 8-inch banana slugs, visible earthquake faults, natural bridges, teeming tide-pools, gorgeous waterfalls unspoiled by automobile access, as much solitude and silence as you choose. You can set out on foot from the town of Santa Cruz, or from the campus of UC Santa Cruz, and find yourself on a different spectacular trail day after day, or you can drive a quarter hour and have access to hundreds of miles of trails ranging from abandoned roads and railways to unmaintained scrambles. There are hundreds of miles of fat-tire bike routes and equestrian trails also. And there are flowers to be 'grokked' in every season, every month. No one has ever exhausted the hiking opportunities of the Santa Cruz mountains, if only because new parks and preserves are constantly being opened. I used this trail guide many times over the years; my copy of it is the Seventh Edition, published in 1994. It's mostly maps and text, useful for locating trailheads. A detailed trail map of the region is probably more useful in the long run, but this book will get you on your legs.

Santa Cruz is a big town of about 60,000, in the middle of a flourishing agricultural region, separated from the true Bay Area cities of San Jose and San Francisco by long drives on two-lane roads. The town has always been a tourist attraction, with a busy 'boardwalk' on the beach; now it's also a 'college town', but the university doesn't dominate it as universities dominate towns like Amherst or Madison. Although it has an accurate reputation as a bastion of "liberal" voting, in many ways it's a typical American big town: lots of churches, lots of shoe-string businesses, plenty of bars, blocks lined with small detached houses and a few dug-in trailer parks. Not much conspicuous wealth, a 'working poor' community with average unemployment, primarily a "white" population with an influx of Latinos to do the jobs that pay less than welfare, most people probably between the 'poverty level' and the 'average family income'. A nice place to bring up kids, although like most American big towns it has its problems ...

One trail not indexed or described in this book, however, is the officially marked "San Lorenzo Riverway", which runs through the center of Santa Cruz from the ocean to the suburban development called "Paradise" and then up into Henry Cowell State Park. It's part paved bike path, part dirt, on both sides of the stream. I found it by chance, starting from the hotel where I'm staying just to take a walk after the World Cup final, heading upstream to see how far the path would go. Much to my surprise, it went farther and got stranger than I foresaw. Past the downtown cross streets, the San Lorenzo Riverway quickly becomes the Main Street of Homelessness. There are homeless camps under every bridge. There are scores, maybe hundreds, of down-and-outers, of all ages and all states of mental competence, nearly all white males but including some women, all living on the bounty of garbage cans and picnickers' litter, almost certainly all uncounted in the recent census. The farther upstream you hike, the trashier the path becomes, until it approaches "Third World" ugliness. What starts as a stroll through tranquillity turns into a trudge through cultural catastrophe. Whereas Haight Street in the 1960s was a boulevard of psychedelic utopian illusions, the San Lorenzo Riverway today is a slough of substance-abusive dystopian disillusionment. This is a human population that no longer expects anything from America or shares any segment of the American Dream.

I stopped when I came to the heavily-overgrown upper reaches of the Riverway, where I could see cardboard sleeping palettes under every clump of bushes. I was too well-dressed, with my iPod and Grado headphones and my new Chicago Cubs sweatshirt. This afternoon I'm going "in", wearing my rattiest T-shirt and jeans, carrying just one piece of ID and no cash. If this turns out to be my last amazon review, you'll know that I've unexpectedly found "meaning" in the midst of meaninglessness.

I can't but agreee with the other reviews--this is a thorough and entertaining examination of the trails winding through the entire range of the Santa Cruz Mountains. Granted, some of the descriptions are terse, but unless one wants to publish a book the size of an unabridged dictionary, something has to give.

Unfortunately, as I am a staunch proponent of the Second Amendment, the author's curt two-sentence demand to close what may be the only rifle range in easy reach of Silicon Valley left a bad taste in my mouth and somewhat poisons my enjoyment of the book. No mention is made of road noise (a considerably greater nuisance), of alternatives to unconditional closure, of the range's shorter hours compared to the trails, or that the range has a perfect safety record, unlike the trails and roads around it. All the other "wish-list" items in the introduction, on the other hand, are lengthy paragraphs-long explications with supporting arguments. To answer another reviewer's implicit question: yes, this definitely would alienate many outdoorsmen and as a result very well could impair conservation efforts.