About this Third Edition
Just beyond the limits of Southern California’s ever-spreading urban sprawl lies a world apart. In snippets of open space here and in sprawling wilderness areas there, California’s primeval landscape survives more or less untarnished. In hundreds of hidden places just over the urban horizon (and sometimes within the cities themselves), you can still find nature’s radiant beauty unfettered—or at least not too seriously
compromised—by human intervention.
101 Hikes in Southern California was originally written by Jerry Schad, the grandmaster of Southern California hiking guidebooks. Unequaled in his knowledge of the region’s wild places and in enviable physical condition, Jerry was abruptly diagnosed with kidney cancer in 2011 and passed away in the same year. At his request, David Money Harris revised this book to keep it up to date with changing conditions. He has endeavored to retain Jerry’s lively writing and insightful descriptions while reflecting recent changes, rendering the driving directions as unambiguous as possible, and adding GPS coordinates for the trailheads.
Harris has physically walked every trail in this book to ensure that the information contained herein is up to date. Based on this fieldwork, he has replaced 17 of the hikes covered in the second edition with outstanding substitutes. Seven of these hikes were closed or rendered inaccessible by fire. Two had access issues due to private property. The road to one had deteriorated to the point that it was impassable by stock fourwheel-drive vehicles. The others had become brushy, poorly defined, or simply less interesting than nearby trails.
Excerpts:
Southern California sits astride one of Earth’s most significant structural features—the San Andreas Fault. For more than 10 million years, earth movements along the San Andreas and neighboring faults have shaped the dramatic topography evident throughout the region today. The very complexity of the shape of the land has spawned a variety of localized climates. In turn, the varied climates, along with the diverse topography and geology, have resulted in a remarkably plentiful and diverse array of plant and animal life.
Living on the active edge of a continent has advantages and disadvantages that cannot be untangled. Like the proverbial silver lining in a dark cloud, the rumpled beauty of our youthful, ever-changing coastline, mountains, and desert redresses the ever-present threat of earthquakes, fires, and floods.
Because much of Southern California is physically rugged, not all of it has succumbed to the plow or the bulldozer. When you’ve had the pleasure of hiking beside a crystal-clear mountain stream minutes from downtown L.A. or cooling off in the spray of a cottonwood-fringed waterfall just beyond suburban San Diego, you’ll realize that not many regions in the world offer so great a variety of natural pleasures to a population of many millions.
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