101 Hikes in Southern California: Exploring Mountains, Seashore, and Desert

by Jerry Schad, David Money Harris

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780899977164
Publisher:	Wilderness Press
Publication date:	09/10/2013
Series:	101 Hikes Series
Edition description:	Third Edition
Pages:	288
Sales rank:	93,521
Product dimensions:	9.02(w) x 5.94(h) x 0.58(d)

About the Author

Jerry Schad's several careers encompassed interests ranging from astronomy and teaching to photography and writing. Schad was the author of 15 books, including a college-level textbook for introductory physical science courses and the top-selling Afoot & Afield series of hiking guidebooks that cover nearly all of Southern California. Schad’s outdoor column, “Roam-O-Rama,” was published weekly in the San Diego Reader 1993–2011, and his San Diego Reader blog, “Outdoor San Diego,” kept San Diegans up-to-date on a variety of natural events in the sky and on earth. In the months preceding his death at age 61 from kidney cancer, Schad worked tirelessly and with courageous joy and spirit to complete his last book 50 Best Short Hikes San Diego.

David Harris grew up rambling about the Desolation Wilderness as a toddler in his father’s pack and later roamed the High Sierra as a Boy Scout. As a Sierra Club trip leader, he organized mountaineering trips throughout the Sierra Nevada. For the past 15 years, he has explored the mountains and deserts of Southern California. David teaches Engineering at Harvey Mudd College. He is the author of Day & Section Hikes Pacific Crest Trail: Southern California, and coauthor of Afoot & Afield Inland Empire and the 6th edition of San Bernardino Mountain Trails. He lives with his wife and 3 sons in Upland, CA.

Read an Excerpt

EXCERPTS

HIKE 4

Sandstone Peak
Location: Circle X Ranch (Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area)
Highlights: Most inclusive view in the Santa Monicas and volcanic rock formations
Distance: 6 miles (loop)
Total Elevation Gain/Loss: 1,400'/1,400'
Hiking Time: 3½ hours
Optional Maps: Trails Illustrated Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area or USGS 7.5-minute Triunfo Pass and Newbury Park
Best Times: October–June
Agency: SMMNRA
Difficulty: Moderately strenuous
Trail Use: Dogs allowed

Sandtone Peak is the quintessential destination for peak baggers in the Santa Monica Mountains. The 3,111-foot summit can be efficiently climbed from the east via the Backbone Trail in a mere 1.5 miles, but the far more scenic way to go is the loop outlined below. Take a picnic lunch, and plan to make a half day of it. Try to come on a crystalline day in late fall or winter to get the best skyline views. Or, if it’s wildflowers you most enjoy, come in April or May, when the native vegetation blooms most profusely at these middle elevations. In addition to blue-flowering stands of ceanothus, the early- to mid spring floral bloom includes monkey flower, nightshade, Chinese houses, wild peony, wild hyacinth, morning glory, and phacelia. Delicate, orangish Humboldt lilies unfold by June. Beware of poison oak growing alongside the trail.

Sandstone Peak lies within Circle X Ranch, formerly owned by the Boy Scouts of America and now a federally managed unit of the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area. The National Park Service generously provides free trail maps at the trailhead.

To Reach the Trailhead:
The Sandstone Peak Trailhead is located near the western end of the Santa Monica Mountains, a few miles (by crow’s flight) south of Thousand Oaks. From the Pacific Coast Highway near mile marker 1 VEN 1.00, turn north onto Yerba Buena Rd. and proceed 6.4 miles. Or from US 101 in Thousand Oaks, take CA 23 south for 7.2 miles. Turn right (west) on Mulholland Highway, then in 0.4 mile turn right again onto Little Sycamore Canyon, which soon becomes Yerba Buena Road and reaches the trailhead in 4.5 miles. On either approach, you face a white-knuckle drive on paved, but very narrow and curvy roads.

Description:
Start hiking at the large parking lot on the north side of Yerba Buena Road, 1.1 miles east of the Circle X Ranch park office. Proceed on foot past a gate and up a fire road 0.3 mile to where the marked Mishe Mokwa Trail branches right. On it, right away you plunge into tough, scratchy chaparral vegetation.

The hand-tooled route is delightfully primitive, but it requires frequent maintenance so as to keep the chaparral from knitting together across the path. Both your hands and your feet will come into play over the next 40 or 50 minutes as you’re forced to scramble a bit over rough-textured outcrops of volcanic rock. You make intimate acquaintance with mosses and ferns and several of the more attractive chaparral shrubs: toyon, hollyleaf cherry, manzanita, and red shanks (also known as ribbonwood), which is identified by its wispy foliage and perpetually peeling, rust-colored bark. You also pass several small bay trees. After about a half hour on the Mishe Mokwa Trail, keep an eye out for an amazing balanced rock that rests precariously on the opposite wall of the canyon that lies just below you.

By 1.7 miles from the start you will have worked your way around to the north flank of Sandstone Peak, where you suddenly come upon a picnic table shaded beneath glorious oaks beside Split Rock, a fractured volcanic boulder with a gap wide enough to walk through (please do so to maintain the Scouts’ tradition).

An unmaintained trail on the right leads to Balanced Rock, but you continue on the vestiges of an old dirt road that crosses the canyon and turns west (upstream). You pass beneath some hefty volcanic outcrops, and at 3.1 miles come to a signed junction and turn left onto the Backbone Trail toward Sandstone Peak. Pass some water tanks on the right and an unsigned service road up to the tanks. Shortly thereafter, a sign on the right indicates a side trail to Inspiration Point. It takes you about 50 yards to the top of a rock outcrop. The direction finder there indicates local features as well as very distant points such as Mount San Antonio (Old Baldy), Santa Catalina Island, and San Clemente Island.

Press on with your ascent. At a point just past two closely spaced hairpin turns in the wide Backbone Trail, make your way up a slippery path to Sandstone Peak’s windswept top. The plaque on the summit block honors W. Herbert Allen, a longtime benefactor of the Scouts and Circle X Ranch. To the Scouts this mountain is Mount Allen, although cartographers have, so far, not accepted that name. In any event, the peak’s real name is misleading. It, along with Boney Mountain and most of the western crest of the Santa Monicas, consists of beige- and rustcolored volcanic rock, not unlike sandstone when seen from a distance.

On a clear day the view is truly amazing from here, with distant mountain ranges, the hazy L.A. Basin, and the island-dimpled surface of the ocean occupying all 360 degrees of the horizon. To complete the loop, return to the Backbone Trail and resume your travel eastward. Descend a twisting 1.5 miles to return to the trailhead.