The Santa Cruz Mountains Trail Book

By Tom Taber

Book Overview

Guide to the parks and trails of the Santa Cruz Mountains in California. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0960917063
• ISBN13: 9780960917068
• Release Date: December 1997
• Publisher: Oak Valley Press
• Length: 222 Pages
• Weight: 0.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.5" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

An excellent resource

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.

Great Book for People in Bay Area

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.

Review of the 10th edition

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.

Definitive guide to mountains of the San Francisco Peninsula

There is no other guidebook focusing on the coastal mountains immediately south of the city of San Francisco, a rich mosaic of open-space preserves. Taber's diligent research and love of the area make this an essential reference

A great choice for walkers in the bay area

This is a great book for people living (or intending to visit) the bay area, who like to go hike, bike, picnic and camp.I've bought several books in the past, but this one covers a lot more of the trails in the area and with better detail. It tells you if trails are open to bikes and/or horses, talks about the camping facilities, details how long a walk you will have and the types of things you can expect to see out there. There are also little sections on the local history, how the geology stuff works and many more useful snippets of info.Definately the best book I've found for picking places to go walk, but then, it is somewhat targetted to the area where I live.