CALIFORNIA
Sam McDonald Park
For this hike we originally were intending to go to Memorial County Park but I discovered upon arrival that park is closed from the fires still. For what it’s worth I wasn’t in charge of planning this hike! But also shame on Google for navigating me all the way there and not telling me it was closed! There was no reception there so I was almost unable to reconnect with my friends. Thankfully the park ranger was nice and told me to use the free Wifi. Sam McDonald Park is only about 3 miles away and a perfectly good backup plan.
The map at the parking lot there has a couple recommended hikes. We were interested in the 5 mile hike that follows Towne Fire Road to Heritage Grove for a nice loop. The map below has the intended route highlighted in yellow, and the way we accidentally went in red…
There’s a hiker’s hut near trail marker 30. We were supposed to go back to reconnect with Heritage Grove, but instead we just kept going on Towne Fire Road. This will take you out of the range of Sam McDonald Park. See this map for full details. Thankfully my phone had GPS and I was able to convince the group to turn back before we wandered too far. We had started around noon and had already walked about four miles.
Normally I would blame the trail markers but actually they’re numbered and it wouldn’t be that hard to stay on track. I do recommend bringing a screenshot of the map on your phone since we didn’t have cell service for long stretches.
Onto the views! For a hike in the Santa Cruz mountains this hike had quite a few meadows which was novel.
But also standard mountains and redwoods which are always lovely. The fire road got surprisingly steep. I was the weakest link in this hiking group and it got pretty tough.
I recently downloaded an app called Seek which lets you take pictures of animals and plants and it will try to identify them for you. I had good success with fungi that doesn’t move, but it was struggling a bit with these wild turkeys.
Unfortunately my Fitbit has been losing steam recently so it was dead for this hike. I estimate we hiked probably 8 miles in total. This park seems like a hidden gem with a lot of hiking trails to explore. Next time we’ll come better prepared!
We were 15 minutes from Alice’s so we went there for our traditional post hike dinner!