Introduction To Field Guide to the San Gabriel Mountains

Please read the brief Introduction to San Gabriel Mountains Sites first.

Purpose of This Site
Introductory Remarks
   How To Use This Site
   Advantages of an Online Guidebook
   Printed SGM Guidebooks and This Site


Purpose of This Site

This site is a field guide to many aspects of the San Gabriel Mountains (SGM). These pages represent many hours of first-hand experience by ourselves and by others in the field. As of 12/29/99, we have written over 100 pages on various topics, such as a bloom identification guide, a guide to the waterfalls of the SGM, and current and historical news. In addition, this site collects and organizes all web information about the SGM written by others, with ~150 such webpages indexed on 12/29/99.

Introductory Remarks

How To Use This Site

This site is organized by subject matter. The main topics covered are:

In addition, there are three related links:

The organization on the main page is simply to make the table more compact by placing topics with similar numbers of subtopics together. The number of subtopics is not necessarily related to the amount of information listed about a given topic. For example, there are 68 points of interest contained within the points of interest topic, but there are no subtopics at all there.

These pages can be used a variety of ways: planning a trip or hike, reading on a rainy day, looking up a topic of interest, comparing your experiences to those of others.

For example, let's say you are interested in a place such as Red Box. Click on Points of Interest on the Field Guide to the SGM page, then pick the place you want, Red Box, from the alphabetical index. All the links we can find plus information we have collected ourselves will be listed on that page.

If you are interested in a particular activity, for example, hiking, you would then click on Activities, then Hiking which will take you to a comprehensive list of the material on the web for the SGM.

Want to know how bad the bugs are? or how windy it might be? Then click on Conditions, then Bug and Snake Reports or Weather. Many weather links are real time.

Did you see a beautiful flower blooming along the trail? Want to know its name? Use Natural History > Plants > Bloom Identification Guide which is our up-to-date record of what's blooming each month along the trails in the mountains.

Be sure to use the Search This Site button if you want to find out everything that is on this site about one topic, for example, the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT).

Advantages of an Online Guidebook

The web provides a wonderful medium for a guidebook to a given area, for a number of reasons:

Printed SGM Guidebooks and This Site

This site has not yet become a full self-contained guidebook to every aspect of the SGM, since that is a mammoth undertaking. Thus by no means does this site replace the large amount of printed information about the SGM. We have compiled a list of Books About the SGM which can be consulted for more information about a given subject.

If you know of any pages containing significant information about the SGM that we haven't linked, or if you find a link that is not working, please let us know. We thank Anthony Sebestyen for bringing a number of these sites to our attention. For bad links, check first the status of links to see if we already know about a problem.

We usually explicitly give the author's name in each link to an external webpage, unless the title of the link itself makes the authorship of that page clear, but give just the title for our own pages. One exception is on the Points of Interest page, which often just has the place names linked, since it would be awkward to write Henninger Flat's Henninger Flats page. If in doubt about the authorship of a given linked page, look at the copyright at the bottom of each page. Our pages always have that information, which also identifies whether a given page was coauthored or written by just one of us.


Go to Field Guide to the San Gabriel Mountains


Copyright © 1996-1999 by Tom Chester and Jane Strong.
Permission is freely granted to reproduce any or all of this page as long as credit is given to us at this source:
http://tchester.org/sgm/site/intro_sgm.html
Comments and feedback: Tom Chester | Jane Strong
Last update: 1 January 2000.