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
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:
- General Information
- Activities
- Current conditions
- History
- Misc. SGM information
- Natural History
- Points of Interest
- The neighboring San Bernardino and San Jacinto Mountains,
- A list of analysis pages at this site, and
- A list of pages related to this site.
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:
- An online guidebook can be much more up to date than any printed guidebook could ever be. The SGM may have existed in nearly their present form for millions of years, but many changes occur each year from fire, weather, rules and regulations, and other human acts. An online guidebook can provide the latest information with essentially no delay at all.
- An online guidebook can be much more comprehensive and authoritative than any printed guidebook. It isn't practical to publish a 5 volume, 1000 page tome containing complete information about every aspect of the SGM. Guidebooks by necessity have to narrow the scope one way or the other. An online guidebook has essentially no such space restrictions.
A guidebook that incorporates webpages authored by others takes advantage of the expertise of a large number of authors, a tremendous resource in providing very comprehensive information. Geologists, biologists, historians, etc. provide expert pages in far more volume than any printed guidebook could ever contain.
A guidebook that organizes information put online by others makes that information more valuable. More and more sites contain information about the SGM, but it is very difficult to wade through search engine outputs to find the specific information about the SGM when you want it. Further, it is quite difficult to search for information that you do not even know exists.
- Another major advantage coming from the webpages of others and input from readers is the diverse viewpoints offered on a given subject. A single author guidebook draws only on the experiences of that author, and there is no room for diverse viewpoints. On the web, reader comments can be placed online to give a different perspective on a subject. (See for example, the new Fish Canyon Trail.)
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.