Hiking Routes With Mileages and Altitude Gains
A Preliminary GPS Map of all the routes at the Reserve. Later this year, I will start adding individual trail maps and descriptions.
An excellent Map of the Hiking Trails is now available at the official SRP site.
Jim Grattan's reproduction of the older official trail map (hard to read, but shows everything except the new Sylvan Ranch Acquisition).
A 2002 USGS Aerial Photograph from the Microsoft Terraserver, showing the entire Santa Rosa Plateau Ecological Reserve. Here is a zoom of the main vernal pool.
You can scroll the pictures using the green arrows along the edge to see the rest of the Reserve, or click on a location to recenter the picture and zoom in on a location.
A recent satellite view of the main vernal pool is given by Google, and has amazing detail. You can see individual trees! Simply drag the mouse in whatever direction you want the map to scroll. You can "hike" any trail and see what it looks like from a satellite!
The Google maps are recent! They show the driveway bulldozed across from the vernal pool trailhead, as well as the new house at the corner of Los Gatos and Via Volcano, complete with their horribly-out-of-place palm trees lining their driveway.
The Santa Rosa Plateau Reserve used to be featured as the "Best Wildflower Hike" on the Los Angeles Times web site, but they have removed all the hike writeups by Jerry Schad. See his 101 Hikes in Southern California published by Wilderness Press.
Note two updates since Schad's description and map was published. First, the hike as described can no longer be done, since the entrance used for the start and end of the hike is now closed. Second, there is a new trail on the western side of the Reserve, with a new parking lot about one mile west of the former main entrance.
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Copyright © 1996-2005 by Tom Chester.
Permission is freely granted to reproduce any or all of this page as long as credit is given to me at this source:
http://tchester.org/srp/hikes/index.html
Comments and feedback: Tom Chester
Updated 28 June 2005.
