Introduction to
Hikes In San Diego County
Site

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Note three important caveats:

• This site is not nearly as comprehensive for San Diego County as is my San Gabriel Mountain (SGM) hiking site. It will be some years, if ever, before it achieves a measure of completeness.

• This site is currently being slowly transferred from its previous home, which was a Fallbrook-centered site, and made into a San Diego County-oriented site. Until this notice is removed, some content remains available only at the previous site. The first page was created here on 3/1/00. I transfer pages by area, usually only after I have hiked recently in that area, and rework the pages before transferring them. Hence this process will take some time.

• Some of the information linked here is contained within the SGM hiking site. The links on those pages won't take you back to this site.

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Purposes of This Site
Introductory Remarks
   Advantages of an Online Hiking Guidebook
   Printed San Diego County Hiking Guidebooks and This Site
   How To Use This Site

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Purposes of This Site

This site has four main purposes:

• To maintain a comprehensive list of all the hiking trails in areas of San Diego County where I frequently hike, and the hikes using combinations of those trails.

• To collect and organize all the web information available on these trails, and current trail information submitted by readers.

• To present information from my own hikes in this area, including detailed trip logs including hiking times, mileages and altitudes at various points along each trail.

• To gradually add comprehensive information about every included trail, including a map of the trailhead, a description of the highlights of each trail, current trail condition, a plot of altitude versus distance, and a description of the views from the trail.

The site also includes:

• analysis pages related to hiking such as the accuracy of trail mileages, tables of distances and elevations to various peaks as seen from each other, and information about expected temperatures at various altitudes at various times of year; and

• collections of information related to hiking such as a list of deaths from outdoor activities and a list of all mountain lion attacks in California.

Introductory Remarks

Advantages of an Online Hiking Guidebook

The web provides a wonderful medium for a hiking guidebook, for a number of reasons:

• An online guidebook can be much more up to date than any printed guidebook could ever be. Trails change, conditions change, rules and regulations change, yet guidebooks are often 5 or more years out of date. Any guidebook that contains 100 trails or more will be out of date by at least a year for at least some trails even the moment it is published, since it takes considerable time to hike 100 trails. (It takes a full year of weekends to hike 100 trails, averaging one trail per day.)

  An online guidebook can provide the latest information about a given trail with essentially no delay at all. Further, with feedback from readers, current information can be provided about nearly all the trails at once, an impossible task for a single author.

• 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 all the trails. Guidebooks by necessity have to eliminate trails or cut their descriptions. 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 hikers and other 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 hiking trail information, but it is very difficult to wade through search engine outputs to find the trail information when you want it. Further, it is quite difficult to search for a trail 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 trail or 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 trail or subject.

Printed San Diego County Hiking Guidebooks and This Site

This site has not yet become a full self-contained guidebook. There is no reason to duplicate the excellent guidebooks that currently exist to San Diego County. Instead, this site builds upon those guidebooks as a foundation. In return, this site provides updates and corrections to those guidebooks to extend their useful lifetime and make the books more valuable. In addition, many of the hike descriptions provide valuable feedback to others for places where it was difficult to follow a guidebook author's instructions.

The Bible of hiking for San Diego County is Jerry Schad's Afoot and Afield in San Diego County, 3^rd edition, 1998, 367 pages, published by Wilderness Press. It is the only comprehensive guide devoted solely to San Diego County. Jerry Schad published the first edition in 1986 and the second edition in 1992.

Other guidebooks include:

• 60 Hikes Within 60 Miles: San Diego by Sheri McGregor, Menasha Ridge Press, November 2004. I haven't seen the book yet, but Sheri delayed her book in order to redo all the descriptions of trails burned in the extensive 2003 fires, so this is the book to consult for the latest printed trail information.

• Walking San Diego by Lonnie Burstein Hewitt and Barbara Coffin Moore, The Mountaineers, 1989, has additional hikes with complete descriptions.

• Day Hiker's Guide to Southern California, vol. I and II, by John McKinney, Olympus Press, 1987 and 1989, also has additional hikes with complete descriptions.

• California Hiking by Tom Stienstra and Michael Hodgson, Foghorn Press, 1995, is an encylopedic compilation of 1,000 hikes all over California, which has a few trails not found in Schad's book. However, the descriptions are very brief and the maps very large-scale, by necessity.

• 101 Hikes in Southern California, by Jerry Schad, 1996, Wilderness Press.

If you know of any other books with good local hiking information, please email me.

Many of the trip logs I write up for hikes contained in those books are supplemental to those books, and I encourage you to take one of those books (if the hike is covered by one) and the appropriate USGS Topo map on hikes you are not familiar with.

How To Use This Site

The left hand side of the table on the main page gives the areas within San Diego County that are covered by this site. (Zero as of 3/3/00, since they are awaiting transfer from the old site!)

The right hand side of the table contains:

• general hiking information, such as a bloom identification guide, current trail conditions and weather predictions;

• some analyses I have done related to hiking such as the accuracy of trail mileages, tables of distances and elevations to various peaks as seen from each other, and information about expected temperatures at various altitudes at various times of year; and

• collections of information related to hiking such as deaths from outdoor activities and a list of all mountain lion attacks in California.

• Information About This Site. All files except the update log are in common with the SGM site and hence are under that URL:
  • an Abbreviations and Sources page that defines the abbreviations used for phrases and sources of some of the information presented here;
  • a Definitions page, giving definitions of some words or phrases; and
  • a Style Sheet page, containing information about the style for the composition of the pages here. One item to note: we have intentionally not formatted our pages to occupy only a portion of a typical screen. I recommend that each reader size their browser window themselves to read the pages more easily.
  • an Update Log, giving a record of what was added to both sites on a given day;

This site has no connection with any company or organization, and result from the personal work of the author, as well as the volunteer input from readers credited either on the page with their input or on the acknowledgements page for each site. The referenced links are also mostly the result of volunteer effort by many different webauthors, although a few referenced pages come from commercial efforts. No endorsement of any kind is implied by the existence of a link from these pages, other than our belief that there is some useful information contained within those links.

It is a misconception held by some people that webauthors somehow get a fee for every reader who accesses a webpage. This is true only for some commercial sites supported by advertising. In fact, in most cases, webauthors pay money to put their pages online and make it available to the public. Fortunately, the amount of money for a site like this is small, $275 per year for this site. In comparison, since the page charges for many major scientific journals are ~$100 per printed page, my SGM site alone would cost ~$20,000, making the dollar costs of a website essentially negligible!

Go to:

• Hikes in San Diego County
• Table of Contents for all of Tom's webpages.