Product Details
Day Hikes Around Orange County

Day Hikes Around Orange County
By Robert Stone

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Product Description

Orange County invites exploration! This southern California county is framed by the Pacific Coast on one side while the Santa Ana Mountains run along its backside, offering incredibly diverse landscape and scenery.

Despite the presence of the Orange County metropolis, nearly 30% of the county's acreage is parklands, wildlife sanctuaries, national forests, and wilderness preserves. Day Hikes Around Orange County is a comprehensive guide to 108 day hikes in and around the county, providing access to these natural, undeveloped areas and hundreds of miles of hiking trails, from the dramatic coastline to the interior mountains and valleys. Residents and travelers will find this 256-page book an essential guide to exploring Orange County. Highlights include magnificent rock formations, bay-side coves and caves, eroding sandstone cliffs, marine terraces, tidal estuaries, peninsulas, mountain peaks, waterfalls, ridge walks, weather-sculpted canyons, old ranch roads, historical ruins, large public parks, and sweeping views from the ocean to the cities.

Each hike includes a detailed map, accurate driving and hiking directions, distance/time/elevation statistics, a list of relevant maps, and summaries to help hikers find a trail appropriate to their ability and desire. Larger overall maps show the hike locations in the greater metropolitan area. All hikes can be completed during the day, and a range of difficulty levels is included. (Map sources and references are included for extending the hikes).

Companion hiking guides in the Day Hike Books series include Day Hikes On The California Southern Coast, Day Hikes Around Los Angeles, and Day Hikes Around Ventura County.

Product Details

  • Amazon Sales Rank: #184096 in Books
  • Published on: 2005-04-01
  • Original language: English
  • Number of items: 1
  • Binding: Paperback
  • 256 pages

Features

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Readers like the concise directions to the trailheads, clear hike descriptions, and comprehensive selection of hikes.”--Bill Becher, Los Angeles Daily News

From the Back Cover

Day Hikes around Orange County is an essential guide to exploring this country's vast tracts of green space. Hikes range from dramatic blufftop walks along the Pacific coastline to cool, quiet retreats within the canyons of the Santa Ana Mountains. Highlights include dramatic rock formations, bay-side coves, sandstone cliffs, tidal estuaries, waterfalls, and sweeping views from the ocean to the mountains.

About the Author

For more than a decade, veteran hiker Robert Stone has been writer, photographer, and publisher of Day Hike Books. Robert has hiked every trail in the Day Hike Book series. With twenty-one hiking guides in the series, many in their second, third, and fourth editions, he has hiked over a thousand trails throughout the western United States and Hawaii. When not hiking, he is researching, writing, and mapping the hikes before returning to the trails. An active member of the Outdoor Writers Association of California and a Los Angeles Times Best Selling Author, he resides summers in the Rocky Mountains of Montana and winters on the California Central Coast.

Customer Reviews

Ok... but not great.....3
I prefer 101 Hikes in Southern California Gary Schad to this one. Origanally I had gotten this one because while I had hiking books about Southern California, I had only a few that were about the local area of Orange County. Honestly, I was very excited to see new places to hike around here, but I was quite disappointed. There are many hikes here in OC that are left out, and only limited references to the many hikes in our various local regional parks. There are no pitures, which I was a little bummed about. It helps for picturing where you are going, and the maps are not defining enough for the pages they take up.
While the book does cover a few interesting places, it covers no more than most other books about hiking in the area that cover all of Southern California.

Big Sky meets Big Urban5
The first Robert Stone books I purchased were hiking guides to Yellowstone National Park and the Beartooth Mountains. Both were nice introductions to an area I had spent relatively little time in as an adult. But like many fans of Montana's Big Sky country, Stone eventually discovered the bitter truth, namely that it is cold as heck during the winter there. He now spends winters in California and subsidizes his stay by writing hiking guides to the West Coast. Not a bad lifestyle.

That said, I hesitated to buy this book since Jerry Schad has done such a wonderful job covering this region that I was afraid I would not find much new material. I could not have been more wrong. This book offers detailed descriptions and trail maps of 108 hikes in and around Orange County, including many along the coast. Palos Verdes, Crystal Cove, and Chino Hills State Park receive much of the coverage of course, but readers will also find routes in out of the way places like little Oak Canyon and the El Dorado Nature Center in Long Beach. Readers will also find many hikes within the boundaries of the Cleveland National Forest.

Most of the hikes in this book are between 1-3 miles in length. A few exceed 7 miles and a couple have options that would give hikers a 10 mile trek. For the most part however, all the hikes in this guide are accessable to most reasonably fit walkers. I've enjoyed all 30 of the hikes I've done in this guide and look forward to doing several more when I get a spring break in April. This book is a winner for all Southern California Walkers.

A great way to get to know the OC5
1 to 10 mi. hikes, easily accessable to all. Easy to follow directions make getting to start by bus, where available, simple.

I look forward to spending 2008 using this book.