Southern California Adventure Hikes
These Hikes Are By Nature Potentially Dangerous – Read Adventure Hiking Page and Disclaimer
The map and table included below contain all the Southern California Adventure hikes from the different areas covered on this site.
One of the primary reasons we are drawn to the mountains is the potential for solitude and tranquility – but also the thrill of adventure. A place where one can commune with nature and the universe – but also experience the exhilaration inherent in exploration of the unknown. Southern California has many beautiful and rugged mountain ranges that afford numerous opportunities for adventure. Fortunately the majority of these areas have been conserved as National Forest or protected by some other designation. Because of this, and partially as a legacy of the Civilian Conservation Corps efforts in the 1930’s, these areas have been provided with a surprisingly extensive system of maintained trails. Most hikes, especially those that are found in guidebooks and on web sites, are on these maintained trails. This makes sense of course, since many are quite beautiful, well-conceived, and immensely enjoyable.
But these trail hikes cover only a relatively very small portion of the areas they traverse. There exist other places of extraordinary beauty that can be accessed with some additional knowledge and conditioning. These can only be reached as adventure hikes and are in areas visited infrequently by man. Note that the tradeoff is that typically there is no trail, and thus no defined trail head, so they are usually harder to find and sometimes difficult and dangerous to negotiate. But if this was not true, everyone would be there, right?
If you are truly searching for solitude in nature, for a taste of the pristine wilderness that once covered our entire earth, know that it is still to be found. Make sure to read the Adventure Hiking Page, which will explain some of the concepts and dangers of adventure hiking. Then peruse the hikes contained below, find one that appeals to you, and go for it. Fear of the unknown encapsulates most people in self-made prisons, and the sense of liberation and personal empowerment that can be achieved through adventure hiking is exhilarating.
