Sierra Azul
February 2023
The Bay Area makes legal backpacking very challenging. Fortunately, it makes illegal backpacking fairly easy. Instead of planning six months ahead to purchase a lottery ticket for a campsite or overnight permit for one of the few legal backpacking spots in the area, Anthony, Noe and I decided to romp around the Sierra Azul Preserve between Campbell and Santa Cruz. We started from a transit hub in town and walked along relatively urban footpaths that took us to the Lexington Reservoir.
As usual, all the photos are by Anthony.
From here the route became more remote as we ascended into the Sierra Azul Wilderness. I was surprised at the wildness of this area, given that we were so close to town. Wide fire roads made for easy travel, though some parts were quite steep. Nonetheless we attained the ridge around sunset. We found a nice lookout to sleep at, though a cold dew soaked our bags overnight and we all had trouble sleeping due to this fact. After maybe a couple hours of good sleep, and many hours of miserable shivering, the sun rose and we started walking. Moving our bodies warmed us up considerably, and we shortly forgot about our chilly night entirely.
Our next objective was Mt. Umunhum, the tallest peak in the Santa Cruz mountains. The climb was extraordinarily circuitous, winding its way around the entire peak before finally gaining the summit. We debated bushwhacking straight up Umunhum’s northern ridge, but Anthony remembered reading a trip report from Bob Burd that advised against this.
On the summit we were greeted by expansive views of the Bay Area, as well as a close look at the huge rectangular monolith that sits on the peak. This structure once served as a radar tower to detect hostile aircraft during the Cold War. We enjoyed the summit for a while, and eventually cracked on to the east.
On our descent we were joined by a nice guy named Evan. He worked for the county and was also a solid outdoorsman. We hiked with him for several hours and eventually parted, not before exchanging contact information. Soon we dropped precipitously into the Almaden Valley where we jogged across town to Santa Teresa Park. The route went up and over this minor range and then dropped into town where we caught the train back to Campbell.
We saw a lot of degeneracy on the train (guys taking off their clothes, on man passing out on the floor, a lady screaming as she was removed from the train, a cracked out man laying out clothes from his suitcase to sell to the public, a homeless man accosting a woman with her newborn child, and another angrily trying to break the train windows from outside since he missed boarding). This all provided us with good entertainment, but I perhaps would not have taken it so jovially if I was commuting with a small child or elderly relative. Welcome to the Bay, home to enough bureaucratic efficiency to make legal backpacking impossible, but enough bureaucratic inefficiency to keep the public transportation steeped in complete degeneracy.
