DeLaveaga Park 2015-10-16

A twisted redwood tree

DeLaveaga park  in Santa Cruz offers miles of trails amidst redwood groves, oak woodlands as well as picnic areas and other outdoor amenities for visitors. The main entrance to the park is at 850 Branciforte Dr, Santa Cruz with plenty of parking available. It wouldn't be a bad idea to print a map of the trails before your first visit to the park.

The main parking area is by a large open grass field with several picnic spots surrounding it. A short walk from here led Apollo and me to the trail heads. There are several short trails in the park and the map has a good description of each of them. We started out in the direction marked La Corona, but quickly joined the Sand Pit trail (aka Enchanted trail in the map) heading south. 

Doubling as an unpaved service road, Sand Pit trail is a multi-use trail popular with bikers and dog walkers. The trail weaves through tall and majestic redwoods as it makes it way to the southwest corner of the park.

At the end of the trail is a sand pit where dogs are allowed to be off leash. As always, Apollo was quick to befriend a dog and play chase before spending some quiet time inspecting the sand pit.

From here, we headed back up north, taking the upper arm of the Redwood Lower Loop trail. This is a single track trail that weaves through predominantly redwood trees. This trail joins the Sand Pit trail making it a nice loop in the south side of the park.

We continued up north by La Corona trail. This trail is a double track dirt trail, sometimes going through interesting rock formations. After the junction with Branciforte Creek trail, the climb by La Corona trail is slightly more steep. A ravine by the trail had couple of cars lying in the depths! I wonder how the vehicles got there in the first place!

La Corona trail heads up to "Top of the world" - a vista point, part of the Disc Golf club. There were few folks flexing their arms throwing frisbee by hole 27. It may be called top of the world, but it is only a modest 450 ft. tall hill. 

Heading back, we took the Branciforte Creek trail. This trail quickly climbs down to the creek level. This is an especially nice and scenic location by the creek, with gorgeous redwood groves and trees with very interesting growth patterns.

The trail pretty much parallels Branciforte creek the entire distance before coming up on the athletic playgrounds making this the second loop in our hike today.

Our 5.2 mile hike over about 700-800 feet climb today ended up being very leisurely due to the achilles injury I was nursing. While the official off-leash section was only near the sand pit area, I observed several people were walking their dogs off-leash in most trails.

More pictures from our hike today.
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