Ask people why they love living in the Santa Cruz Mountains and they’ll usually start with the house or the quiet. Stay a while, though, and the real answer comes out: it’s the weekends. When your backyard is one of the most beautiful stretches of forest in California, Saturday looks different. Here’s how we spend it.
Walk among the giants
You don’t have to drive far to stand under thousand-year-old trees. Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park in Felton is the everyday favorite — its 40-acre old-growth grove is genuinely awe-inspiring, and the Redwood Grove Loop is a flat, easy 0.8-mile stroll that a toddler or a grandparent can do. Want to earn a view? The Observation Deck trail climbs about four miles to the highest point in the park, and over in the Fall Creek unit, the Lime Kilns loop winds five quiet miles past old lime kilns and along the creek.
Deeper in, Big Basin Redwoods State Park — California’s oldest state park — is writing one of the most moving comeback stories in the state. Hit hard by the 2020 CZU fire, it reopened for day use in 2022 and now offers around twenty miles of fire roads and a growing network of trails, including stretches of the famous Skyline-to-the-Sea and the beloved Redwood Loop. Watching this forest regenerate, year over year, is something you can only really appreciate by living nearby and going back. Reservations are required, and it’s worth planning ahead.
Ride the steam train
Right next to Henry Cowell sits Roaring Camp Railroads, and it never gets old — authentic 1880s steam locomotives that climb through the redwoods on one line, and a vintage beach train that runs all the way down to the Santa Cruz Boardwalk on another. It’s the kind of thing you take visiting relatives to once and then find yourself doing again, just for you, because chuffing through a redwood forest behind a real steam engine is pure joy at any age.
Taste the mountains
The Santa Cruz Mountains are a serious wine region — one of California’s oldest, recognized since the 1870s — with more than 80 wineries and 200 growers scattered across the ridges. The cool marine air and high-elevation vineyards produce elegant pinot noir, chardonnay, and cabernet, and because these are mostly small, family-run operations, there’s a good chance the person pouring your glass is the one who made the wine. A lazy afternoon of tasting rooms tucked into the hills is one of the great local pleasures.
And when you want the ocean
Here’s the quiet luxury of these mountains: the beach is right there. From most of the valley you’re half an hour from Santa Cruz — the Boardwalk, the wharf, the surf breaks, the tide pools. Mountain people become expert at the two-climate day: a foggy redwood morning, a sunny beach afternoon, and home under the trees by dinner. Not many places let you do all three before dark.
The ordinary magic
The truth is, most weekends up here aren’t epic. They’re a slow coffee while the fog lifts, a walk on a trail you’ve done a hundred times, a farmers-market tomato, a glass of local pinot on the deck as the light goes gold. That’s the real luxury of mountain living — not that every weekend is an adventure, but that the ordinary ones happen in a place this beautiful. You stop needing to go somewhere. You’re already there.