Posted on 10/07/2008 6:30:36 PM PDT by nickcarraway
Detailed Backcountry Map Is a Must for Every Hiking Enthusiast
Bryan Conant knows the Santa Barbara backcountry like few others, having personally hiked every trail, most of them many times. “I got the backcountry bug in the 1990s when I was attending UCSB,” Conant remembers. “Surfing was everything in those days, but one weekend a few friends invited me to go with them to the swimming holes at Red Rock. I’d been in Santa Barbara almost three years before I’d even gone over the mountains that day and I was amazed what was out there.
“For some reason, the mountains called to me that day and the love affair began,” Conant added. “From that time on I began spending more and more time in the backcountry.”
Realizing that there really wasn’t a good map of the backcountry, Conant began to explore the idea of creating his own map. “It was the perfect opportunity to blend two of my passions — backpacking and cartography,” he recounts. Over a period of five months in winter and spring 2003, Conant was out most every weekend, lugging along a home-built wheel designed to measure the length of each trail accurately. The San Rafael Wilderness Map came out later that year and was an instant success.
New Project Emerges: By 2006, Conant began focusing on the idea of publishing a second backcountry map for the Dick Smith and Matilija wildernesses. “In the summer of 2006, I started doing some volunteer trail mileage collection work for Backpacker Magazine,” he explained. “They sent me a GPS to replace the wheel I was using before, and in return I sent them the data to include in their library of GPS data. While doing this I started to think of a second project I might do. There were a few maps available for the Dick Smith Wilderness, but nothing very recent and nothing with mileages on the map.”
In November 2006, Conant took his first trip out to a remote part of the Dick Smith Wilderness called Rancho Nuevo. “It was a place I'd wanted to go but had never been,” Conant remembers. “That weekend I hiked all the Deal Trail, Rancho Nuevo Trail, and Tinta Trail — and I was off.” After this, Conant was out on the trail most weekends, slowly building up the data he need to produce the new map. Then disaster seemed to strike.
Zaca Fire Crisis: “When the Zaca Fire started in July 2007, I wasn’t sure what that meant for all the work I’d done,” Conant mused. “I went back and forth in my head if the project was on or off. I wondered whether I should I abandon the idea since all the Dick Smith seemed to be burning up. Basically, for the rest of 2007, I gave up on the project and figured it had gone up in flames along with the rest of the backcountry.”
However, when the Los Padres Forest Asssociation began a project to monitor the trails in the burn area through its Volunteer Wilderness Ranger program, Conant became re-energized. “I went to Santa Cruz, Bluff Camp, Tin Shack, Bear, Don Victor, South Fork — and most of the trails in between — scouting for damage from the fire. The more time I spent back there, the more I realized that the area was not destroyed by the fire, and that in fact in many ways it was better than before.”
On a January 1, 2008 trip out with his dogs in the Ojai River Preserve, Conant made it his New Year’s resolution to finish the map. From that day on through June he spent just about every weekend on the trail. “I day hiked, backpacked, drove my 4x4, mountain biked, and even rented motorcycles for a weekend to get out to Divide Peak and other remote areas,” Conant remembers. “Weeknights were spent on my computer mapping.”
Slowly but surely over those six months the map came together. And by late July it was ready to go to the press. Like the San Rafael map, the new one is printed on waterproof, tear-resistant stock, is well laid out and easy to read. The detail is superb and includes accurate mileages thanks to the GPS and is color coded to show which trails are in good condition, which are somewhat overgrown, and which are so overgrown as to be virtually impassable. For those who’ve hiked the backcountry much you’ll understand how valuable these classifications are.
The Dick Smith/Matilija map includes all springs, creeks, lakes, seasonal ponds, water availability (intermittent vs. year round water flow), peak names, trails —even those historic trails that are no longer shown on the Forest Service maps. A bonus — it also includes the Zaca Fire perimeter boundary so it is easy to see which trails were impacted by it.
For anyone who is interested in the Santa Barbara backcountry, Conant’s new map is a must buy. The cost is $8.95 and well worth the price.
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