It is summer, and with summer comes either hiking early or hiking shady in order to avoid the heat. A whole host of excellent choices for the latter exist in the Santa Cruz mountains, full of redwoods with a nice dose of hilly hiking.
Today we went to Big Basin Redwoods State Park , a great choice for the summer due to nice shady trails (but also awesome in the winter/ springtime when the rain has been falling so you can really enjoy those waterfalls!) You can find the full Map/Brochure here , but we took a short-ish route today represented below:
The park was a little busier than last time, so we ended up parking in the additional parking located a little way up North Escape Road.