Hiker Deals

Any problems thinking up something to do over the weekend? I usually have more trouble thinking of things to do over 2-3 day weekends than I do with a full week of time off. A great place to start is the GORP.com Outdoor Weekender Guides.

The Guides can be searched by region, city, and state and have a huge variety of things to get you outside. From parks and trails to take the dog for a walk on - to cliff-top beach hikes - to hike-in hot springs with campgrounds just a mile or two from the road.

In my case the City Weekender guide for Los Angeles already found one trailhead I didn’t know about that’s just 4 miles from home and a network of dirt roads and paved trolley & railroad-repair roads for riding through the Angeles National Forest, and those are less than 90 minutes from home. There’s also a campground in the Santa Ynez Recreation area that’s in a perfect spot for an after work arrival, about 20 miles southwest of Santa Barbara (enough outside Santa Barbara to avoid weekend beach traffic). Found through the Weekender Guides it has several small, tents-only areas and sounds like a perfect alternative to the normally crowded, RV-filled campgrounds in SoCal. I won’t give a direct link to it or it may not be open when I want to go, but I will say that’s the area is about an hour up winding mountain roads and hosts two hotsprings and several trailheads.