Bay Nature magazine has an excellent in-depth look at Mount Madonna County Park, which gets lots of campers but not nearly so many hikers. The park is at the peak of the southern end of the Santa Cruz Mountains and is a fine place to freeze your fanny off in the middle a hot summer if the marine layer settles just right. Melissa and I camped out for Fourth of July Weekend in 2005 and had to bail after one night because it was just so damned cold and damp that it was no fun to hang around at a campsite. (Here’s the write-up on our first camp-out there).

The coolest story about Mount Madonna is that of its previous owner, one Henry Miller, a cattle baron who owned so much land that, according to the Bay Nature article, he could ride on horseback from Mexico to Oregon and stay each night on land he owned.

He built a huge weekend mansion at Mount Madonna, but there’s not much left of it now.

I assume it was built on these concrete pilings. His heirs had little interest in the Mount Madonna property, which found its way into the hands of the Santa Clara Count Parks Department. The forest has almost totally reclaimed the mansion site — it seems odd to have “ruins” less than a century old but I suppose that’s one more manifestation of America’s throw-away culture.

It is a nice place for car camping. The trails are often steep, but they do pass through redwood/tan oak forests to manzanita scrub and back — so there’s lots of nature watching to be had. Trails also connect to Uvas Canyon County Park and Forest of Nisene Marks State Park.