The announcement said "approximately 6 miles of new hiking trails." On October 26, Santa Cruz County Parks and District 5 Supervisor Monica Martinez opened the Pace Family Wilderness Trails at Quail Hollow Ranch County Park in Felton. That gave the public access to nearly 80 acres it had never been able to reach. The county's own trail list shows how those six miles break down. The four new named trails add up to 2.9 miles. Six miles is the length of the new Quail Hollow Grand Loop, which joins them to the Woodrat, Sunset and Chaparral trails that hikers already know.
That shrinks the headline, but the hike is better for it. Before October, Quail Hollow was a park of short loops and out-and-backs to a vista. Now it has one long walk through the Santa Cruz Sandhills, a habitat found nowhere else, and each new trail is named for a species that lives there.
Where the six miles come from
The Quail Hollow Ranch County Park page lists the new Pace trails alongside the routes that were already there.
| Trail | Length | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Band-Winged Grasshopper Trail | 0.7 mile | Access route from Quail Hollow Ranch into the Pace Family Wilderness |
| June Beetle Trail | 0.8 mile | Pace parcel trail |
| Wallflower Trail | 0.4 mile | Pace parcel trail |
| Spineflower Loop | 1 mile | Pace parcel loop |
| New trail total | 2.9 miles | |
| Quail Hollow Grand Loop | 6 miles, 500 to 600 ft of gain | Woodrat, Sunset and Chaparral trails plus the Pace trails |
The county lists all four new trails as moderate and the Grand Loop as strenuous. On the county's current projects page, the new section is described as an access trail leading to a figure-8 loop on the Pace land. It extends a trail network that used to total 4.5 miles.
The figure-8 matters more than the mileage. Before the Pace trails, every route at Quail Hollow eventually turned around or looped back toward the ranch house. The Grand Loop carries you past the old vista points and onto ground that was closed until last month.
Why this land sat closed for two decades
The county received the 79.5-acre Pace property as a gift in 1997. According to County Parks, it stayed closed to the public for the past two decades because no trail connected it to Quail Hollow Ranch. The county owned the land the whole time. What it lacked was a route in.
County Parks Director Jeff Gaffney put it this way in the county's October 21 announcement: the trails are "an important new access to what was previously an unreachable island of public open space." According to the same release, the trails were routed to avoid sensitive vegetation and natural drainage. The work was a joint effort among County Parks, community partners, park volunteers and AmeriCorps, funded by a $200,000 matching grant from the state's Habitat Conservation Fund. The project page also thanks Santa Cruz Mountain Stewardship and the California Conservation Corps.
TPG Online Daily reported on November 7 that the trails opened to hikers on October 26. In the county release, Supervisor Martinez said, "Many local residents have been visiting Quail Hollow Ranch for decades, and while there is always something new and wonderful blooming or hatching there, being able to open these new trails to visitors to explore is really special."
The ranch has its own history worth knowing before you set out. County Parks says it was once home to the Lane family, who owned Sunset Magazine from 1929 to 1991.
Four trails, four species, four sculptures
The new trails aren't named for donors or landmarks. Each one is named for a Sandhills species, and the four bilingual steel sculptures of the new Sandhills Sentinels installation show the same four.
- Band-Winged Grasshopper Trail is named for the Zayante band-winged grasshopper.
- June Beetle Trail is named for the Mount Hermon June beetle.
- Wallflower Trail is named for the Ben Lomond wallflower.
- Spineflower Loop is named for the Ben Lomond spineflower.
Put together, the trail names read like a short field guide. If you walk the Grand Loop, you'll have passed through the home range of every species on the list.
These species live only here because of the ground they grow in. The Sempervirens Fund describes the Sandhills as a 15-million-year-old sea floor surfacing among the redwoods. Its Zayante soil is about 92% sand and holds little water or nutrients, so the Sandhills form hot, dry pockets next to the damp, shaded redwood forest. County Parks describes the park's Sandhills as sandy soil with scattered ponderosa pine.
The rarest piece is Sand Parkland. In an April 2016 release, the Land Trust of Santa Cruz County called it a Sandhills sub-habitat unique to the San Lorenzo region, with fewer than 200 acres in the world. That release announced the Land Trust's purchase of 9.82 acres of Sand Parkland on the border of Quail Hollow. The same release said biologist Peter Raven had compared the Sandhills to the Galapagos for their biological diversity.
Sempervirens also notes that sandy ground erodes quickly when people walk off trail, and it asks visitors to stay on the path. With soil like this, the Pace trails being open to hikers only makes practical sense.
Picking a route for a November visit
The park is open from sunrise to sunset. All of the options below come from the county's trail descriptions, listed from shortest to longest.
- Discovery Loop: 1 mile, 150 ft of gain. It's nearly flat, takes 30 to 40 minutes, and passes the pond, where turtles, ducks and geese show up. County Parks calls it the easiest hike with a stroller. The west side gets boggy after rain.
- Woodrat Trail to Woodrat Vista Point and back: 1.1 miles, 250 ft of gain. The county calls this the shortest hike in the park to a great view. It's open to hikers only.
- Woodrat Trail to Sunset Vista Point and back: 2.6 miles, 540 ft of gain. Shade at the bottom gives way to sun higher up. The county calls it the park's best wildflower trail, though that's mostly a spring draw.
- Quail Hollow Grand Loop: 6 miles, 500 to 600 ft of gain. This strenuous loop links Woodrat, Sunset and Chaparral to the Pace trails. It's the route that uses the new ground.
- Sandhills Hike: 6.5 miles, 700 ft of gain. Also strenuous. The county says it offers the best experience of the Sandhills ecosystem, passing through Sand Parkland, ponderosa pine, dwarf redwood and mixed chaparral.
The park closes at sunset, so a 6-mile loop with several hundred feet of climbing is easier to finish if you start early. If you only have an hour, the Woodrat Vista walk still gets you a view.
Before you leave the car
The details that trip people up at Quail Hollow are about where you can go, not how far. Here they are, from the county's park page and dog map:
- Address: 800 Quail Hollow Road, Felton.
- Parking: A small dirt lot with room for horse trailers.
- Finding the trailhead: It sits on the far side of the lawn behind the visitor center. Walk east along the driveway with the house on your left and the barns and corral on your right, and look for the trail map beside the collapsed old blacksmith shop.
- Restroom: Yes, though it isn't ADA-compliant.
- Dogs: Per the park's dog map, leashed dogs are allowed only in the areas highlighted in orange, and no dogs are allowed on the trails.
- Horses: Riders share the Discovery Loop, the Italian and Lower Chaparral loop, and parts of Sunset. Woodrat and the Pace Family Wilderness trails are for hikers only.
- The pond: No fishing.
- Maps: The county has posted a mobile map and a printable map of the updated trail system, and the current projects page links the updated Quail Hollow Ranch trail map.
Park pages change over time, so check the county's Quail Hollow page before you go, especially after a stretch of rain.
If the new Pace loop has you weighing how close you'd like to live to trailheads like Quail Hollow, Megan DeVivo is glad to talk it through, on either side of Highway 17. Let's Connect.
