Sacramento County Highpoint Trip Report
Date: March 18, 2008
Author: Patrick Thornley
I had an opportunity to visit a friend who now lives in Folsom, CA. He and I
had previously done several other CA county highpoints when I lived in Reno but
for some reason I had never bothered to get the Sacramento highpoint, probably
because, at that time, I only had the Suttle book and it implied that access was
not allowed. Nowadays, several trip reports at cohp.org imply various levels of
access and availability. I printed out 5 of these and headed for CA.
After perusing them all, my friend said the report from Robert Greene sounded the most
plausible, so we set out. Robert's report is from 2004 and there has been
considerably more construction done since his report but the essential elements
remain unchanged from his report which follows.
"Here's the directions I recommend:
50 east to E. Bidwell exit.
Left (north) on East Bidwell.
Right (east) on Broadstone (2nd light).
Right on Serpa.
Left on Caversham.
Follow Caversham past Iris to end."
As we discovered if you follow Caversham to the end now you get to a tall (6 foot)
wrought iron fence and solid suburban housing all around. While the gate
is not posted or signed, it is locked, and climbing over might attract unwanted
attention but if, on your way up Caversham (0.6 miles from it's start), you look
to the right you will see a nice landscaped, paved path between two homes.
Simply follow it to it's end, about 75 feet, and then turn left and walk
basically behind all the houses to the summit. Dogs in the fenced yards will
bark and you need to be careful not to trip on all the irrigation lines going to
the new landscaping on the hillside but we crossed no fences, saw no postings,
and in 10 minutes were at the benchmark. One vehicle was at the larger antenna
base building but nobody appeared as we arrived. A of couple minutes for photos
and we were on our way.
Other trip reports mention coming straight up from Iron Point Way, we saw no
reason why that wouldn't work and that was going to be our backup plan when we
found the path through the houses to the open park land beyond.
It was maybe a half mile total walk.