Читать книгу 101 Hikes in Southern California. Exploring Mountains, Seashore, and Desert онлайн

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Living on the active edge of a continent has advantages and disadvantages that cannot be untangled. Like the proverbial silver lining in a dark cloud, the rumpled beauty of our youthful, ever-changing coastline, mountains, and desert redresses the ever-present threat of earthquakes, fires, and floods. Because much of Southern California is physically rugged, not all of it has succumbed to the plow or the bulldozer. When you’ve had the pleasure of hiking beside a crystal-clear mountain stream minutes from downtown L.A. or cooling off in the spray of a cottonwood-fringed waterfall just beyond suburban San Diego, you’ll realize that not many regions in the world offer so great a variety of natural pleasures to a population of many millions.

Let us, in the next couple of pages, briefly explore the principal wild and semiwild natural areas bordering Southern California’s coastal plain. When linked together, these natural areas form a broad, curving crescent around Southern California’s urban population—now more than 20 million strong. About 90% of the hikes found in this book fall into this unpopulated or sparsely populated crescent.