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.