Getting to Know Santa Cruz County, Street by Street, Path by Path

First a bit of geography. If you look at a map of the United States, California is the slightly bent arm along the Pacific Ocean, and Santa Cruz County is just below the outer elbow. Nearly its entire length runs between the Santa Cruz Mountains, with their towering coastal redwood trees, and the Pacific. The county covers roughly 445 square miles of land, or 607 square miles if you get out in a kayak and explore the areas covered by salt water.

When I began to plan my project of walking every street in Santa Cruz County, I am surprised to learn that the Santa Cruz Public Works Department can’t provide me with a precise number of streets within the county, but I quickly understand why. With old roads falling out of use and new ones being built, the number is dynamic, it’s a moving target. When I collect the maps I use to organize my walking, I see roads indicated that were planned but never developed. And there are roads I’ve walked on that I can’t locate on a map. There are trails that are called roads, and roads that are called trails, such as Ohlone Trail. So at the outset of the project I have only a guess gleaned by counting the streets listed in the street name indexes of various maps. By the time I walk the last road of my project, seven years after I started, Silver Mountain Road, home of the Silver Mountain Vineyards, in 2020, I, of course, have a much clearer count: 4,121.

It astounds me that before these walks I had never given much notice to the sun or the moon, nor felt their welkin masterpieces etching my eyes.

Nearly half of the roughly 270,000 residents of Santa Cruz County live within four incorporated cities that, combined, cover only 24.1 square miles and include a total of 1,295 streets. Capitola is the smallest city at 1.6 square miles with 118 streets. Scotts Valley covers 4.6 miles and has 212 streets. Watsonville is the second largest with 411 streets in 5.9 square miles, while the city of Santa Cruz, the county seat, is 12 square miles with 554 streets. The remaining residents live in the unincorporated areas of Santa Cruz County, which, combined, cover 299 square miles and include 2,825 streets and roads.

The San Lorenzo River, the largest watershed fully within the county, originates in Castle Rock State Park, in the highest reaches of the county at twenty‑five hundred feet above sea level, and travels through rugged mountains, suburban neighborhoods, and several small to midsize towns before it runs brackish where it blends into Monterey Bay, at the river mouth along the Ferris wheel end of the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk. A portion of the thirty‑mile-long Pajaro River, which snakes through three additional counties, runs through Watsonville. There are ten major watersheds within the county, more than two hundred named creeks, and numerous unnamed creeks.

In the course of a day walking through the county, I can move through stretches of dry chapparal rooted in sandy soil that bring to mind the old westerns that were some-times on TV after school as a kid, moist forests teeming with life, shady oak groves dropping acorns, rolling hills, steep cliffs buffeted by ocean breezes, and a range of neighborhoods.

The inaugural walk of the project, on December 8, 2013, a pleasantly cool Sunday afternoon, is only a mile long. All the same, it holds significance.

I ask Ellen and Miles to join me in walking our own three‑block street and two of its side streets, and they agree. We set out from our house, Miles on his skateboard holding Izzie’s leash, sometimes walking her and sometimes being eagerly pulled by her, and Ellen beside me, holding my hand. Ultimately, I’ll take most of the walks solo, but having them with me to mark the beginning of what will become an epic adventure sets the tone perfectly.

At the time of the first walk, Ellen and I have been together for fifteen years. Miles is thirteen, and Kita, who was fourteen when we first got together, is now twenty-nine and has long since been on his own, living and working in Santa Cruz. Ellen and I were both nearing forty when we met, and early in our relationship we realized that if we wanted to have a child together, time was of the essence. Ellen had never so much as changed a diaper, but she wanted to be a parent and approached it as she approaches everything she commits to, with gusto, dedication, and uncommonly detailed planning. Once we agreed to have a baby, she put a down payment on a house, swapped her sportier car for a Subaru Outback, and practically memorized the book What to Expect When You’re Expecting. At each pre-natal visit, she asked the doctor a long list of questions and wrote notes in the margins throughout every appointment. We had a darling six‑pound, seven‑ounce baby boy, whom we named Miles, in our arms before we celebrated our second anniversary. We were both so excited to have a baby in our lives that we often got ourselves jammed up in the doorway to his room, trying to be the first to get to him when he woke up from a nap.

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Over the weeks following the first walk, I squeeze as many additional walks as I can into the short winter days, before and after work and on the weekends. I wander around our neighborhood and fan out into adjacent areas. I walk along the streets themselves, but I also trek through adjacent alleyways, campgrounds, parks, and beaches. This gives me some material to work with as I start practicing using my spreadsheets and figuring out how to keep track of the walks and the photographs I take as I go. In addition to writing in notebooks a few details of what I see and experience on the walks, I keep a spreadsheet into which I enter information after each outing. While I’m putting together this spreadsheet, I’m also learning how to process, store, and organize my photographs electronically. The learning curve on that is equally steep. I purchase archival quality photo albums with black pages, and white pens to write the street name below a photo for each street, which I affix onto the albums’ pages with old‑fashioned photo corners.

Just weeks into the project, I close the front door behind me and step out into the predawn morning. I try to carve more hours into the day by slipping out before the world is awake. I am ostensibly making my way to work, roughly six miles to the south, but somehow, I’m walking in precisely the opposite direction. Since I’ve begun these walks, I’ve discovered an irresistible vantage point from which to see the day begin: a clifftop above Natural Bridges State Beach. I walk‑race the half mile and arrive in the still‑dark.

The beauty is too much to bear alone. I want to call a friend. But it dawns on me that they have all likely already noticed that the sun rises and sets.

Settling into a patch of ice plant, I gulp first light and sea air greedily, like a drink of water after thirst. Waiting for the sun, I resist the urge to lift my hands and conduct its rising. Instead, I sit quietly and observe the world around this place, which comes to life slowly, deliberately: in shift-ing clouds that rearrange brilliant rays as the light curves over the horizon and spills buckets of color across the sky. It astounds me that before these walks I had never given much notice to the sun or the moon, nor felt their welkin masterpieces etching my eyes.

The beauty is too much to bear alone. I want to call a friend. But it dawns on me that they have all likely already noticed that the sun rises and sets. I save myself the awkwardness of rousing someone from a dead sleep to say, “Um, hi. The sun rose again!”

Instead, I pry myself away and start my walk to work along West Cliff Drive, a three‑and‑a‑half‑mile road with an adjacent walking and cycling path that hugs the coast-line. A relaxed pace should put me at my desk, with its incessantly ringing phone and overflowing inbox, in roughly two hours.

I look to the shoreline below and spot dozens of sanderlings, moving as a single organism, charging brazenly toward the incoming waves to snatch up sand crabs, small fossorial crustaceans, then retreating on comically fast-moving tiny legs before the waves catch them. They are well tuned to each other and to this ritual: It’s how they survive, and it’s amazing to see how efficiently they work.

A curve of the road delivers me to one of Santa Cruz’s most famous surf spots, Steamer Lane. I watch the action of the few surfers who’ve already tossed their boards into the chilly water and are now at its mercy, bobbing at the rise and fall as they wait for a good ride. A bird lights on a fence post, the night sky painted in stars and hearts across its licorice breast. I fall under the spell of the starling as the morning sun strikes just so, sending the full spectrum of color cascading down his feathers like liquid, head to tail. I admire him until he lifts off into the air, reminding me that I, too, should be on my way.

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From Scavenging Beauty: A Memoir in Walks by Angelica Glass. Published on July 7, 2026 by Riverhead Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2026 by Angelica Glass.