Aliso Creek, Wood Canyon Trails

Aliso & Wood Canyons Regional Park, the largest park in the hills above Laguna Beach, preserves 3,400 acres of pastoral Orange County.

Most locals and other hikers refer to the low hills that back the Orange County coast from Corona del Mar to Dana Point as the Laguna Hills or “the mountains behind Laguna Beach.” Actually, the northerly hills are the San Joaquin Hills, their cousins to the south the Sheep Hills.

Here’s how nature writer Joseph Smeaton Chase described an outing in the Sheep Hills in his classic 1913 book, California Coast Trails: A few miles along a road that wound and dipped over the cliffs brought us by sundown to Aliso Canyon. The walls of the canyon are high hills sprinkled with lichened rock, sprinkled with brush whose prevailing gray is relieved here and there by bosses of olive sumac. Our camp was so attractive that we remained for several days.”