After cogitating on it for awhile, I decided today to kill the San Gabriel Trails Project website. The San Gabriel Trails Project is my effort to run every trail, or at least close to every trail, in the San Gabriel Mountains. I have a few reasons for undertaking the project:
- I have an obvious tendency to run (and go birding in) areas that I am already familiar with. There are many such places in the San Gabriels alone. In fact, there are far too many to ever get bored with them. That said, the San Gabriel Mountains are a big range and I would like to see as much of what they have to offer as possible.
- I like to explore, and this sense of “exploration” should theoretically help to keep me motivated.
- eBird has become a significant resource for avian biology, and the fact remains that most birders don’t venture far from trailheads they can drive to. On most outings, which are often in areas with no eBird data, I submit an eBird list of all bird species detected on the route. In a small way, my runs here are contributing to science (at least, I like to tell myself that).
I had been keeping a separate website throughly documenting the effort. I’ve found, however, that writing up each run with turn-by-turn directions and photographs was tedious. It was somewhat detracting from my enjoyment of being out there, and I’ve been less motivated to write up each run in detail after the fact.
The San Gabriel Trails Project itself, however, is not dead. In fact, I’ve taken some of the summary info from the original website and placed it on a single page, with a link on the menu bar at the top of this website. All updates will go on that page, and I will write a short and simple summary of each included run on this website.
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