.The Aptos High School Trail and Why You Should Get Lost

If we had not gotten lost, we would have never found ourselves looking down on Aptos High School from the mountain above. Seeing the sprawling school from the mountain side made me understand what a huge pillar of this community the high school is, huge in size and community support. Sometimes you just don’t know what you will find until you get lost.

Into the forest I go, to lose my mind and find my soul. —John Muir

Freedom Boulevard is my road home. I have driven by Aptos High School five hundred times, and I never gave the school a thought. “Not my place, not for me.”

Except for an occasional morning or afternoon traffic jam at the entrance to the school on Freedom, the arches emblazoned with Aptos High School in blue and white letters, towering over the entrance to the region’s high school, never entered my mind. And if we had not of gotten lost on the mountain above the school, we never would have gotten to see this amazing school.

Rebels Without a Compass

Indigenous tribes for centuries cultivated and maintained intricate trail networks before federal agencies claimed them. I don’t know who created or owns the trails behind Aptos High School, but you can get sensational panoramic views of the school from trails up on the mountain.

We find a path up the mountain out of the church parking lot, next to the Highway Patrol Office on Soquel Avenue. My compadres have their dogs on leashes to keep them from frolicking in the poison oak, which is everywhere. We notice there is no trail signage, none. The path is obviously used by lots of people, horses and even dirt bikes, but this surely is not a government-maintained path. 

We are undeterred, we are rebels without a compass. We claim hiking days for our rebellion against structure and rules. We do give a wide berth around homes, we respect people’s privacy, but out on a trail there is no barrier we will not climb, no fence we will not hop, and no double negative we won’t use. Our favorite verse from Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land”:

Was a high wall there that tried to stop me
A sign was painted said: Private Property
But on the back side it didn’t say nothing
This land was made for you and me 

Our point man takes a steep animal path up the hill, and I scramble up the incline after my compadres on all fours. Once we make it to the ridge there is a well-worn, level, human path through a beautiful multi-treed forest that reminds me of the flora in Bonny Doon. We walk silently, not at odds, but the climb up the steep hill to the ridge has winded us and we focus on the next step, the next breath.

We come upon a rope swing, impossibly tied to an oak tree limb high over a steep ravine. This swing over the canyon is the first inkling I get that we might be near where young people congregate. Who would climb out this oak limb to attach the rope so far above the ravine floor? Images of myself as a teenage boy seep out of my reptilian memory, and I picture a young person inching his way out the limb. We don’t understand yet that we are lost but I’m wondering if Aptos High School is closer than we think.

We originally had a destination—the Aptos water tower—but as we continue up the ridge trail, our point man says that we missed the turnoff to the water tower and we are now lost. We no longer have any idea where we’re going. We continue on the ridge trail, now wonderfully lost. For a few moments we are set free, untethered, on a path to nowhere.

Getting lost may be the last frontier. Maybe the only one. If you know where you are, if you clutch your map that says “You Are Here,” everything is prescribed, you’re just passing through a predetermined experience. There is no adventure; it all is just theater, where everything gets reviewed, everything gets Yelped. It’s the triumph of metaphor over reality. Getting lost may be our last hope.

“I wish I didn’t have to perform Iron Man every night.” —Ozzy Osbourne

The next clue that we were on a trail above the high school is when we found the gnome in the tree. I’m thinking, “Here’s a gnome in a tree, and gnomes and knights are all the rage on TikTok. Feels like high school students must be close.”

Indeed, a few steps further and we find Tee 3 of the Aptos High Disc Golf Course. The course rocked for years but closed down during the pandemic. 

I’m sorry to have missed the water tower up the mountain behind the Highway Patrol Office on Freedom and Soquel, but we wandered lost, were set free, to feel our relationship with the entire mountain, not just the 18 inches wide path in front of us. And we wandered lost until we stumbled upon the disc golf course markers and then Aptos High School below us.

How to get there, or not: There was no signage, so I suggest you do this only as your personal sense of adventure allows, but there are paths off Mockingbird Ridge Road, as well as from the Soquel Avenue church parking lot, that go up the ridge of the Aptos mountain and drop you on a trail that runs along behind Aptos High School. You can also walk from the high school entrance road up onto the mountain to find trails with stunning views of the school. Again, we were headed elsewhere, got lost, that’s my alibi and I’m sticking to it, but the trail up on the mountain behind the school shows a panorama of the beautiful campus. My buddies and I end up sitting on a bench at the entrance to Aptos High School. One says, “This is how I want to go to high school. When it’s closed.”