Summit, Santa Cruz County, California

Patchen is a ghost town in the Santa Cruz Mountains, in Santa Clara County, California. It is located along the old Santa Cruz Highway.

Laurel is a ghost town in Santa Cruz County, California, United States, in the Santa Cruz Mountains. It is in a valley at an elevation of 900 feet (270 m) above sea level.

Holy City is an unincorporated community in Santa Clara County, California. Once considered a Utopian community in the 1920s and 1930s, it is now considered a ghost town. The town is located in the Santa Cruz Mountains, off State Route 17 on Old Santa Cruz Highway. It is part of the Lexington Hills census designated place. Its ZIP code is 95026, and its area codes are 408 and 669.

Glenwood, California, is an unincorporated area of Santa Cruz County. It is located at coordinates 37°6′29″N 121°59′8″W, and is 891 feet above sea level.

Redwood Estates is a rural unincorporated community along State Route 17 in the coastal Santa Cruz Mountains in Los Gatos, California, United States. The Census Bureau includes it in a census-designated place named Lexington Hills. It lies inside the confines of Santa Clara County. The area is about eight miles from downtown Los Gatos and nine miles from the Santa Cruz County community of Scotts Valley. Nearby Summit Road is roughly the dividing line between the counties: Santa Cruz County areas being generally west of Summit Rd. The Butano Fault (also known as the Butano Rift Zone), roughly follows Summit Road through the area. The ZIP code for post office boxes in Redwood Estates is 95044, although the city and ZIP code for street delivery is Los Gatos, 95033. Street addresses are usually five digits. The U.S. Geological Survey, National Geographic Names Database, lists the NAD27 coordinates of the community as 37°09′23″N 121°59′08″W. The community is inside area code 408 while communities further west (but outside Redwood Estates) are in the coastal area code 831. The architecture of homes in the community varies widely. The roads are paved, but narrow and winding when compared to modern urban streets. While area housing prices have been buoyed by rising real estate prices in Silicon Valley, the area is quiet and informal. There are few lawns: most homes have redwood duff in the front yard. Poison oak is evident in the area. There are very few storm drains, curbs, or sidewalks. Roads are framed by vegetation and wind along the contours of the area's hills. As the name implies, the area is populated by the towering redwood trees ubiquitous to the occasionally fog-shrouded areas of the California coast. Redwood roots seem to serve as informal speed bumps on many of the narrow community roads. Business occupancies in the community include: Nonnos Italian Cafe, 21433 Broadway; Redwood Estates Store, 20121 Broadway; San Jose Water Co., Santa Clara County Fire Department Redwood Station at 21452 Madrone Dr.; and the Redwood Estates Post Office. A traffic focal point is the SR17 interchange with Madrone Drive. Summit Road has an interchange with SR17 and approximates the southern extent of the community. The area has a history with ties to railroading. Until the 1940s, a Southern Pacific Railroad line to Santa Cruz passed through Holy City east of Redwood Estates. A factor in the removal of the rail line was its high maintenance cost. The portals of three tunnels along this line were closed during World War II in case an invading military force might use them as cover.

Lexington Hills is a census-designated place and an unincorporated area in Santa Clara County, California, United States. The population was 2,492 at the 2020 census. The area is located in the Santa Cruz Mountains, about five miles south of Los Gatos and about 14 miles (23 km) north of Santa Cruz. Lexington Hills is the name assigned by the United States Census Bureau to the area, which actually comprises several small communities, including Redwood Estates, Holy City, Chemeketa Park, and Aldercroft Heights.

Chemeketa Park is an unincorporated community of approximately 150 homes located in Lexington Hills, in the Santa Cruz Mountains in Santa Clara County, California, that is now effectively a rural neighborhood of Los Gatos, California. The postal designation for Chemeketa Park is "Los Gatos 95033", although it lies approximately five miles South of the official boundaries of the incorporated town of Los Gatos. The community is in area codes 408 and 669. Nearby communities are Redwood Estates, Aldercroft Heights, and the ghost town of Holy City. Chemeketa Park is accessed off of State Route 17, on Old Santa Cruz Highway along the Big Moody Curve.

The Wrights Tunnel (also known as the Summit Tunnel, Tunnel 2, or Tunnel 1 after the daylighting of the Cats Canyon tunnel) is a railroad tunnel located in the Santa Cruz Mountains in Santa Clara and Santa Cruz Counties, California. Opened in 1880 after almost two years of construction involving numerous fatalities, the tunnel was at one point the longest tunnel in California and one the longest tunnels in the United States. It carried the tracks of the narrow gauge South Pacific Coast Railroad, which ran trains from San Francisco to Santa Cruz until the railroad was acquired by Southern Pacific Railroad, which upgraded the tracks to standard gauge and continued operating trains through the line and its tunnel until a major storm in 1940 washed out certain sections of the track in the Santa Cruz Mountains. After two years of no rail traffic on the line, Southern Pacific abandoned the line. Subsequently, the United States Army Corps of Engineers collapsed both portals with explosives, destroying the northern portal in the process. The interior of the tunnel remains intact along with the south portal, but the conditions of the interior are unknown, particularly since the tunnel crosses the San Andreas Fault and no person has entered the tunnel in the aftermath of the Loma Prieta earthquake.

Wrights, California (also known as Wrights Station) is a ghost town in unincorporated west Santa Clara County, California. It is located near Summit Road in the Santa Cruz Mountains, on the north bank of Los Gatos Creek, east of State Route 17.The National Weather Service maintained a cooperative weather station on the site of Wrights until May 31, 1986, which recorded rainfall and snowfall. The weather station was 1,600 feet (490 m) above sea level. The location is on the San Andreas Fault, according to the U.S. Geological Survey, and it experienced considerable damage in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. Geologists observed a lateral displacement of 4.6 feet (1.4 m) at Wrights.Wrights is one of a number of ghost towns in the Santa Cruz Mountains that flourished during the last half of the nineteenth century. Laurel, Wrights, Glenwood, and Clems declined when the Los Gatos-Santa Cruz railroad ceased operations in March 1940. Later in 1940, Patchen was bypassed and isolated by the construction of State Route 17; since the late 1960s it has been a Christmas tree ranch. Alma and Lexington were submerged in Lexington Reservoir in 1952, along State Route 17 above Los Gatos.

Clems, California is a ghost town in Santa Cruz County with an elevation of 790 feet (240 meters). It is located a latitude 37055N, longitude 1215947W; decimal degrees: latitude 37.09806, longitude -121.99639.Clems was a minor stop located between Glenwood and Zayante on the railroad which operated from Los Gatos to Santa Cruz from 1880 to 1940. The railroad was leased in 1887 to the Southern Pacific, which added weekend excursion trains to the regular South Pacific Coast Railroad freight and mixed (freight and passenger) trains that operated several times a day. The tracks, bridges, and tunnels along the line were badly damaged in the April 18, 1906, earthquake, then repaired or rebuilt. The line was standard-gauged in 1907 and a railroad shelter was installed for locals at the time. Southern Pacific formally abandoned the line in November 1940 following a major storm that severely damaged the line on the night of February 26. State Route 17 was completed that same year, bypassing Clems and most of the other stops along the old railroad right-of-way.Today the area is sparsely settled and considered a part of the Glenwood community.

Alma is a ghost town and drowned town in Santa Clara County in California, United States. It lies beneath the waters of the Lexington Reservoir above Los Gatos. The location is latitude 37.18N and longitude 121.98W. It was 551 feet (168 meters) above sea level.There are two different possible origins for the name of the town. The first is that the town was the location of a branch road that led to the New Almaden mine. The second, and more fanciful, origin is that the town was named after a local prostitute. The original town name registered with the Postal Service in 1861 was Lexington. It was re-registered as Alma in 1873.The town was mostly demolished when the James J. Lenihan Dam was constructed there in 1952. Alma, at the time, had a population of fewer than 100 people. The town was an important rail stop for the logging industry in the Santa Cruz Mountains as well as a stop for vacationers heading to the coast from the Santa Clara Valley. Just north of Alma was the town of Lexington, which had greatly declined by the time that dam and reservoir were constructed. Alma had a stage stop, hotel, saloons, small agricultural operations, general merchandise store, and lumber mills, as well as other establishments. The South Pacific Coast Railroad served Alma between 1880 and 1940, providing service between Los Gatos and Santa Cruz via Wrights, also known as Wrights Station or Wright's Station.Some foundational structures are only visible when the water levels drop in the reservoir, and some old roads and a bridge dating from 1926. The bridge can only be viewed when the water level is unusually low, such as the summer of 2008 when construction on the dam lowered the water level to 7% capacity. Modern day State Route 17 passes by the reservoir—beneath which lie the former towns of Lexington and Alma. A U.S. Weather Bureau cooperative weather station in Alma reported average annual rainfall of 22.60 inches (574 millimeters).

Lake Elsman is a 6,200-acre-foot (7,600,000 m3) reservoir, created by an earthen dam called Austrian Dam on Los Gatos Creek in the Santa Cruz Mountains of California. At several points it is over 140' deep and its normal surface area is 96 acres. It provides 12% of San Jose Water Works’ total water capacity in some years. The lake and dam is owned by the San Jose Water Company,In 1988 and 1989, two earthquakes at M=5.3 and 5.4 respectively occurred at Lake Elsman that transferred stress that led to the 1989 M=6.9 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake.