Chemeketa Park, Los Gatos, California

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.

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.

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.

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

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).

Lexington Reservoir is an artificial lake on the Los Gatos Creek near Los Gatos, California. The James J. Lenihan Dam, a 195 ft (59 m) high, 1,000 ft (300 m) thick earthen dam, forms the third-largest reservoir in Santa Clara County.

The Bear Creek Redwoods Open Space Preserve is a public open space preserve in the Santa Cruz Mountains. The preserve is located along both sides of Bear Creek Road, west of State Route 17 and Lexington Reservoir, and mostly north and east of the Skyline Boulevard and Summit Road sections of State Route 35. It surrounds the Presentation Center, a conference and retreat facility run by the Sisters of Presentation. The preserve is owned and managed by the Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District. A first phase, including about 500 acres west of Bear Creek Road, was opened to the public on June 8, 2019. It includes six miles of hiking and equestrian trails, a 52-space parking lot, and restrooms for visitors. The remainder of the preserve remains closed to the public, and will open in two additional phases – phase 2 between 2020 and 2026, and phase 3 after 2026.

Summit is a small unincorporated community more frequently referred to by locals as the Loma Prieta Community located partially in Santa Clara County but predominantly in Santa Cruz County, California, in the mountain ranges of the Santa Cruz Mountains. It lies at the summit along Highway 17 from which is gets its name. Home to a series of abandoned railroad towns and tunnels from the South Pacific Coast Railroad which operated until the 1940s, Public transportation by bus is also no longer available from the Summit Road area. VTA route 76 has been cancelled since June 2010, and the Highway 17 Express only stops in Scotts Valley. It is one of the few places in the San Francisco Bay Area to receive snowfall and the mountain pass which links the Silicon Valley and Monterey Bay is closed at this spot when snowfall is too heavy. The next town to the south is Scotts Valley and to the north Redwood Estates. The area serves as a rest stop with food for people traveling across the mountains. Before 1906, there were lakes in the area around Summit that locals used for recreation and fishing, but these lakes dried up after the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake diverted their sources. The original road between Santa Cruz and Santa Clara Counties passed somewhat east of the current site of Summit, which came into being when California State Route 17 was constructed in the 1930s. Several businesses can be found in Summit today, most of them dating from the 1950s.Summit straddles the county line with Santa Clara County and is south of the unincorporated area of Lexington Hills with which it shares a zip code. The ZIP Code is 95033 and the community is inside area code 408.

Lexington, California, is a ghost town in Santa Clara County, now submerged by the Lexington Reservoir. Originally located along Los Gatos Creek, the town was 550 feet above sea level.Lexington started out as a sawmill built in 1848 by Isaac Branham and Julian Jank. Zachariah "Buffalo" Jones bought the mill for $3000 and laid out a town called "Jones Mill". In 1860 John P. Hennings bought some of the property and changed the name to Lexington, after his home town of Lexington, Kentucky.Lexington was a stop on the stagecoach route from Los Gatos to Santa Cruz. In the 1860s, the saw mills moved up into the hills and Lexington began to lose importance. In 1880, a narrow gauge railroad from Los Gatos to Santa Cruz was completed, bypassing Lexington and accelerating its decline; its post office had already been transferred to Alma, a mile south, where the trains stopped and which was the transfer point to stagecoaches until the line was completed.The railroad ceased operations in March 1940, following major damage by a winter storm and the completion of State Route 17 that same year. When the Lexington Reservoir was created in 1952, both Lexington and Alma were officially abandoned and SR 17 was rerouted to its present location. The visible ruins under Lexington Reservoir are actually those of Alma, not Lexington; building foundations and original pavements of roads are sometimes visible during droughts. The nearby unincorporated town of Lexington Hills is a reminder of the former town; it combines several villages in the Santa Cruz Mountains. The Lexington Murders was one of the most notable crimes in California during the 19th century. Three men were responsible for the brutal murders of William Peter Renowden and Archibald McIntyre in Lexington, on March 11, 1883.

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.

James J. Lenihan Dam is an earthen structure across the Los Gatos Creek creating the Lexington Reservoir in the Santa Cruz Mountains of Santa Clara County, California south of Los Gatos. The name was changed from Lexington Dam in 1996 for the retirement of James J. Lenihan, the Santa Clara Valley Water District's longest-serving director.