Red Peak, Santa Cruz Island
Red Peak, Santa Cruz Island (Red Mountain) is 1822 feet in altitude to the north of the Main Ranch. Here a survey station was established by William E. Greenwell and his aid, Preston C. F. West on Thursday, June, 1857:
- “It is situated on a rocky mountain immediately in front of Dr. Shaw’s house. The best directions for getting to it can be found out at the ranch, as there is a ridge with a sheep trail on it that leads from near the ranch to the top, not known well enough be me to give a full description.”
In 1874 Stehman Forney reported the Red Peak survey station:
- “on a high, bold peak covered with red rock immediately in front of the Main ranch house, which can be approached by a small brushy ridge on the north face of the valley, about 1-1/2 miles west of the main ranch house.”
In 1890, geologist William Goodyear referred to Red Peak as Red Hill [Goodyear 1890: 158].
The station was recovered in 1934 by surveyor, Charles K. Greene:
- “on the first of the highest peaks on the main ridge extending from Prisoners' Harbor at the summit of the ridge which forms the south wall of the canyon leading back from the Pelican Harbor. Found stone bottles. The station was remarked with a standard disk set in concrete in rock and stamped Red Peak, 1857-1934. A cairn of rocks was built up around the station.”
Botanist Steve Junak  reports that one of three locations of madrone (Arctostaphylos menziesii) is “on slopes NE of Red Mountain.”
The horizontal coordinates were established by classical geodetic methods and adjusted by the National Geodetic Survey in June 1996. This triangulation station appears on the Santa Cruz Island Sheet B topographic map.
[UTM 11: North 3,767,154.026 East 249,014.747]