W When I moved to the River City almost 10 years ago, I did a double take: Wait a minute! Where’s the river? Sacramento, City of Trees? You bet! I was stunned the first time I rode a bike through the neat, canopied boulevards of Land Park and East Sacramento—serene, leafy and lovely. America’s Farm-to-Fork Capital? Fine and dandy. One visit to the farmers’ market to load up on makrut limes and persimmons and I was sold. Dang, Sacramento, you’ve got it going on! This foodie was impressed. But the two rivers, too often barricaded behind imposing levees, seemed like inaccessible, overlooked afterthoughts, rather than civic amenities conferring anything close to bragging rights. River City? Not so fast, Sacramento. See, I grew up on a river. My earliest memories are of living on an old tugboat moored on an island in the mighty Columbia, just outside of Portland, Oregon, with my hippie parents. I slid down sand dunes on the beach, romped through forests, and fished off the bow, keeping my catch in buckets as “pets” until my dad dumped them overboard while I napped. Huckleberry Finn had nothing on me. When you grow up close to water, it’s as if the blood in your veins takes its pulse from the currents, and you become tied to it psychically and spiritually. I remember the first time I heard the Talking Heads’ cover of Al Green’s “Take Me to the River” as a teen—it felt like it had been written just for me. It’s a song about baptism washing away heartbreak, and immersion in nature is my idea of a religious experience. The wilderness has always been the only thing to mend my heart. Take me to the river. I spent at least 20 years of my adult life living aboard sailboats in Ventura and Sausalito, and have never lived more than minutes away from a lake, river or ocean. Things changed after I relocated to the capital city in 2016. I could appreciate all the cool people and places I was writing about, from the fun, innovative architecture of Oak Park and the R Street Corridor, to the coffee house culture that made Sacramento feel, in some ways, like a clever reboot of Portland. But at a baseline level, I never connected with the city emotionally. Then, I obtained a copy of Mildly Scenic, author Ashley Shult Langdon’s new trail guide about all the secret, previously unmapped ways to access the hidden wilderness of the lower American River. According to the National Wild and Scenic Rivers System, it’s the most heavily used recreational river in all of California, frequented by swimmers at Discovery Park, rafters and kayakers who put in at Sunrise and take out at River Bend, and a handful of dedicated anglers in waders. The Sunrise Recreation Area just below the Nimbus Dam in Gold River is a wildflower wonderland in springtime. (Photo by Ashley Shult Langdon) The river’s most amazing attribute might be its modesty—how it hides right in plain sight, in the middle of the city. Even knowing that, and despite seeing the rafters and tubers and others floating down river all summer, the wilderness shoreline felt inaccessible to me. Enter Langdon and Mildly Scenic, which led me on a remarkable journey of discovery that has changed the way I view Sacramento. It might just change your daily life the way it has mine. It was as if someone flipped a switch, and the light in my soul was suddenly, remarkably ablaze again. I’m a voracious consumer of outdoorsy guidebooks, so I knew exactly what I was seeing and what it meant, and I felt like Indiana Jones when a magnified, laser-like sunbeam revealed the way to the lost treasure in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Langdon had, after all these years, handed me my key to the city. Places that had been there all along but seemed obscure and unapproachable were there on the page, with a gentle, enthusiastic author holding my hand and telling me how to navigate the unfriendly driving, parking and trailhead finding, aspects that had thwarted me from finding my way. Take me to the river. Drop me in the water. Mildly Scenic  is organized into 18 chapters for 18 access points marching up both sides of the river, from Discovery Park to Lake Natoma. I’m only familiar with the latter, as the trail circling the lake is a place I like to run. Each access point leads to one or more nearby picnic spots or swimming holes, and a suggested short to medium route for walking or running, many in the 3- to 5-mile sweet spot that’s perfect for a weekday outing. I pick the closest one to me: Jacob Lane, in Carmichael. When I arrive at this residential side street where Chapter 7 tells me I can park, all I see is that familiar chain link fence atop a levee. No signage. But when I climb up and over, I see an expanse of green spread out below me, criss-crossed by a paved bike path and gravel trails. I break into a jog, and go right. I can’t see the river yet, but according to the book, I’m heading downriver on a nice little 3-mile loop that will take me there. Sure enough, following Langdon’s advice, about a mile in I reach what she calls a “river spot among the reeds.” Over the water, a rope swing hangs from a magnificently twisted old tree. I would never have found this blissful spot if left to my own devices. The rocky shoreline of Ancil Hoffman Park where it surrounds Carmichael’s Effie Yeaw Nature Center is perfect for skipping stones in summertime and watching salmon migrate in the fall. (Photo by Ashley Shult Langdon) I visit Jacob Lane again a few days later and run north into Chapter 8 territory, William B. Pond Recreation Area. A couple of miles along, I stop at the center of the Harold Richey Memorial Bridge, a span for bikes and pedestrians. What’s that I hear? Nothing but birdsong. There’s no traffic noise. If I continue, I’ll be heading into River Bend Park’s network of riparian trails, but I’m just looking for a 3-miler again today. As the Mildly Scenic  title suggests, you don’t need all-day adventures to boost your physical and mental health, just “mild” doses of escape. This is the level of activity that keeps those Blue Zone centenarians in shape—they don’t exercise per se, they simply engage in movement. On the way back, I find the little beach on Arden Pond that Langdon describes in her guidebook as “a great spot to bring your goggles and take some laps. Lather up in sunblock, lie back, and let your kiddos paddle you around in circles.” (Lest there be any confusion, William B. Pond was the name of the first director of Sacramento County’s parks and recreation department, while Arden Pond is a body of water.) Lucky for me, it’s a school day in May, so I have the place to myself. The pond water is surprisingly warm when I pull off my Sauconys and stick my feet in. I have a brief flashback to summers growing up, when my grandparents took us kids to a tiny campground with an even tinier creek running behind it. We found a “dock” made out of a single plank, and what might have been the world’s smallest rowboat, and made our way upstream—the depth would have to be measured in inches, not feet, as would our progress, but we fancied ourselves great explorers on a grand adventure. Sometimes these small, mildly scenic landscapes are just what our real children or our inner children need to feel like great explorers again. My toes, wiggling in the warm water, begin to feel alive. I seek Langdon out, and we make plans to go for a walk. I let her pick a favorite, and she chooses River Bend Park near Rancho Cordova—Chapter 10 in the book. Just past the park entrance, I come across a deer, a yearling with fuzzy antlers who looks up at me, curious and unafraid, then continues munching on the grass. Further on, just before the last parking area, I pass a flock of wild turkeys fanning their handsome tailfeathers. Hard to believe I’m just five minutes from the congestion of Folsom Boulevard. Langdon is wearing cool-girl corduroy overalls with a bohemian edge, and I feel sisterhood immediately. Her parents, who met in the Peace Corps, were teachers and adventurous world travelers. Eventually, the family settled in the Bay Area and bought a cabin at Lake of the Woods near Ashland, Oregon, where Langdon spent summers growing up. No way! My  grandparents had a summer cabin there for decades. They’d sold it by the time I came along, but we used to go to a cousin’s cabin on the lake. If I close my eyes, I can still picture the bugs flickering around the bare bulb on the sleeping porch and hear the lapping of the lake against the dock in the wake of the water-skiers. Now I know Langdon was wired for water from childhood, just the way I was. Courtesy of Ashley Shult Langdon She and her husband Andy moved from one coast to another before relocating to East Sacramento when he took a job locally as a child psychologist at Kaiser in 2014. They had met in the years after college when both were living in San Francisco and leading youth group trips abroad, which Langdon did professionally between graduating from UC San Diego with a degree in behavioral and evolutionary ecology, and having her children Dylan and Rhys, now 9 and 7, respectively, at which point she switched to handling admissions for study abroad trips. Then, when the pandemic hit, her industry shut down and she transitioned to becoming a stay-at-home mom. “I’d be like, ‘I just have to go on a run, and it can’t be around the neighborhood. That’s when I started,” says Langdon of embarking on her river journey. “The early times I went out to the river, not only did I not know it very well, but I also didn’t know Sacramento very well, to be honest.” But undaunted, Langdon set out to change that. She drove up and down both sides of the river, then mucked around until she found out how to read the geography and discover the trailheads hiding in neighborhoods. Her first success was finding the unsigned park access point at Jacob Lane. She hunts around on her phone for the selfie she took to send to Andy when she found a way in, that first time. The first of many, many, many times. “It’s really interesting that these trails are not more well known,” she says. We travel through tall grasses up the river’s southern bank where irises are in bloom. Langdon’s first forays were her own morning and evening runs, but when the pandemic closed her toddlers’ preschool, she got serious about getting the two boys outside every day. She tried piling them in the car and heading for Auburn State Recreation Area, one of the best-known hiking destinations in the region, about an hour north of Langdon’s home in East Sacramento. But the boys, like a lot of siblings on car trips, started fighting. “We got halfway there,” Langdon recalls, “and they were just Bart Simpson-ing each other in the back seat. I had to pull over. And I said, ‘That’s it, we’re going back to the river.’ ” That’s how she eventually found all the cool little places along the American to hang out. Langdon points to a grassy shelf at the river’s edge. “Remember how high the water was all last year?” she says. “This was basically ankle-deep, froggy water where the kids could look for tadpoles.” Moving on, she points out a super-secret small beach across the river from us, hidden in a residential neighborhood—Sarah Court, Chapter 9. She first spied it from where we’re standing. “I could see people over on that little sandy spit,” she says. Eventually she sleuthed out how to get there. In 2022, Langdon went into her favorite neighborhood bookstore, East Village Bookshop near McKinley Park, whose owner Sabrina Nishijima is also the author of a guidebook, 1001 Things to Do with Kids in Sacramento. Langdon asked Nishijima if she knew of a guidebook for the lower American River. She didn’t. The two women got to chatting—about books, about the river, about raising kids—and a light bulb went off. Having written a local guide herself, and hearing how much time and effort Langdon had already put into exploring the river, Nishijima suggested that Langdon go ahead and write the very book she was looking for. Nishijima says she had also been looking for this exact book for years. “I know of  this river; I catch glimpses of its beauty,” she says. “But every time I took my kids down a trail, I felt a sense of unease and disorientation. But Ashley is fearless. I just told her, ‘You have to write this book.’ I was a cheerleader from then on.” Langdon already had a lot of the material, having been an assiduous documenter of her river adventures. Later, back at our cars, she opens up her notebooks from her research period, and shows me the calendar in which she recorded each day’s discoveries. In fall, winter and spring months, the calendar is thick with ink; a little less so in the brutal heat of summer, just two days per week of early morning expeditions. Occasionally she’d spy a trail or spot that made her curious, and then she’d come back kid-free to explore on a trail run. Following in Nishijima’s guidebook-author footsteps, Langdon embarked on a self-publishing odyssey, deciding to keep the entire production local and under her creative control. She hired graphic designer Greg Traverso, who then lived in Amador County and was a frequent collaborator of hip area event producers Unseen Heroes on projects like Gather Oak Park and their retail shop Display California. And when the time came to finally add maps to the book, Langdon cold-called the geography department at Sacramento State, hoping for a map-maker recommendation. Instead, they enthusiastically took on the challenge of mapping out the trails themselves, turning it into a project for one of their undergraduate classes. Langdon in her element, on the shores of the lower American River where it passes through Rancho Cordova. The persistence with which Langdon pried open this wilderness, rendering it accessible, is a quiet masterpiece of human effort. I wonder, looking over her shoulder, if someday the places she has put on the map are going to be as familiar to locals as Land Park is today. If so, she will have altered the fabric of the city for the better, not by changing anything physically, but by altering the flow of human activity, like a river changing course. Since publishing Mildly Scenic  in May, Langdon has gotten a sense of who her readers are through an interview on Capital Public Radio’s Insight  program, and at book events around the region. (She plans to host a series of public library appearances in September, and join some of her collaborators from Sacramento State at an East Village Bookshop event on Oct. 5. “The moment Sac State got onboard to create maps,” Nishijima says, “I knew this book was going to become a staple and an essential part of this city for many years to come.” Langdon tells me that most readers, like me, have indicated that her work is instantly an essential resource for living in Sacramento. “The message I’ve been getting from people is, ‘This is the book I’ve been waiting for,’ ” she says. We pass through more wildflowers, cross Cordova Creek, through Hagan Community Park, a grassy spot with water fountains, restrooms and a baseball diamond, then dip back to the river. Before the book, Langdon says, she tried to tell a friend how to get to this spot (it’s now Chapter 12). The friend got as far as the park with the baseball diamond, but couldn’t figure out where the river was. Langdon had to guide her the rest of the way via text, even though the path was right there. I’m excited for my next solo outing—Sarah Court is calling to me as a place to spend a summer weekday basking with a beach read. I’m also longing to explore another spot that Langdon rhapsodized about, the El Manto area in Rancho Cordova, with its picturesque oak tree and on a clear day, even a view to the snow-capped Sierras. Sounds majorly scenic to me.