Every Los Altos parent who has made the mile-long walk out to Deer Hollow Farm knows the trip runs on a kind of civic autopilot. Park in one of the five lots off Cristo Rey Drive, follow the paved path past the wild turkeys, let the kids meet the goats, walk back. What most of those parents don't know is that the farm's day-to-day work depends on four separate organizations doing four separate jobs, while a separate county agency's scholarship grant is ending this year.
Deer Hollow Farm is a 160-year-old working homestead tucked inside the Rancho San Antonio Open Space Preserve, right at the edge where Los Altos foothills give way to open grassland. It draws about 130,000 visitors and 5,000 schoolchildren a year, according to its own nonprofit's site, and it houses somewhere between 75 and 100 farm animals at any given time. None of that runs on a single budget line. The City of Mountain View Parks and Recreation Department manages the day-to-day operations and programs. The Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District, known locally as Midpen, owns the land and the buildings and handles maintenance. Santa Clara County Parks funds a piece of the operating budget, paid directly to the City of Mountain View. And a small nonprofit called Friends of Deer Hollow Farm raises the money for animal care, farm enhancements, and student scholarships.
The scholarship funding is the piece that changed this year.
The Grant That Didn't Renew
For more than a decade, the Santa Clara County Social Services Agency, a different arm of the county than the one that funds day-to-day operations, provided grants to Friends of Deer Hollow Farm earmarked for student scholarships. That funding ends in 2026, the nonprofit's site notes, as a result of federal budget cuts working their way down through county social services. It's a small, specific casualty of a much larger fiscal story playing out across the country this year, but it lands in a very particular place: the line that helped get schoolchildren onto this farm for free.
The animals themselves aren't at risk from this particular cut. The cost of feeding and caring for them runs about $125 a day, or roughly $45,000 a year, and that figure is already covered entirely by donations and grants to the Animal Fund, separate from the scholarship money that just disappeared. So the barnyard opens on schedule either way. What's gone is the piece of the funding stack that specifically widened who got to walk through the gate for free, which is a different kind of loss than a budget shortfall, even if it doesn't show up in whether the goats get fed this winter.
It's worth sitting with how thin that funding stack actually is even before this year's change. The farm runs exactly three ticketed fundraising events a year: two spring Farm Tours celebrating the season's newborn animals, and one fall event called Spooky Times. Everything else is free five and a half days a week. Those three events support the Animal Fund, separate from the scholarship funding.
Spooky Times Lands October 17
This year's Spooky Times is set for Saturday, October 17, running 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. with last entry at 2:30. For Spooky Times, the farm closes to non-ticketed visitors, and the nonprofit says 100 percent of net proceeds go to the Animal Fund. The event includes costumed farm-animal visits and a haunted barnyard walk, and the nonprofit's own event page is blunt about the one real logistical problem: parking is limited, and they ask visitors to carpool rather than arrive in separate cars.
That advice tracks with what regular visitors already know about this preserve on any given weekend, event or not.
Getting There Without Losing an Hour to a Parking Lot
Rancho San Antonio's main access point sits at 22500 Cristo Rey Drive, reached off Foothill Boulevard just south of Interstate 280. There are five parking lots along that road, and Deer Hollow Farm itself sits about a mile in from Lot 1, along a paved, stroller- and bike-friendly stretch that Midpen and the farm both count toward roughly 24 to 25 miles of trail across the wider preserve. That trail-mileage figure holds steady across the two official managers, Midpen and the farm's own visitor page, even though third-party trail databases sometimes cite a larger acreage figure for the same land, a reminder that the preserve's boundary is drawn a little differently depending on who's counting.
Past the farm, the trail options split by ambition. The Wildcat Loop Trail climbs through wooded switchbacks to the High Meadow Vista Point, an open hilltop looking out over the Santa Clara Valley and the Bay. Coming back down, most loop hikers connect through the Rogue Valley Trail and the Farm Bypass Trail to return to the parking area, a combination that keeps a family outing under a couple of hours. For a longer day, the Black Mountain Trail starts from the separate Duveneck Windmill trailhead on the Los Altos side of the preserve and climbs nearly 1,600 feet over its course, a route better suited to a serious hiker than a Sunday-morning stroll with a stroller.
A few rules trip up newcomers more than anything else on the trail. Dogs aren't allowed anywhere in the preserve, which surprises visitors used to more permissive Bay Area open space districts. Bikes are restricted to designated trails and aren't permitted west of the farm at all. And any group of 20 or more needs a permit from Midpen before showing up, a detail that matters if you're the parent trying to organize a birthday hike for half a soccer team.
On timing, visitor accounts keep landing on the same two workarounds: get there early, well before mid-morning, or come in through the pedestrian underpass near the Los Altos side of the preserve instead of driving in through the main entrance off Cristo Rey Drive. Neither trick is a secret exactly, but they don't show up on a trail map, and on a weekend they're the difference between a hike and twenty minutes of circling a lot.
What Doesn't Show Up on the Trail
None of this changes what the farm looks like on a Tuesday afternoon in October: the same goats, the same volunteer-run garden, the same 1-mile walk from the same five lots. The gate still opens at 8, closes at 4, and takes a half day on Wednesdays like it always has. What's different this year is on the nonprofit's books rather than on the trail: a scholarship line that isn't there anymore, while the October fundraiser continues to support the Animal Fund.
If Rancho San Antonio and Deer Hollow Farm are part of what makes this corner of Los Altos feel like home to you, Michal Amodai would love to hear about it. She keeps track of the small, specific details, like a preserve's funding structure or a trail's real crowding pattern, that don't show up on a map but shape daily life here, and she's always glad to talk foothill-side Los Altos with anyone who's curious about it.
