Bryan route finding off-trail in Sespe Wilderness.

“I came to know that country, not in the way a traveler knows the landmarks he sees in the distance, but more truly and intimately, in every season, from a thousand points of view.”

—N. Scott Momaday, The Way To Rainy Mountain (1976)

“If I think about one lifetime, maybe we have eighty years if we’re lucky. That’s not many seasons to be out. If we only come out during one season we’ve missed out on three quarters of a lifetime.”

—Ray Mears

I have heard talk of a “hiking season” in the southern Los Padres National Forest, as if walking is akin to hunting and only legally permitted for a short time during a select period of each year.

The reasoning, I presume, is that summertime temperatures in the backcountry tend to be hot, in the nineties and upwards of one hundred. The land and creeks and rivers are dry or stagnant. The forest is swarming with pesky nostril and eyeball loving flies and campfires are prohibited. These conditions differ greatly from spring when the streams tend to flow, the temperatures are mild, the flies have yet to emerge and a rippin’ good fire can be freely kindled.

Self imposed limitations, however, necessarily result in limited experiences, and in turn a narrow understanding of the land, its plants and animals. It may also, perhaps, result in a more limited appreciation for the forest than might otherwise be afforded the person who visits the woods during all seasons and conditions.

Cedar Creek Trail, Sespe Wilderness

A mountain field carpeted in poppies and lupine for a few weeks during the mild temperatures of April is a remarkable sight, but it is all the more striking and incredible when one knows what the field looks like in August during 100 degree heat. (Seasonal Change In Wildflower Fields of Figueroa Mountain)

The dynamic and lively sound of a rushing creek filling a canyon is likely not appreciated as much by those who have never heard the same canyon dead silent during late summer when the creek has gone dry.

I wish to know the forest and everything there within during all seasons, when it’s hot and when it’s cold, when it’s dry and when it’s wet or frozen, when skies are blue and when they are cloudy, when it is not raining and again when it is pouring, when the days are long and when they are short, when the shadows are long in early morning and late afternoon and when they are short at midday.

For during each span of time a world of difference can be found resulting in a greatly varied collection of experiences which all hold in themselves their own unmatched value, and when the various pieces are combined the puzzle is put together and the picture complete.

The Cuyama Badlands. One of the wildest and least trod stretches of land in all the southern Los Padres National Forest.

A Chumash pictograph with inset showing a recreation of the design.

A seasonal creek flows by this Indian rock art site in Santa Barbara County and there is a spring not far from the paintings. When flowing the creek cascades several feet over an exposed outcrop of bedrock and into a small pool near the painted alcove. On the face of the outcrop where the waterfall flows there is a cavity in the rock that catches and holds water for far longer than the pool below the falls.

I checked this natural tank in mid-July out of an interest in seeing, during the current severe drought, how long it will hold water through the summer. It was still holding a decent amount despite no rain in over three months, the last precipitation amounting in total to about one inch which fell on the first and second of April. As of August 8, the tank still held water, remarkably clean looking water, and was a magnet for honey bees seeking moisture.

The small protected tank.

I sat beside the small puddle watching polliwogs wiggle around. A week earlier I had scooped up and saved twenty or so of those same tadpoles from a tiny volume of water, nearly dried up, which was held in a cavity on the same rock, just above the puddle where they now swam.

I sat wondering if the longstanding puddle ever served as a precious source of stored water for the Chumash. There is the spring lower down the creek, but in such a dry landscape, during a record drought, any bit of water catches my attention and seems remarkable.

I had been sitting there for ten minutes or so when I suddenly noticed a chipmunk clinging precariously to the rock just above the waterline. It was wet and shaking and had his face pressed against the rock. It looked like it was going to fall into the water at any moment.

My camera flash caused it to do so and I watched it for a couple of seconds frantically trying to swim, fatigued, its puny body vertical in the water, barely able to keep its nose above the surface. It was unable to claw its way back up onto the rock despite its desperate bid for life and after bobbing there for a moment its head dipped below the waterline. I could see it wasn’t going to make it.

I jumped off the rock and snatched a stick from the ground and thrust it into the water. Should have seen how fast and how solidly the little thing grabbed the wood. I brought the stick out of the water and slowly set it beside me. The chipmunk just sat there clinging to it.

I reached into my pack to grab a few raw almonds, thinking to leave them there for it to nibble as I left, but realized I had taken out my trail snacks and left them in the car. It was getting close to sunset, and as the chipmunk sat there shivering, I wondered if it would live through the night or succumb to hypothermia in its wet and weakened condition.

In making an effort to carefully carry the chipmunk on the stick up to a patch of sunshine, he jumped off and scampered through the brush. He found his way up to the exposed bedrock shelves, which were still soaking up the day’s last remaining rays of direct sunlight.

As soon as he left the shadows and hit the sunny rock he froze and collapsed like a lizard on a hot stone on a cold day. I laid my palm flat on the stone beside me which had already fallen into the shadows and it was exceptionally warm to the touch. The heat radiating from the bedrock must have felt awesomely good to the poor little cold bugger, which had just spent who knows how many hours or maybe days trying to avoid drowning.

Clinging on for dear life.

The moment of rescue.

Looking through Barger Arch toward Santa Barbara.

A coast live oak tree obscured for most of my life this frontside feature of the Santa Ynez Mountains. Arroyo Burro Trail, which cuts the mountainside nearby, was one of the first trails I explored as a boy. Riding my bike to Stevens Park and hiking up San Roque Canyon. My house sat beneath Barger Peak, just a few miles as the condor flies from the arch.

In later years we’d hike up Northridge Road, a steep length of skin-stripping asphalt below the trail and arch, and bomb it on skateboards wearing down the chosen Powell IIIs until they lost their bulky cubic form, turned into long thin cylinders and eventually got core-rot, could no longer bear the torque and ripped apart. We walked up La Vista Road innumerable times, also beneath the arch, and flew down it on skateboards testing our humble high-speed skills against gravity and pushing luck.

We wandered on foot the empty ridgeline above Northridge and connected it to Arroyo Burro Trail and down into upper San Roque Canyon. Now there are a couple of estates perched on that ridge overlooking Santa Barbara making such walks legally impossible.

We hiked, bushwhacked and crawled our way over and through the various folds of Barger Canyon. Thoughtlessly rode motorcycles across private land therein and were run into the hillside by an irate Robert A.

A frontal view of the arch showing the burnt branches of the oak tree.

Yet in all that time, through the years, in all those hours of unsupervised and unstructured recreation, crisscrossing the foothills of this particular section of the Santa Ynez Mountains, I never knew the arch in Barger Canyon existed.

Perhaps, though, it did not exist as it does today. Maybe it was smaller or even nonexistent. Standing beneath it now one can clearly see how a massive chunk of sandstone fell at some point from the outcrop thus creating the arch, if not entirely, then as it currently stands.

Sitting under the arch.

Then the Jesusita Fire stripped bare the mountain slope in 2009 defoliating the oak tree and exposing the arch as I had never seen it. A new feature was suddenly and dramatically revealed.

And along with it so too came the revelation that there was, amazingly, even this close to the city in a place in full view from areas all over town, and somewhere I grew up roaming, still some frontiers to explore, still some of the unknown to discover, still surprises and new experiences to be had, even in the nearest portions of Los Padres National Forest.

View through the arch.

Overlooking a dry Laguna Blanca, living up to its Spanish name due to the drought, with Barger Canyon arch noted by red dot. (Laguna Blanca Lake)

Related Posts:

Twin Arches, Gaviota Crags (from afar)

Twin Arches, Gaviota Crags (up close)

Finding Frontier In The Forest Conquered

Gabe Venturelli making it look easy. Good to see a friend, a Santa Barbara local, getting it like not many people do. In the middle of summer, no less. Pacific love.

“Look at this shot of Sandbar yesterday,” my wife says to me this afternoon, and holds out her iPhone to reveal a video of an epic wave featured on some surfer magazine page on Facebook entitled, “An Endless Barrel at Sandspit.” Such are the times, cell phones and social media, and, well, blogs like this. Much hated by many, but that’s reality these days.

“Wow. Oh man,” I reply, thoroughly envious of whomever it was that picked off the reeling grinder showing on the tiny screen.

“You’re not pissed off you missed that are you?” she asks knowing me all too well.

I refrain from answering her directly and after a brief pause, which effectively meant, “Hell yeah I’m pissed!” I continue the conversation with: “I drove by there yesterday late morning during high tide.”

I had a brief moment to check the surf at that time. I knew it wouldn’t be as good as when the tide dropped, nowhere near as good, but I had to lay eyes on the scene as soon as I had a chance anyway. It was a rare swell event.

“It was unreal!” I continue. “There were four SUKs out there!” SUK being a pejorative for SUP, which means Stand Up Paddleboard. “I’ve never seen anything like it. Just ridiculous!”

Frame grabs from video by Tony Modugno:

Late in the afternoon, that is the yesterday featured in the video my wife had shown me, not having felt like battling the mob I knew would show up at low tide Sandbar on an epic south swell, and not having wanted to try and elbow my way into waves amid the frenzy of wave-starved surfers, I had opted to go elsewhere.

I certainly did not score anything remotely close to what’s seen in the video, but my afternoon was made sweet and memorable nonetheless with some clean and green long walls at a break that rarely works in summer. The last time I had surfed there in summer was in the mid-nineties, after wakening one morning at a friend’s house along Gaviota to the sound of meaty shorepound slamming the beach, and the air laden with ocean mist. It was a rare treat to surf there once again in summer.

I see an old friend I grew up with at the beach today after having seen the video. He mentions that he saw Gabe, a mutual friend, at Sandbar on that glorious aforementioned yesterday. That he got one of the best waves he’s ever seen, saw it from the wharf across the harbor channel. He says he later saw it on video on the Web. Could it be? I wonder to myself. Naw. Couldn’t be. What are the odds?

I return home later and check the Web and sure enough, Gabe immortalized. I hadn’t recognized his style the first time I saw the video. “That was Gabe, that video you showed me,” I tell my wife. She knows him, too. “Wow!” she says. “You always said he was a good surfer.”

“Yeah. He’s really good.”

Related Post:

8@20 WNW 286°

A Chumash Indian rock art painting depicting a swordfish.

The rock holding the swordfish.

A pictograph found in a cave adjacent the boulder holding the swordfish.

A boulder found just outside the cave holding the pictograph shown in the previous photo.

A view from the cave. Once out from underneath the riparian zone, the shady canopy of coast live oak trees shrouding the creek, it is an entirely different world, an exposed hot landscape covered in scrub brush and annual grasses.

Bedrock mortars near pictograph site.

The bedrock mortar stone shown in previous photo seen again here.

Riparian environment near rock art site running along the foot of the rocky slope.

Replicas of Chumash tule-thatched huts at a nearby re-creation of a village.

A thatched tule hut somebody built along the Ventura River mouth a couple of years ago.

Building a replica of a Chumash thatched hut at the Ventura County Fair in 1923.

 Related Post:

Swordfish Cave, Earliest Chumash Rock Art On California’s Central Coast

A mural in Lompoc, Santa Barbara County depicting a seaside Chumash village scene.

Little of what Bill said made reasonable sense.

He stood on the other side of his termite infested, dry-rotted, wobbly fence, which was missing slats and had gaping holes, saying that the reason he would not allow us on his property to view a Chumash pictograph panel was because he was protecting it.

He was, in his own words, “a vicious and violent protector.” He was calm and peaceful and obviously being hyperbolic or perhaps his sense of humor was as bone dry as the surrounding landscape. Maybe despite his serene demeanor, however, he really was a mean animal if provoked. “I don’t own the rock art,” he said. “I’m just a temporary protector of it.”

In the grand scheme of things, in a philosophical sense, he was correct. The art may be on his private property, but his life is short, fleeting, a mere speck in time relative the universe. Nobody really owns anything, by that measure, but are only temporary caretakers for the short period of time during which they exist on this planet. Ownership is a legal abstraction, a man-made concept that exists only in the human mind.

A Chumash rock art panel in the Santa Barbara backcountry holding one of my all-time favorite design elements, which is seen here in the top half of center frame.

Chuck took the lead in trying to break through the armor plated steely resolve Bill represented. From this angle and that angle he attempted to gain access but was met each time with steadfast denial. He tried this. He tried that. And it went on from there. What if we never tell anybody? No. What if we promise, take a solemn oath, never to post photos of the site online? No. What if we don’t take any photos? No. How about just a quick glance? No. No. No.

Ten minutes prior to this fence line standoff, Chuck had spotted Bill in his driveway and approached him to ask if by chance he knew the location of the pictographs. We had been hopping around a pile of boulders, across the road from Bill’s house, looking for the treasure we had driven some distance to search out and find by way of a few scant clues. The boulders seemed an unlikely place, their location did not match the one telltale clue we had clung to all afternoon in our questing, but we were running out of ideas and so we checked anyway, and then Chuck saw Bill across the street.

Bill had played dumb. “I’ve heard that there is supposedly some Indian rock art somewhere around here but I’m not sure where it’s at.” I had been laying a few yards away under the canopy of oak trees on a boulder in the shade, enjoying a brief respite from the heat and the previous few hours of fruitless hiking. Chuck had chatted with Bill for some five minutes before we hopped in Chuck’s car and returned back up the small residential lane a second time for a final attempt to locate the sought after site.

A touched up version of the design element noted and shown in the previous photo. This is a redrawn image that enhances the design and relatively accurately conveys the general sense of the original artwork, but is not an exact representation.

After some two hours, maybe three or more even, of hiking up and down and all around a fully exposed, all but shadeless, hot south-facing mountainside in the summer swelter, we had one last option to investigate. The option, like the boulder pile across from Bill’s house, did not match the aforementioned clue, and so we had not pursued it earlier, but we had no better ideas at this point.

We headed downstream, or more properly described, down a small dry drainage channel that funnels runoff down the mountain during periods of significant precipitation. It seemed unlikely we would find here what we had already expended so much energy searching for, but it was our last hope before admitting failure for the day and heading home.

Twenty to thirty yards down the narrow drainage, which held only minimal brush and a few stunted oaks due to so little annual rainfall, it opened to a flat beside the creek bed. There before us protruding from the hillside adjacent the creek was an outcrop. Bingo! This was it. This had to be it.

We approached the site for a closer look onto what was obviously private property, and as we stood about conferring with each other, a man spoke to us from beyond the fence line. It was the owner. The same man Chuck had just spoken to face to face on the other side of the house and whom, bald faced, fed him a big ball of lies and pretended to know nothing. Later Chuck would say that he wouldn’t want to play poker with Bill, who had so well hidden the fact that he owned the rock art Chuck had stood before him inquiring about.

An exceptional Chumash mandala pictograph in the mountains of Santa Barbara County.

“I feel bad,” Bill repeated several times during the lengthy over-the-fence conversation, speaking of his refusal to allow us a peek at the rock art. Yet he stood firm and would not relent. He kept insisting he was a protector defending the art and repeatedly justified his denial of our friendly requests on that basis.

I understood his reluctance to allow strange men appearing at his backyard unannounced onto his property to view a rare, fragile and priceless piece of antiquity. I respected that, but what he was saying made no reasonable sense, and that bothered me more than his obstinate refusal.

I don’t appreciate being taken for a fool, like a small child who lacks the mental capacity to reason and see through a patently absurd argument.

We now knew exactly where this archaeological site was located. We knew his street address. We knew his name, and through various public records could find out a lot more about him. We could pinpoint the site location on Google satellite imagery and broadcast a map and GPS coordinates to the world, if we were so inclined. At this point we could tell anybody we wanted to regardless of whether he let us onto his property or not.

By refusing to allow us even so much as a brief glance at the pictographs Bill wasn’t protecting anything. His claim was prima facie ludicrous. He had tried to prevent our discovery of the site, and thus tried to protect it, by lying to Chuck earlier but that failed. We were persistent and determined. As Chuck told Bill over the fence, “We have a nose for these things.”

There was nothing any longer to protect, because we knew where it was. The only way he would be protecting the art was if he allowed us onto his property and then we somehow tried to harm the art right in front of him and he forcibly stopped us, but that was a wildly silly idea. We just wanted to see it.

Chumash pictographs in the Los Padres National Forest of Santa Barbara County.

I remained silent, though I wanted to let Bill know what he was saying was foolish, and that I well knew it. If he was willing to put up such a fallacious argument to justify his action, or was unable to see the falsity of what he was saying, then he would not likely be receptive to reason and so was a waste of further time.

We left Bill, the great self-described protector, after failing to convince him to let us see the treasure he hardly kept hidden beyond his shoddy, rickety fence. For a man who so adamantly claimed to be a defender of the site, he sure put little effort into keeping it hidden and secure from wayward eyes. And we wondered what the dust kicked up from the dog we heard barking in his yard did to the art.

We were kind and considerate and left on good terms. In the end, at least for me, as much as I wanted to see the pictographs, and as much as Bill’s lame excuse irked me, the fact that we were finally successful in locating the site, and did so on our last effort and after so much work, was a worthy reward in itself. The treasure hunt paid dividends even though we were ultimately denied the jackpot.

Rock art in San Luis Obispo County.

Blue skies and golden grass along lower Manzana Creek Trail at the Pratt homestead site.

“The Pratts homesteaded just below Cold Spring on Manzana Creek. They had a stepson by the name of Eddy Fields. At the site of the Pratt house you can still see a large “E” and “F” carved into the trunk of a live oak tree.”

-Historical Overview of the Los Padres National Forest, E.R. “Jim” Blakley and Karen Barnette (1985)

The oak is fairly thin and ordinary, unremarkable, another tree in the forest like so many others. Not like the oaken hulks aside the grassy flat several miles away on the west end of Sunset Valley in lower Munch Canyon, which in their height and massive girth draw attention and would make good targets for a bored mind and idle hands.

The oak must of been a relatively minor tree a hundred years ago when he carved his initials into it. I wonder why Eddy chose it. Maybe it just happened to stand between his family’s cabin and the nearby uncommon pocket of the creek that holds a perennial pool, where I imagine he might of played.

The Pratts stayed only a short time on Manzana Creek and apparently never proved up on their homestead claim. They sold their stove to Edgar B. Davison, a forest ranger who used it to outfit his Fir Canyon station on Figueroa Mountain: Edgar B. Davison’s Fir Canyon Cabin (circa 1900).

The E

The F

Eddy’s oak on the left.

There is a pocket of clear cool water in the creek by the oak. This in the month of July during a record drought while most of Manzana Creek is dry. At the moment of this writing a stack of rocks sits on the bank above the pool to note the uncommon availability of good water for passing hikers in an otherwise dry landscape. It wasn’t a bad choice for a site to stake a claim as a homesteader.

Manzana Creek upstream from the pool shown above at the Pratt homestead site.

Related Post:

Manzana Creek Schoolhouse (1893)

Calochortus fimbriatus, the late-flowered Mariposa lily, is in bloom at the moment in the Santa Ynez Mountains. A patch of the flowers thrives in the droughty dryness and summertime heat on a south facing rocky hillside at this particular location.

This variety of Calochortus or lily is listed by the California Native Plant Society (CNPS) as being rare throughout its range. Observational information about rare, threatened or endangered native plants and animals can be submitted to the California Department of Fish and Wildlife via their Native Species Field Survey Form. The data is added to the California Natural Diversity Database, which according to CNPS is “the largest, most comprehensive database of its type in the world. It presently contains more than 65,000 site-specific records on California’s rarest plants, animals and natural communities.”

The upper Santa Ynez River valley.

Upper Santa Ynez River

Looking up lower Mono Creek near the Santa Ynez River confluence.

“During the month of November the trail in Little Caliente and Mono canyons was greatly improved.”

Los Angeles Herald (1899)

The Mono-Alamar Trail is a treasure hunt to hike for the uninitiated. Near constant searching, scanning the brush and ground, straining to see subtle clues and telltale signs that lead to the goods. It may well represent in microcosm much of the world of hiking in southern Los Padres National Forest.

I had little time to spare with nine miles to hike in late afternoon up the unkempt, poorly marked trail. The treasured outcome was actually arriving at camp before sunset.

A short distance from its beginning the trail fades into the poison oak understory of a coast live oak forest and there I stood once again, like last time, wondering where the path went and which way to go.

In a general sense I knew exactly where to go. I’ve been there before. I didn’t need the trail. I could’ve reached the campsite without it and I wanted to forget the damn thing. Not waste time searching for it.

The meadow at Mono Campground. I lost a toy cowboy rifle somewhere down there several decades ago, which for some reason still sticks out in my mind.

The intense mental effort required to search for and follow the trail for miles on end makes it seem like an irrational obsession at times. I feel like an unsuspecting character in an outdoor theater of the absurd compelled to stay on the trail whether it makes the hike easier or not.

I waste time and energy searching for the trail, wandering around in circles over here and over there, into the brush and back out, up the creek and back down.

Where is the damn thing? How can it just disappear? It’s clear as day here and then a few steps later, poof, it’s gone.

An adobe at Ogilvy Ranch along Mono Creek.

Another view of the adobe looking up Mono Creek canyon.

Late afternoon reflections on a clear water section of the creek.

I stand gazing over the land straining to recognize some trace of the trail’s presence cutting through the grass or bushes or across a patch of soil, but I’m also thinking that I could easily hike on without it. I could make a lot better time hiking without a trail than standing around looking for one.

Sometimes I’m standing around looking or walking back and forth searching for the trail in the midst of a thirty or forty foot-wide gravelly wash beside the main creek channel. It’s open country in a wide, flat-bottomed canyon, but rather than hiking easily up the creek without need of the trail, I’m erratically wandering around staring at the ground searching for it.

It’s like a sick obsessive-compulsive disorder. That I must stay on the trail at every turn, even when it requires more time to do so and doesn’t make hiking any easier. As if the entire point of the trip is walking the trail as an end itself.

Looking upstream into Mono Narrows. The location of the campsite can barely be seen frame left as a tiny touch of brown, the top of the dead oak tree, at the foot of the shadowy cliff.

Mono Creek Narrows after a little rain.

Muddy Waters

Sight of the dry creek triggered visions of digging for mucky water in the gravel of the narrows, squatting in some low spot between boulders ladling up the dirty leftovers of a once clear flowing stream.

I hadn’t actually expected to see lower Mono Creek flowing or even muddy. I knew it’d be dry. Recent rain, a measly and sporadic few showers, had barely moistened the droughty hills. I had packed enough fluids to sustain me for two days at a minimum level and hoped to find water near camp.

Rainwater was puddled in depressions atop boulders along the trail as I hiked up canyon. Even though the creek was drier than the previous year when I was there last, enough rain had fallen to actually raise the creek through the narrows, but it turned it into a silt-laden stream of chocolate milk. While it didn’t invite a swim nor look appealing to drink, some muddy water was better than no water at all and it actually didn’t taste bad despite its hideous appearance.

Warm and muddy in Mono Narrows.

The Old Oaks Dies

I stopped short and stood gazing down the twilit creek in astonishment, mumbling to myself, cursing and questioning what had happened. The gnarly old oak had died.

The oak defines the campsite, hanging awkwardly over a bench of silt deposited from prior floods. It looks as if its acorn one day long ago washed ashore during an epic flood and rooted in near the high waterline.

The tree gives the camp a sense of place, that it isn’t just another few yards of unremarkable scrubby forestland like so many others. The tree imbues a particular ambiance to the nook that makes it feel like a destination, somewhere worth arriving at, somewhere worth spending time.

Mono Narrows Camp under the dead oak. Each day the water cleared up a little bit and the water fell cutting lines in the sand along its bank.

The oak tree sprouts out of the soil with tentacle-like meandering limbs reaching over the flat. In wild day dreams sitting around camp, the old tree my only companion apart from a bear, I imagine that the deep black hole in its trunk is the sucking maw of some fantastical monster with flexing, reaching lips like that of a horse. Some bizarre beast rooted into the creek bank, its tentacle limbs reaching into the stream snatching prey and stuffing its gaping mouth hole like a crab scavenging a reef, its pincers shoving forage into its grinding mouthparts.

Mono Narrows Camp
A camp fire with a view.

Looking downstream.

Overhead view of camp looking upstream.

The death of the great oak is a tremendous loss. When the tree falls it will take with it much of the campsite’s character and leave a void which cannot be refilled.

It’s unlikely that the campsite will remain an inviting place to stay. It may still serve a basic utilitarian purpose for the odd backpacker passing through who merely needs a patch of dirt upon which to sleep a few hours, but the camp has lost its defining feature and is on its way out. It died along with its ugly old oak.

Another view of the camp.

A large cottonwood tree snapped like a toothpick by a massive rock slide.

 Related Post:

Mono Narrows Camp, 18 Mile Day Hike Gone Bad

A mural in Lompoc, Santa Barbara County depicting a seaside Chumash village scene.

Little of what Bill said made reasonable sense.

He stood on the other side of his termite infested, dry-rotted, wobbly fence, which was missing slats and had gaping holes, saying that the reason he would not allow us on his property to view a Chumash pictograph panel was because he was protecting it.

He was, in his own words, “a vicious and violent protector.” He was calm and peaceful and obviously being hyperbolic or perhaps his sense of humor was as bone dry as the surrounding landscape. Maybe despite his serene demeanor, however, he really was a mean animal if provoked. “I don’t own the rock art,” he said. “I’m just a temporary protector of it.”

In the grand scheme of things, in a philosophical sense, he was correct. The art may be on his private property, but his life is short, fleeting, a mere speck in time relative the universe. Nobody really owns anything, by that measure, but are only temporary caretakers for the short period of time during which they exist on this planet. Ownership is a legal abstraction, a man-made concept that exists only in the human mind.

A Chumash rock art panel in the Santa Barbara backcountry holding one of my all-time favorite design elements, which is seen here in the top half of center frame.

Chuck took the lead in trying to break through the armor plated steely resolve Bill represented. From this angle and that angle he attempted to gain access but was met each time with steadfast denial. He tried this. He tried that. And it went on from there. What if we never tell anybody? No. What if we promise, take a solemn oath, never to post photos of the site online? No. What if we don’t take any photos? No. How about just a quick glance? No. No. No.

Ten minutes prior to this fence line standoff, Chuck had spotted Bill in his driveway and approached him to ask if by chance he knew the location of the pictographs. We had been hopping around a pile of boulders, across the road from Bill’s house, looking for the treasure we had driven some distance to search out and find by way of a few scant clues. The boulders seemed an unlikely place, their location did not match the one telltale clue we had clung to all afternoon in our questing, but we were running out of ideas and so we checked anyway, and then Chuck saw Bill across the street.

Bill had played dumb. “I’ve heard that there is supposedly some Indian rock art somewhere around here but I’m not sure where it’s at.” I had been laying a few yards away under the canopy of oak trees on a boulder in the shade, enjoying a brief respite from the heat and the previous few hours of fruitless hiking. Chuck had chatted with Bill for some five minutes before we hopped in Chuck’s car and returned back up the small residential lane a second time for a final attempt to locate the sought after site.

A touched up version of the design element noted and shown in the previous photo. This is a redrawn image that enhances the design and relatively accurately conveys the general sense of the original artwork, but is not an exact representation.

After some two hours, maybe three or more even, of hiking up and down and all around a fully exposed, all but shadeless, hot south-facing mountainside in the summer swelter, we had one last option to investigate. The option, like the boulder pile across from Bill’s house, did not match the aforementioned clue, and so we had not pursued it earlier, but we had no better ideas at this point.

We headed downstream, or more properly described, down a small dry drainage channel that funnels runoff down the mountain during periods of significant precipitation. It seemed unlikely we would find here what we had already expended so much energy searching for, but it was our last hope before admitting failure for the day and heading home.

Twenty to thirty yards down the narrow drainage, which held only minimal brush and a few stunted oaks due to so little annual rainfall, it opened to a flat beside the creek bed. There before us protruding from the hillside adjacent the creek was an outcrop. Bingo! This was it. This had to be it.

We approached the site for a closer look onto what was obviously private property, and as we stood about conferring with each other, a man spoke to us from beyond the fence line. It was the owner. The same man Chuck had just spoken to face to face on the other side of the house and whom, bald faced, fed him a big ball of lies and pretended to know nothing. Later Chuck would say that he wouldn’t want to play poker with Bill, who had so well hidden the fact that he owned the rock art Chuck had stood before him inquiring about.

An exceptional Chumash mandala pictograph in the mountains of Santa Barbara County.

“I feel bad,” Bill repeated several times during the lengthy over-the-fence conversation, speaking of his refusal to allow us a peek at the rock art. Yet he stood firm and would not relent. He kept insisting he was a protector defending the art and repeatedly justified his denial of our friendly requests on that basis.

I understood his reluctance to allow strange men appearing at his backyard unannounced onto his property to view a rare, fragile and priceless piece of antiquity. I respected that, but what he was saying made no reasonable sense, and that bothered me more than his obstinate refusal.

I don’t appreciate being taken for a fool, like a small child who lacks the mental capacity to reason and see through a patently absurd argument.

We now knew exactly where this archaeological site was located. We knew his street address. We knew his name, and through various public records could find out a lot more about him. We could pinpoint the site location on Google satellite imagery and broadcast a map and GPS coordinates to the world, if we were so inclined. At this point we could tell anybody we wanted to regardless of whether he let us onto his property or not.

By refusing to allow us even so much as a brief glance at the pictographs Bill wasn’t protecting anything. His claim was prima facie ludicrous. He had tried to prevent our discovery of the site, and thus tried to protect it, by lying to Chuck earlier but that failed. We were persistent and determined. As Chuck told Bill over the fence, “We have a nose for these things.”

There was nothing any longer to protect, because we knew where it was. The only way he would be protecting the art was if he allowed us onto his property and then we somehow tried to harm the art right in front of him and he forcibly stopped us, but that was a wildly silly idea. We just wanted to see it.

Chumash pictographs in the Los Padres National Forest of Santa Barbara County.

I remained silent, though I wanted to let Bill know what he was saying was foolish, and that I well knew it. If he was willing to put up such a fallacious argument to justify his action, or was unable to see the falsity of what he was saying, then he would not likely be receptive to reason and so was a waste of further time.

We left Bill, the great self-described protector, after failing to convince him to let us see the treasure he hardly kept hidden beyond his shoddy, rickety fence. For a man who so adamantly claimed to be a defender of the site, he sure put little effort into keeping it hidden and secure from wayward eyes. And we wondered what the dust kicked up from the dog we heard barking in his yard did to the art.

We were kind and considerate and left on good terms. In the end, at least for me, as much as I wanted to see the pictographs, and as much as Bill’s lame excuse irked me, the fact that we were finally successful in locating the site, and did so on our last effort and after so much work, was a worthy reward in itself. The treasure hunt paid dividends even though we were ultimately denied the jackpot.

Rock art in San Luis Obispo County.

I stood daydreaming with my back to the river when a loud slap broke from behind me, the sound of something smacking the surface of the water. It was pushing toward 100 degrees and I had just climbed out of the stagnant pool.

I turned quickly, falling into a crouch on my toes with fingertips spread on the stone for balance, a conscious reaction but seemingly driven automatically by instinct.

I do not like being the odd item out in the woods, a focal point, a target, attracting unnecessary attention. I like to be quiet, to blend in, become part of my surroundings rather than stand out from them.

The surprising noise, while not directly threatening, triggered a sense of apprehension. Thoughts sped across my mind like stock quotes on a ticker tape on fast forward. For a fleeting moment I thought somebody was playing a mischievous game, throwing something from the nearby cliff into the water to startle me.

I once was attacked by three heavily tattooed thugs from Lompoc not too far from where I was, one throwing a rock that slammed into my shin and drew blood. They surrounded me, getting off on cowardly intimidation and threatening further violence.

Following the slap on the water, the thought of some punk maliciously toying with me from the high ground was unsettling. I was out in the open. Imagine quickly scanning the high hillsides of a wide forest while standing on low ground and thinking somebody is out there hidden from sight spying on you. Not a good feeling.

Carp stranded in a summertime pool in the Santa Ynez River. (Photo taken several years ago at a different location than described in this story.)

A moment later, ripples radiating out from a point in the middle of the eerie looking deep green pool, I wrote it off as a large carp. The water is full of them, and I had just been gazing down upon several lazily swimming  around just the below the surface of the water.

I knew that sound, however, and it was not a carp or any other fish, but I couldn’t believe what my mind was telling me after it had time to settle and add up the equation. So I rejected it. Yeah, right. No way.

I clambered down the sandstone outcrop I had been standing atop, stepped back into the cool, refreshing water and lunged out into its depths swimming back to the far shore, along a rocky cliff and up onto the gravel shoreline. I was comfortably back in my element, alone in the woods, the previous thought of another person of some unwanted sort dismissed.

I walked back to the line of riverside brush and young trees where I had stashed my backpack and sat in the shade. It was hot, but I’ve come to appreciate hiking in 90 degree temperatures.

I noticed beside me a telltale clue that further confirmed my previous conclusion about the source of the noise in the water, but which I had rejected. I knew immediately upon seeing the branch what it was that made that slapping sound, but yet again my mind refused to accept what the clues confirmed. It just couldn’t be.

The branch had been recently gnawed in half and carried away for it was nowhere in sight. I scanned the immediate area around me and suddenly realized I was surrounded by numerous nubs of freshly gnawed branches sticking up from the riverbed and other old ones, too.

I wondered how I had missed all this obvious sign when I first hid my backpack and stripped off my clothes for a swim. It bothered me that I’d been so negligent, so lacking in situational awareness, oblivious to my surroundings. The roughly cut branches were everywhere. I must have been too hot, fatigued and ready for a swim.

On closer inspection I could see the wide bladed teeth marks that had smoothly slid through the wood in singular passes and with ease. Obviously whatever the animal was that made these marks had remarkably sharp teeth and powerful jaws.

“The branch had been recently gnawed in half and carried away.”

I knew what it was that made the marks, that cut the branches, that removed them to another location. Yet I still would not accept what my mind was telling me. I had been hiking through or around this general area since ever I could remember. One of the first hikes I remember was to this very location when my dad and uncle, the Brothers Elliott, dragged me down the trail here one day as a young boy.

I recall watching my dad dive off a notably high cliff-side perch into the deep river with near perfect form. That same perch was now right before me some yards away. They had pointed out fossil seashells along the way, which to me as a young boy were a great fascination and to this day those images still remain on my mental hard drive. The water was deep and rushing loudly that day.

Years later, as a teenager after I got my driver license, I hiked back to this area of the river frequently, sometimes with friends, but many times alone. It was a favorite backcountry hot and sunny spot in late spring and early summer when the coast is often buried in a cool, foggy marine layer. I’d spent many afternoons swimming and diving off the rocky cliffs and swinging from rope swings into the deep water. I’d caught and eaten trout and crawdads and saw big bass and carp.

I saw many things, but in all those early experiences I’d never seen any beaver nor sign of them. And in all the years since, while I knew there were beaver on the lower sections of the river and also in the upper Sisquoc River of Santa Barbara County, and I knew of historic accounts of beaver, and had also seen a Chumash pictograph that purportedly represented a beaver, I had never heard tell of beaver in this particular area in my lifetime.

But that’s what had slapped the water behind me when I was on the rock, not a carp or somebody throwing something. That’s what had gnawed through and carried away all those branches.

The characteristic gold, green and blue of summertime in the Santa Ynez Mountains.

Yet it was not until a few days later, after I had emailed a friend who is in a position to know, even if he had never seen them personally, that I finally allowed myself to accept what my mind had been telling me all along. After a couple of email exchanges I was thrilled to know that, yes, he had heard of beaver here and so, indeed, that is what I had heard and seen sign of that day.

I returned soon afterward and while I did not see any beaver, as I arrived at the very spot where I had hidden my backpack the week before and sat to rest in the shade, an animal went charging loudly through the brush down the riverbed. I could see a trail pressed through the reeds and branches leading from the water. It had to be a beaver.

I doubled back downstream and tried to walk back up the riverbed to sneak up and get a look at it, but the brush was too thick. Rather than continue the pursuit I decided to return another day at a better hour and hopefully catch sight of the animal in the water. The hunt to photograph the furry critter continues.

And so this late in my life I am still discovering new surprises in areas of the Los Padres National Forest that I thought I knew, and that I have spent much time recreating in and exploring since the earliest days of my youth, and which lie less then 100 miles from the nation’s most populace county.

It is wilder out there than I had thought.

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Finding Frontier In the Forest Conquered

Barger Canyon Arch

A preserved desert bighorn sheep in the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History.

“. . .the most modern hunters, the men who sally forth with rapid cameras instead of repeating express rifles, who press a high speed shutter instead of a hair trigger.”

—New York Tribune (1904)

After a bowl of oatmeal and a pint of coffee I had set out from camp hiking up a remote defile between ragged mountains with two strangers. A narrow, tertiary canyon above a river, it cut deep into the mountain, zigzagging up to the foot of a prominent peak. The mouth of the drainage, where it dumped into a wide-bottomed rubbly canyon, was a door into another realm. A tight entrance bracketed by rocky cliffs leading into a shadowy moist riparian strip.

The surrounding terrain, by contrast, was barren, steep sloped, mostly broken rock and exposed loose soil with little vegetation. It was oddly bare in its nakedness relative mountains nearby covered in dense chaparral. That’s one reason why the quarry we were after lives there. The open landscape allows the sheep to better see predators and the steep slopes aid their escape.

No trail lead through the canyon. It was a wild land of bears, lions and bighorn sheep, where condors soared the thermals faraway overhead, mere dots of black ink against a blue canvas. We walked up the shady creek hopping from one side to the other stepping over the few inches of water trickling down the stony groove.

The zigzag riparian strip of Sheephorn Canyon.

We were looking for an exit point out of the creek and up onto the mountainside. Somewhere we could manage to sit for two hours peering out across the vast space before us and maybe see something move out there. The land was rugged with few places to sit that had any sort of long view. In many sections the drop into the creek was sheer or too steep and rocky to scramble up and over. Getting out of the creek took effort and caution.

We were working for the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) searching for a remnant herd of desert bighorn sheep. We had been brought together as volunteers through an invitation extended by a prominent frequenter of the local backcountry, a conservationist who puts in many hours of volunteer work bettering the national forest in various ways. He was leading this outing and was sitting somewhere on another ridge also searching for the bighorn as we three settled in for our morning round of surveillance.

Our assigned duty was to sit for two hours glassing the mountain slopes for sheep, note how many we saw, if any, and their presumed ages as identified by the size of their horns or lack thereof. Our observational notes and photos would later be forwarded to CDFW officials for analysis.

Class I 2-3 years old; Class II 3-5 years old; Class III 5-7 years old; Class IV 7+ years old (CDFW graphic)

I had never seen a live bighorn sheep, just the stuffed specimens in the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History. I had only learned of their presence at this particular location relatively recently.

Not long before first learning bighorn lived in the local forest I had taken my young daughter to the museum and stood before the stuffed sheep. I had looked at it many times through the years on numerous visits, but it was a different experience this round.

An illustration from an article entitled, “Shooting Mountain Sheep In Lower California,” published by the Los Angeles Herald in 1897.

It had always been just another exhibit to glance at like so many others, never captured my attention much. This latest time, however, seeing the exhibit through a child’s eyes, I no longer only understood in a remote abstract sense how these large animals had disappeared from the mountains, but felt for the first time a sense of loss and lament unlike during other visits.

I pondered what had been seized and snuffed out by previous generations. There was the ill-considered actions of otherwise decent people. But there was also the plundering, the rapacity, and the ruthless indifference by others. Fleeting actions by a few that forever altered the course of history for all others and life on the planet. I thought of what we of later times had lost. I felt a deep sense of regret that my own children, through no fault of their own and without their having any say in the matter whatsoever, would never see the bighorn when hiking in the wilds of their own extended backyards.

It was if I had brought my daughter to this illuminated glass case to view a treasure that had been stolen from her. It wasn’t a celebration of the wealth of natural history. It was a memorial. It wasn’t a museum. It was a mausoleum. The plaque on the exhibit was an obituary. It was a hall of holocaust where people spoke in whispers and filed through to catch a glimpse of an extinct specimen of humanity’s relentless massacre. A dark record of civilization’s collateral damage. The stuffed sheep stood behind the glass as a silent testament. The heavy door, the weight, having to heave it open to leave the stale confines of the dark-colored room, it seemed fitting.

When I later learned that the bighorn were not in fact regionally extinct I was stunned and thrilled. When I was subsequently recruited to venture into the forest and find them I could hardly wait to get out there. I need little reason and an even smaller excuse to get out into the backcountry bushes.

The thought of hunting down wild bighorn sheep from a remote base camp provided a surplus of stoke to fuel the long arduous hike alone through the heat of the day, to reach the camp, and meet up with the select group of other volunteers. And when finally out on the mountain, the tedium of sitting for hours glassing the distant slopes was erased by the sense of excitement motivating me to do all I could to spot, for the first time in my life, these magnificent curly horned sheep in their natural habitat, and not too far from my home.

A photo of a hunting camp on Mexico’s San Pedro Martir Mountain. The image accompanied a story from which the following quote was excerpted, relating as it does one reason for the decline and disappearance of bighorn sheep in areas along the Pacific Coast. Twenty-five dollars in 1913 equates to about $600 today when adjusted for inflation. Other historic newspaper stories recount the exploits of Colonel Roosevelt, later elected 26th president of the United States, hunting bighorns in these same mountains.

“Another man had a standing offer from a San Francisco firm of $25 for every head of a male bighorn, and he shipped a good many. The traffic of course was stopped when Mexican law declared a closed season for mountain sheep. It was high time, too, for they were wantonly destroyed, sometimes not even for their heads and skins, but merely for the pleasure of slaughter.”

—Lompoc Journal, Santa Barbara County (1913)

I had been sitting in silence for nearly two hours, though it seemed to pass rapidly, and I had not seen any sheep. My vigilant effort felt futile, like the old needle in a haystack exercise. Then I caught sight of several sheep walking over the crest of a ridge high above me. I thought of the odds of seeing so few sheep in so large a wilderness, and to have them appear as close as they did, and how I was fortunate enough to have been assigned to stake out this particular location, while the other few groups of volunteers had been placed elsewhere. Everything had come together nearly perfectly.

I had separated myself from the other two men by ten yards or so and they had not yet seen the sheep. I started calling to them to get their attention by blowing breath across my teeth in such a way that was just short of a whistle. I didn’t want the sheep to hear or to frighten them so I avoided speaking, but mountain sheep are keen and naturally leery, having evolved to evade silent and stealthy predators like mountain lions. They quickly spotted me with their acute eyesight.

I kept blowing, making the soft rustling sound, unable to get the two other guy’s attention, the sheep peering down directly at me from their high mountain perch the whole time. Later one of the guys mentioned that he heard me for some time before realizing it was me, and that I sounded something like a bird.

We watched through binoculars and cameras. Ten or so sheep, young and mature alike, traipsed over the steep rocky slope cropping forage over a period of perhaps twenty or thirty minutes. They walked across the side of the ridge and then back from whence the came, ever vigilant, before disappearing from sight.

One of the other guys jotted down notes as the other peered through his binoculars calling out the approximate age of the animals. I had my eye to my camera lens rapidly firing off photos. I had brought, aside from my SLR camera, a Russian-made spotting scope but it was too powerful to be of any use and did not have a wide enough field of view. I could not keep it pinned on the sheep as a group as they ambled about and I found it impossible to see much through the shakiness. I decided that I would be of best use by taking photos I could later send to CDFW for staff biologists to analyze.

There’s sheep on the slope, but impossible to see in this photo showing the landscape and habitat.

A closer view showing at least seven well-camouflaged bighorn sheep foraging.

In late afternoon I followed one of the guys I worked with in the morning and we hiked off-trail up a steep, rocky mountainside above the small canyon we had previously staked out. He was a man whose name I’ve seen signed in at a remote mountain peak in the same region, a seldom visited site with no official trail and which few people have set foot on. I had been told his name is found on a number of other such out of the way, hard to reach mountain peaks and I had heard tales of this man from other local hikers. A picture of him had emerged in my mind as a hardened, stoic, grim character of middle age.

When I met him I was surprised to see that he was an easy going, grandfatherly type quick to smile and easy to chat with. He was fit and able, and scrambled up the loose incline with remarkable dexterity for his age, fully clothed in long sleeves, pants and gloves, and with only his face peeking out from under the bill of his hat, a flap of cloth circling his neck. He seemed partial to covering every patch of skin possible. A choice, no doubt, based on the wisdom gained through hard earned backcountry experience, his clothing a subtle clue that his definition of “hiking” differed greatly from the average visitor to the national forests.

I hoped to remain as agile as he was when I’m his age, I thought as we hiked up to a small bare nub of broken rock protruding from the shoulder of the mountain. There we perched for two hours like sentinels overlooking the deep cleft in the earth below us, and peering out over the valley-like canyon where our camp was located. I drew the circular brim of my hat down around the sides of my face to darken my peripheral view and kept my eye to the lens scanning the distant slopes for long periods of silent time. We exchanged few words, but the long silences were not uncomfortable.

A member of the group out scouting for sheep high above the creek, center frame circled in red. It was challenging, in the tight canyon, without hiking clear up the mountain out of it, to find a spot up out of the creek that offered a view wide and long enough to actually be able to glass a decent sized expanse of terrain.

We sat for two hours scanning the mountains and lo and behold near the end of this period of time I spied, on a distant slope, barely visible with the naked eye and hard to see even with my zoom lens, a group of bighorn sheep. Several guys in our group in the canyon below us had clued me in with their sudden chatter and pointing, but it took some time to finally spot the sheep. They seemed to be stuck to the wall of the distant mountain, their legs like pegs drilled into the earth, sharp-edged cloven hooves holding them in place.

I saw the sheep, took my eye from the camera, and then looked back through the lens and couldn’t see them. They were there once more before again disappearing in plain sight. Their tanned-hued hides blended with the surrounding terrain making them nearly invisible from a distance and I wondered how long it took for this perfect color match between earth and animal to evolve.

Once more I was feeling fortunate, ever more so, in having had the chance luck to spy yet again a handful of bighorn sheep on my first ever outing in search of them. Mission accomplished.

Two sheep walked up and perched briefly on this boulder appearing to pose for the camera.

This subspecies (Ovis canadensis nelsoni) is native to the area, but went regionally extinct about 100 years ago due to human actions, overhunting and disease introduced by cattle. Their current presence in their historic range is the result of the CDFW reintroducing them several decades ago. Though many died and the initial effort seemed to fail, the sheep were tenacious and rebounded and increased in number.

The story of these bighorn sheep is one of tragedy and triumph, disappearance and something of recovery, of the destructive force of some humans and those that work to restore and rebuild in the aftermath. In some manner the sheep’s plight is reminiscent of condors which also disappeared completely for a time in this same area due to humanity and were later reintroduced and once more repopulated.

I wonder if the second chance desert bighorn sheep are here to stay or will merely be another short chapter in the long story of interaction between humans and wildlife. The answer mostly depends on the actions, for better or worse, and the interest and care or apathy and indifference of humanity.

I believe this would be categorized as a class III desert bighorn sheep.

We had set out to go spearfishing, but a south wind and a west swell combined to ruin conditions. We drove up the mountain from the beach and hiked down into the canyon, the creek within which drains into the Pacific adjacent the reef we had planned to dive.

Within about fifteen minutes of stomping through the brush we found two bedrock mortars beside the dry creek under the oak canopy. Surrounding the mortars, and spread across a large area, were the remnant pieces of shellfish long ago harvested by the people that had used the stones to presumably grind acorns. The site was located in an oak shaded draw near the top of the canyon at the confluence of several dry creek channels.

I never tire of finding these sorts of archaeological sites, and imagining what life was like for those that once frequented them, and how the land might of looked during their times, devoid of modern alteration and absent the mechanized drone of civilization.

The mortars are located on the rocks frame left, the seasonal creek flows just below them.

The midden was comprised mostly of mussel shells so far as I could determine. One aspect that I found interesting was that all the shells were remarkably small. I did not see a single large, full-grown mussel. I wondered why only small ones were scattered about the area. Did they prefer the taste or consistency of younger mussels?

Two weeks prior, I had harvested a pull of mussels and cooked them for dinner. Out of curiosity I had taken some small, medium and large mussels wondering if there was a difference in taste or tenderness among them. I have always tended to take medium-sized mussels thinking that the larger ones might be tough and that the smaller ones weren’t worth the work for so small a morsel. There might have been some degree of difference in tenderness depending on size, though I think the manner in which they are cooked is a bigger determinate in how tough they are. If overcooked they become rubbery and chewier. There was really no notable difference. They were all tasty and worthwhile.

Thinking back on my own experience, that there did not seem to be any notable difference in taste or consistency among differing sizes of mussels, it occurred to me that what I found at this Chumash site mirrored the findings of scholars working on the Santa Barbara Channel Islands. As previously noted on this blog, “midden evidence [found on San Miguel Island] shows an apparently significant decrease in the size of mussels harvested as the shellfish are thought to have faced increased pressure from a burgeoning Native American population.”

One of the mortars.

The mortar and midden site mentioned here was between one and two miles from the beach, high up in the canyon. I wondered why people had carried the mussels up the mountain rather than having eaten them down near the beach much closer to where they were harvested. I pondered this question assuming that efficiency was crucial to a primitive hunter-gatherer culture, and so why cart the additional weight and bulk up the mountain?

The site was not located on an expansive plot of land sufficiently large enough to provide adequate space for many people to live. It did not seem large enough to support habitation for anymore than a small group of people at best. With only two mortars, and relatively shallow ones at that, it also did not seem to be a site where a significant amount of work was carried out preparing food, though perhaps they might have relied more on free-sitting individual stone bowls rather than bedrock mortars.

My inexpert conclusion was that it didn’t seem likely that there were loads of mussels routinely carried to the site to support habitation. I’ve seen more and deeper mortars at a spring site in the Santa Ynez Mountains where, due to geography and a lack of flat ground and open space, habitation was impractical if not effectively impossible.

The oak grove at this mortar and midden site we found was minimal, as well. It was not a sprawling forest of acorn producing trees that seemed likely to attract many people looking to secure food. Though perhaps the forest of oaks was larger historically than it is now. Whatever the case historically, there were now just as large of oak groves found lower down in the canyon closer to the beach.

I thought that perhaps those people that visited the site had routinely brought with them mussels to eat while they ground acorns beneath the oaks. A sort of lunch cooked on the mountain for a hot meal while out gathering food. And if that was the case, it seemed to me that the logical action would be to bring larger mussels rather than smaller ones. It seemed it would require less work to harvest, cook and eat larger mussels and so was a more efficient means of filling the belly than dealing with loads of tiny shells.

Two small mussel shells from the midden.

And so, in other words, it seemed to me that the reason all the shells in the mountainside midden were so small was indeed because, like on the Channel Islands, they were a highly valued food source whose population was being heavily relied on by the Chumash. That mussels were routinely harvested before they had time to mature. The faded, chalky old shells were an interesting telltale clue telling a story about the Indians and their exploitation of natural resources, a clue on the mainland which matched the evidence found by archaeologists on an island across the channel.

Native Americans, in general, are often romanticized in American culture as careful and responsible stewards of the environment in a manner unlike much of modern humanity. As I squatted beneath the oak trees examining the shells once plucked from the seashore by Chumash hands, I wondered that if history had taken a different tack, and North America was left untouched by conquistadors and explorers and fur traders and subsequent European settlers and their descendents, and the population of Chumash Indians continued to grow and to increasingly rely on shellfish, would they have over-exploited blue mussels?

We proceeded down the canyon from the mortar and midden site, following the dry creek to the beach. There were several other small oak groves along the way, wonderful stands of trees that were to me no less attractive than the one where the mortars and midden were located. We did not, however, see any other traces along the way left by Native Americans.

It left me wondering why they had chosen the site they had, nearly at the top of the canyon, about as far from the beach as one could hike before exiting the canyon and reaching the chaparral covered ridge above. Perhaps it was a stopping place during travel between villages or harvesting and hunting grounds and villages, but being so close to the beach, it did not makes sense to me that they would stop to roast and eat mussels if hiking between destinations. Why not just eat them at the beach, fill the belly at the harvest site and then be on your way with no need to stop a mile and half later or carry the mussels?

Assuming the Indians were a practical people and did not act arbitrarily, I wondered why they had not chosen one of the oak groves lower down the canyon, closer to the beach and with easier access. Of course, all these questions might be quickly answered by scholars, but it was an unanswerable puzzle to me.

Whatever their reasoning, the forest within which the site was located, and the nearby seashore and nearshore reefs, must have offered a wealth of exceptional food. I always daydream of that long lost richness, how it was before the American population explosion greatly depleted what once was abundant. I wish at times I could experience the way it once was, though I harbor no illusions about how much harder life was at that time.

A short distance down the dry creek from the Chumash site we found this seep still holding water, which in this exceptionally dry year of record drought was a remarkable feature of the landscape.

Related Post:

Mussel Harvest at Low Tide: Modern Man, Ancient Practice

A hericium or “Lion’s Mane” mushroom growing on an oak tree, circled in red.

With the first rain of the season some weeks ago the countdown had begun until the opening harvest of mushroom season. One week passed. It may have still been a mite early at that point for the particular type of mushrooms I was after, knowing it was far too early for chanterelles, if enough rain had even fallen to make them fruit. I only had a fraction of a day that weekend and so I opted to go spearfishing rather than mushroom hunting.

Another week passed and by this time I was figurin’ it was too late, but I couldn’t blow it off entirely, had to take a looksee at one of my go-to sites. Even if I found the mushrooms rancid or partially dried, it was still important to me to witness the ways of nature and how these things work, how the equation adds up under the variables of an exceptional drought. Conditions, weather, had been so dry for so long, the soil hydrophobic in all but the most protected and moist nooks of the forest, that I figured this site would be producing if anywhere was after such minimal rainfall.

Making my way down the steep slope beneath the chaparral and into the creek I noted right off how dry it was already. It was as if no rain had fallen. It smelled parched. The creek was flowing, not unexpectedly, but everything else was crispy and dusty. The leaf mulch crackled under foot rather than absorbing footsteps in muffled compression.

I was surprised to see that the oyster mushroom colony on a standing dead tree rising from the creek bed had not even sprouted. The hericium I was after had also not sprouted. I wasn’t too late. Nothing had even happened. Not enough rain.

I wandered up the creek, my dog bounding behind me. I walked the canyon aimlessly, observant, searching the forest for whatever might catch my attention: step, hop, bound, step, pause, peer. With head tilted upward, scanning the slope rising beneath the oak canopy, a white spot caught my eye. Bingo! A hericium was growing from a knot hole in a big oak.

I hadn’t seen this mushroom in previous years though it grew just a short distance from one I had harvested numerous times, the one that had not yet sprouted, likely because it grows in the rain shadow under a log and requires heavy rainfall. The one I had just found was growing in an hole facing skyward that collects rain.

Teetering

I scrambled up the slope to the tree and quickly found that the mushroom was too high to reach and that I had no way to climb up and grab it. Using my trekking pole I was barely able to reach the mushroom, standing precariously on tip toes on a rock leaning over a short drop.

I gave it a gentle prod, but they root firmly into the wood and it was clear I wouldn’t be able to liberate it without tearing it to pieces. I drew back my pole, the end of the handle wet with hericium juice. I gave the wet spot a sniff. The fragrance was remarkably fruity and sweet smelling, so much so that it made my salivary glands tighten and my mouth water. That’s probably not something one typically would think of happening when smelling fungus.

I forced a chunk of the mushroom off with my pole and it plopped into the leaf mulch below. I was just a bit too late, the fruit beyond its prime and beginning to rot. While that was a disappointment, I was nonetheless stoked to have found another hericium.

Even on days that don’t go according to plan valuable experience may be gained, experience that accumulates into wisdom. Following the first rain of next season it will be a site I’ll return to, with a rope ladder, to harvest one of the most delectable mushrooms in the forest, far superior to the highly overrated, lesser mushroom, the chanterrelle.

A smidgeon of Piedra Blanca.

“Civilization has a relatively precarious hold on us and there is an undoubted attraction in a life of absolute freedom once it has been tasted. The ‘call o’ the wild’ is in the blood of many of us and finds its safety valve in adventure.”

—Percy Fawcett, legendary British explorer of the Amazon who vanished without a trace in the “green hell” of the jungle in 1925 never to be heard from or seen again.

After confirming a plan with Stillman to hike up to Pine Mountain Lodge Camp and descend Piedra Blanca Creek, I spent the next week dreading it. How easy it would be to not wake up when it’s dark, to not haul my butt up three thousand feet of mountain in six miles only to turn around and hike down the mountain, without a trail, over unknown terrain.

But the self-imposed forced march is always inevitable. There is something deeply ingrained in me that, sooner or later, always wins out and compels the body to follow the order of the mind. One week I’ll be stumbling back to the trailhead thoroughly exhausted with aching muscles, repeatedly wondering why I do this to myself, while also thinking that at least now I’ve had my fill for awhile. Yet, by the next week my mental half is already Jonesing to get out and punish my physical half some more.

As ridiculous as it is to compare anything I’ve done or ever will do to the adventures, in the true sense of the word, of Percy Fawcett, I suspect I am routinely driven into the woods on long and sometimes grueling hikes by a strain of pathology similar to what propelled him into the jungle time and again.

DavidStillman.blogspot.com

Pine Mountain Lodge Camp along the headwaters of Piedra Blanca Creek.

Piedra Blanca Creek emerges from a crease in the mountaintop, just above Pine Mountain Lodge Camp (PML), a thin brook winding through the rocky high conifer forest alongside the backpacking camps. Neither of us had laid eyes upon the upper length of this creek aside from its headwaters around the campsites.

A short distance below PML prime was a stretch of the unknown. There was even the potential for a chance at encountering some degree of relative adventure. What was there? Waterfalls or caves and incredible sandstone outcrops? Endearing creekside flats perfect for camping but that are never visited? Remnants of historic Americana? Traces of prehistoric Native Americana? It was the lure of the unknown and an unanswered question of how it might proceed. It was tempting. And irresistible.

Fall color in the Sespe Wilderness.

We knew there was no official trail. I was operating on the premise that there wasn’t likely much to see in the upper reaches of Piedra Blanca Creek; little that might set it apart from the other creeks in the neighborhood; nothing that would attract the average hiker.

Despite not thinking I was going to find the extraordinary, I nonetheless felt compelled to put in the strenuous work required to survey the land on foot myself, never satisfied sitting at home scanning through other people’s photos and brief captions via the Internet. Even if I had heard that there was nothing remarkable to see, I’d still have gone. I can’t help it. And much that might be said to be ordinary or unremarkable by most people usually hold a greater degree of value to me.

Hoping boulders down the creek, I turned for a view of my backtrail just as a beam of sunlight shot through a gap in the clouds illuminating a massive old-growth cedar and bringing out its characteristic brilliant red hue.

The gnarled fingers of a giant cedar growing midstream.

This was my first hike of autumn and what a glorious day for it, just following the first rainfall of the season. So long had it been dry. The sky was a brilliant blue, but daubed here and there with just the right touch of white clouds, sometimes puffy, sometimes torn and wispy, to add character and depth to the crystalline air, which was freshly washed and filled with an invigorating mélange of earthy and herbal fragrances, newly moistened soil and damp chaparral.

We walked up on a large black bear, which we may have come face to face with had our timing been less than a minute different. We had been downwind from it and sufficiently quiet enough that it might have told its friends the same tale as I have here, that it unknowingly walked right up on two humans.

I had heard the crack of some bending branches or bushes, but had dismissed it as a deer. When we passed around a boulder blocking our view we saw it traipsing away only to pause once up the slope and out of the creek and give us a good stare down. I didn’t much like the way it looked at us.

We came across a remarkable amphitheater-shaped outcrop or grotto over which the creek flows. Beneath the overhang it was felted over in dense dark green moss and embellished with delicate fern fronds poking from the cracks in the sandstone.

The woods through which the creek flows exude a primeval ambiance. A keen eye, however, may spy telltale signs of previous human passing. But just a couple, and only minute and subtle traces. It’s wild up there. Remote. Shadowy and mysterious with a tinge of creepiness. Big timber. Big boulders. Big beasts. It is legitimate big mountain terrain and wildness quite unlike what might commonly be thought of as typical forest found so close to Ojai and Ventura.

The grotto.

And then, leaving the open tall timber, and falling lower in elevation, we entered into the range of chaparral and the creek suddenly became choked with dense brush and brambles. I went from standing erect and easily hoping boulders while scanning the surrounding conifer-clad slopes, to crouching, scrambling and crawling under a frustratingly thick tangle of overgrowth spread across the creek like a sieve straining the runoff of flotsam during winter storms.

Getting stabbed, poked, and sliced. Incessantly impeded and pestered. And unable to see much more than what was passing within a short distance before me. When possible I’d stand craning my neck straining to see where in the canyon we might be, and then sulk in contempt at how much farther we had to fight our way through the nightmarish tentacles of brush.

Approaching a dry waterfall just prior to entering the unpleasantly brushy section of creek.

We finally broke through onto the official trail once again. That is always a refreshing feeling, to set foot onto a wide-open, well-packed trail that requires so much less physical effort and seemingly zero mental attention, after barging through woody and wiry mountain weeds constantly searching for the path of least resistance.

While I had satisfied my curiosity in experiencing firsthand what that stretch of the wilderness was made up of, the craving for yet more of the same, always coursing through my interior, would soon yet again make itself known. It’s insatiable.

Related Posts:

Pine Mountain From Piedra Blanca

Piedra Blanca

Although the forest ranger mentioned in the newspaper article below is Joseph Montgomery, I wonder if it may actually have been a brief about Josiah T. Montgomery, for whom Montgomery Potrero atop the Sierra Madre Mountains is named. I do not know if Josiah was a forest ranger, but he was a pioneer of the Sisquoc River region and his was the last official homestead claim made in that particular area (Blakley & Barnette 1985).

The article was originally published in the Los Angeles Herald in 1902. About that time the California condor population is estimated to have numbered about 600. By 1987 the condor population had been decimated by intentional and unintentional human actions. In that year the last California condor still flying free in the wild was captured in a desperate attempt to save the species from possible extinction.

A condor soaring over Sespe Wilderness, as seen on a hike to Whiteacre Peak. (Return to Whiteacre Peak or Day of the Condor)

Fight With a Condor: Experience of a Forest Ranger in Santa Barbara County

SANTA MARIA, March 12 —As Joseph Montgomery, one of the forest rangers, was on his way to town last week from the government forest reserve he had quite an experience with a California condor. Coming down a wild canyon he noticed a commotion in some brush near the trail, and on investigation found that two mountain foxes had attacked an immense condor, which was apparently sick and disabled. As the fighters worked out of the brush Montgomery tried to lasso the bird, but with no success, as he would fight the rope off with his wings. It attacked Montgomery by striking at him with his beak and talons, and for a time was getting the best of him until the ranger picked up a club and soon dispatched the bird, but not until his clothes were in a sadly demoralized condition, and he still can show several ugly scratches. The wings, which he brought home, measured nine feet across. As this species is vary rare, he tried to capture it alive.

A winter scene in the Santa Ynez Mountains, Los Padres National Forest.

“No, I can’t say I was ever lost, but I was bewildered once for three days.”

“I wouldn’t give a tinker’s damn for a man who isn’t sometimes afraid. Fear’s the spice that makes it interesting to go ahead.”

—Daniel Boone (1734-1820)

cowboy up
[kou-boi uhp]

verb

1. ( US, informal) to adopt a tough approach or course of action
2. to tuff up; to get back on your horse; to never back down or give up; to face the hand you’re dealt without complaint

I’m going to opine here and perhaps ruffle a few feathers if not anger some people, but I’m not one to remain silent out of concern about such trivial and fickle matters as human emotions. I’m sick of hearing about so-called “lost” hikers calling in Search and Rescue (SAR) to save them from having to face the inconvenience and discomfort of the consequences of their own poor decisions.

In the neighborhood where I grew up, and within the school from which I come, a man was measured by his willingness to accept without complaint the consequences of his actions. That whatever situation a fella got himself into he was first and foremost responsible for getting himself out of before calling on others to risk their health and lives to help him. He looked not to others to relieve him of unwanted, though entirely bearable circumstances. And I do not mean a fleeting or cursory attempt, but a damn good, all in, everything tried sustained effort.

I do not intend to say that a person should never call on SAR or rely on their selfless and noble service, but that I believe such services should be reserved for rescuing people who have sustained serious injuries or are facing imminent great bodily harm or death. I routinely read about so-called “lost” hikers who when the sun goes down have rescue personnel deployed, at great expense, to save them from a few hours of uncomfortable cold and darkness, circumstances brought on by their own thoughtless actions or misguided behavior, situations entirely survivable without injury let alone death. SAR does not exist, in my opinion, to save people from fear or a few shivers and goosebumps or a sleepless night.

I have noted on this blog before, and I am sincere in saying it, that “I’d rather spend a cold miserable night lost in the woods and have another try at finding my way out next morning, rather than call for help. I’d die sooner from embarrassment than exposure.”

When discussing this matter with my wife recently, after reading a post one night from a lady requesting help on the Santa Barbara Swap Facebook page to locate her boyfriend who had misplaced himself in the Santa Ynez Mountains above Santa Barbara, my wife said she wouldn’t hesitate much in calling SAR if I failed to show up after dark. (We do, however, have an understanding that I should be granted a solid chunk of time well after the sun goes down before she even considers calling in the troops.)

I replied in jest as if acting like a rescuer, “We located the lost hiker, but it was the strangest thing. Upon seeing us he fled further into the bush and we were unable to catch up to him. After several hours of fruitless attempts at relocating him we called off the effort.”

I would dread seeing SAR arriving to “rescue” me if I was not incapacitated or not facing serious harm. We later read that rescuers were purportedly dispatched to find the lady’s confused boyfriend and his friend and found them in the vicinity of Seven Falls. Numerous news reports over the years recount similar events. Were they rescued from serious harm or from mere fear and discomfort?

A calico bass might of been the first fish I shot as a kid while spearfishing. They seemed to be the most common, best tasting game in the water at that time. Which merely means that they were largely the only fish I was observant and skilled enough to routinely catch sight of as a floundering young freediver.

In other words, the meager water skills I possessed as a kid were nonetheless sufficient enough to enable me to bring home small kelp bass more often than anything else. I always hoped for the halibut, and I nabbed a few lobsters, caught a fleeting glance of a couple white seabass, but mostly came away with calicos.

I was always stoked to shoot a calico. In later years, however, as I got more experience in the water, and came to better understand the sea life community surrounding coastal kelp forests, both perennial inhabitants and seasonal visitors, and the potential to take larger, more highly prized game fish, kelp bass lost their attraction.

Whereas I had previously been proud, or at least happy, to bring home a calico for dinner, they became almost an embarrassment at times when compared to halibut and white seabass and yellowtail and lingcod.

Calico became the grubby little fish you lied to your buddies about having shot to cover the big game jackpot you were hiding on board and didn’t want them to know about.

“Get anything?” He shouted over the gunwale as our boats idled beside each other in the Santa Barbara Harbor entrance.

“Not much. Just a few calicos,” my buddy replied, hoping they wouldn’t see the bloated cooler bag stuffed with limits for four guys of 40 to 50 pound white seabass, big fan tails sticking out.

We’d drive up to a favorite spearfishing spot and, right after killing the engine, somebody would grab a pole with an iron on it and hurl it as far as he could, then crank it in, hooking a calico. “A couple of tacos,” they’d say with a shrug, downplaying the catch while throwing it into the cooler. Then we’d suit up and slip into the water to see about shooting some real fish. Big WSBs.

Jack in blue with a friend and well over two hundred pounds of freshly caught white seabass shot somewhere in Santa Barbara County.

But what about the pellucid waters of late fall or early winter, when the weather is exceptional, the swell nearly nonexistent, the seawater invitingly pacific and clear, yet when the halibut have moved into deeper water far offshore to spawn, and the white seabass have migrated away, and the reefs have mostly been plucked clean of lobster?

This during an epic drought in California, when the Los Padres National Forest is drier than it has been in at least a century, when the creeks and rivers meandering in silence through the forest have been nothing but desiccated crusty cobblestone pathways for months or years.

Well then, in these conditions, the pull of the sea becomes irresistible for a saltwater junky like me despite the lack of bigger game fish. I mentally cannot bear to stand on the coastal bluffs of Santa Barbara County overlooking the Pacific Ocean, peering through the shimmering, crystalline aquamarine waters, and refuse its offer.

Jack heading out. (c) John Pierpont

I kicked out into the sea scanning the rippled sand bottom hoping to spot a laggard halibut perhaps confused by shifting weather patterns and ocean currents and temperatures. But the submarine forest was mostly vacant apart for several varieties of small fishes. That is except for those other perennial residents, calico bass.

I was fortunate enough to cross paths with a respectably-sized calico among a stand of kelp and manage to get off a well-placed shot. I was stoked to have fresh fish for dinner and something wild and healthy I harvested myself   to offer my children.

Yet were I too walk by somebody on the beach afterward, traipsing back to my truck hauling my gear, I’d shy away from letting them see it and have no interest in letting it be known that I had a calico bass. Unlike hiding larger game fish so as not to attract people’s attention and give away a prime fishing zone, with a calico I’d actually by embarrassed.

When I got home, however, and prepared the fish and its brilliant white fillets completely filled my iron skillet, sputtering in rich butter made from the milk of grass-fed cows and freshly-pressed olive oil, I understood the silliness of my earlier feelings of embarrassment over a supposedly inadequate catch. I came to appreciate that I need far less to be satisfied than I sometimes think, that I can be a tad greedy, and that I’m far more fortunate than most of the seven billion people on this planet, nearly half of whom purportedly still cook meals over open flame campfires for lack of modern technology.

I hear from friends and see their photos of lunkers, the big flatties, big croakers, big tunas, but what do I have to complain about with a skillet full of fresh fish I caught myself? Halibut and white seabass are exceptionally tasty, but a couple of calico fillets cooked properly are pretty good, too.

The centerpiece of one night’s modest dinner for the small family Elliott. Center mass shot, not bad, eh?

Antimony Peak

I strive to not waste the time of readers with unnecessary, empty words and pointless rambling. I have never had much interest in writing “trip reports” or “trail reports.” I have done that, I suppose, but it is not what I’m after here.

I typically find such posts tedious to read and boring to write. The title itself, report, connotes something dry and institutional, something constructed like a document that one laboriously wades through with two fingers pressed to the temple, rather than a mellifluously crafted story that entertains and delights.

Antimony Peak

I started this blog, in part, to fill a void, to offer wilderness literature, something that speaks to the human condition and universal themes in the context of hiking and outdoor recreation in my backyard at large. What trip report information I may include I’d prefer to be incidental not central.

Trail conditions change. Aside from the tedium of reading bland, uninspired, blow-by-blow descriptions of the forest’s contents found along a trail, as if listing the arrangement of furniture in a house, trip reports become, sooner or later, largely pointless.

A trail report written in fall may become useless just several months later after a rainy winter, full of information which no longer accurately reflects the reality of conditions on the ground.

Eagle Rest Peak, the checkered patches of San Joaquin Valley in the distance.

The indefatigable Stillman taking in the view.

The view into San Emigdio Canyon.

Whereas a story about what a man feels and thinks when out hiking, if properly written, is timeless. That is what I aspire to. Perhaps I have failed miserably, but I hope I have achieved something close to that on occasion.

I also thought, after years of wandering cyberspace and reading various local blogs, that the natural world surrounding my hometown was being ignored and when mentioned was given short shrift. There were plenty of websites covering metropolitan life in Santa Barbara ad nauseum; the city and county, its social life, arts, restaurants, viticulture, entertainment and the like. But few sites gave voice to the natural world in a manner I thought it well deserved.

Most sites I did see focusing on the outdoors were not doing it justice. The posts were hastily put together, thin and superficial. Many were little more than photo journals with verbose captions or they read like itineraries of a person’s outings. First we hiked here, and then we turned there, had lunch over here, continued on up there, and finally came back over here. A lot of telling was going on, but little if any showing. The content lacked feeling and depth.

The push up to Eagle Rest summit.

Eagle Rest Peak

The view looking over San Joaquin Valley.

Dropping from Eagle Rest into upper San Emigdio Canyon.

Upper San Emigdio Canyon. With no trail and waist to chest high scrub brush in sections, it was a long, hot, tiresome fight up the canyon.

I held off posting anything on a hike DavidStillman.com and I did awhile back because I had nothing worthy to say about it. I offer here in this installment a bare collection of photos with little said of the experience.

Eagle Rest Peak

A single Fritillaria ojaiensis growing along Fremont Trail in the Santa Ynez Mountains. This photo is from early spring 2014.

This variety of lily is endemic to California. It’s listed by the California Native Plant Society (CNPS) as being rare throughout its range, considered to be an endangered species. I completed a California Native Species Field Survey Form for the Department of Fish and Wildlife. The data will purportedly be added to the state’s Natural Diversity Database, which according to CNPS is “the largest, most comprehensive database of its type in the world. It presently contains more than 65,000 site-specific records on California’s rarest plants, animals and natural communities.”

A Fritillaria ojaiensis leaf sprouting from a bank along Oso Creek in the Los Padres National Forest. There is a fairly large grouping of them at this site, more than 100 individual plants. Photo from February 2015.

With more sun exposure the leaves take on a bronze hue.