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Hiking Is Not A Crime
Santa Barbara Women’s March Expands Beyond Abortion Hundreds join 7th annual rally marking what would have been 50th anniversary of Roe v. Wade ruling, but speakers emphasize issues are ‘bigger than...
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Forest Service Welcomes Hikers To Falling Trees, Flash Floods and Debris Flows
How much worse do conditions get? (Those are actually fantastic conditions! The worse the better.) And yet in the face of such natural horrors, the likes of which only Danny Hillman might venture...
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Mountain Lion Standoff, Santa Ynez Mountains
What I saw when I first turned to continue my walkabout. A beautiful disaster. “Lions often stalk their prey and attack by leaping on their shoulders and back, biting the top of the neck or head....
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Los Padres Forest Association Backs Forest Closure
Los Padres Forest Association issued an obsequious letter to the Forest Service declaring their full embrace of the two month closure of Los Padres National Forest. They called the shutout “wise.”...
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Return To Scene Of Lion Standoff
I returned to the place of the lion faceoff, to measure the distance between us on that day; the most memorable day of my life in the Santa Ynez Mountains of Condor National Forest. Using the yard...
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The Elusive and Fleeting Fire Poppy
I found the fire poppies once more, trailless along a tributary fork of a coastal creek high in the Santa Ynez Mountains. Five years had past since my last sighting. I think the fire poppy, Papaver...
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Native American Trout Gutter
April 2023 A place in the canyon caught my eye. The character of the mountain. The viewshed through the canyon of the Pacific Ocean and Santa Cruz Island. Geography and aesthetics. I felt compelled...
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Brian Sarvis In Noozhawk Echoes Jack Elliott, No Hat Tip
Jimmy J merch. Prototype run, January, 2023. After six years of silence, Sarvis suddenly spoke. He once more found his voice, in somebody else’s writing. We made it easy by providing inspiration and...
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Renaming Los Padres: Names Of the 1930s
Detail showing Abel Mtn. on a 1938 map of Los Padres National Forest. Backstory I’ve long had an interest in place, in the particularity of natural settings and the composition of undeveloped scenes,...
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Big Bummer At Baron Ranch: Trashing the Place To Save It
Yikes. Alright already, sheesh. A wall of nearly impenetrable willow needs no sign. Nobody is going in there. And we destroy everything we can find And tomorrow when the human clock stops and the world...
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Spring Potrero Mutilated, San Marcos Foothills Preserve
Restoration travesty (January 2023) “Paths are human; they are the traces of our relationships.” —Robert Macfarlane Channel Islands Restoration, her purported protector, deflowered the virgin. A...
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Indian Head Test Pattern (1939)
In my years at University of California earning a degree in American history with a minor in Native American studies I never heard tell of the Indian Head Test Pattern. I first learned of it reading...
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Discreet Sensitive Habitat Signage, Sespe Wilderness
A thin sign in Sespe Wilderness only but several inches wide with not another sign in sight. Once upon a time not long ago, following wildfire, thoughtful land managers in Ventura County reposted...
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Figueroa Mountain Bug Bloom
Along the road to bugville in autumn. Springtime wildflower blooms on Figueroa Mountain capture all the attention. But I’ve long marveled, too, at the winter ladybug blooms of the mountain. December...
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The Twelve-Inch Experience, Baron Ranch Corridor
Humboldt lily seed pod. “Adults follow paths. Children explore. Adults are content to walk the same way, hundreds of times, or thousands; perhaps it never occurs to adults to step off the paths, to...
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A Sea of Debris and Plastic Microtrash
A plastic bin to hold plastic bags washed ashore along the Gaviota Coast. “Our research found 6-to-1 plastic to plankton by weight in 1999. We went back last year [2008] and found 46-to-1 plastic to...
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The Mysterious Three Stone Stack
What does this look like? It looks like three stones stacked by human hands to me. Who? Why? When? The rocks did not fall from the wall or ceiling of the cave that I could tell. There is no trace of...
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Repatriation of Native American Remains and Artifacts
Asperitas clouds over Santa Barbara seen from our home on November 15, 2023. October 2023 Gov. Gavin Newsom signed two laws Tuesday intended to compel California’s public university systems to make...
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Howling Coyote, San Marcos Foothills Preserve
A howling coyote and one at the den barking. They didn’t seem to sense the presence of a human right off, but were suddenly startled to see or smell me and that’s when the one began barking. The...
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The Extraordinary Rains of August 2023
The organic curves of chaparral-cloaked Condor National Forest. I’m growing like a seedRain’s been falling on me — KT Tunstall, Feel It All “I’m wondering if we won’t see August thunderstorms.” I...
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