“Out around Glen Annie and Cathedral Oaks if you look toward the Front Range after a pretty good rainstorm you can sometimes see a tiny little set of falls that has a vertical drop of circa 100.’ It is set against an outcropping of rock and drains a quite small drainage. With good optics, it will appear as just a small thread of sparkling water and, if the wind is blowing, mist.

I’ve always known it by the name ‘Widow’s Tears.’ The name that old timers used…My main source for the name was Chuck Begg from a pioneer Goleta family. He pronounced it ‘Widda’s Tears.’

There seem to be a lot of Widow’s Tears falls around the US so I think the stories are probably apocryphal. After Chuck told me the name years and years ago, I heard it from other old timers.”

—woodman40 on SantaBarbaraHikes.com (2005)

Widow’s Tears is the one big waterfall, a cascade really, draining off the frontside of the Santa Ynez Mountains that’s seen from places throughout Goleta after heavy rains.

A blurb about Chuck Begg can be found in the Congressional Record (2002).

In an outcrop on the slope rising out of the steep and tumbling creek, not far above the falls, there is a cave with ocean and island views.

The top of “Widda’s Tears.”

California orange bellied newt (Taricha torosa).

One of the great indicators of seasonal change in the Santa Ynez Range of Santa Barbara is the arrival of orange bellied newts to mountain streams. They don’t always live in water.

Newts spend most of their lives on land crawling through the forest or avoiding desiccation holed up in subterranean shelters waiting out long dry summers. The first three years of a young newt’s life can be spent entirely on land.

Following winter rains when the creeks run anew, newts migrate from their terrestrial shelters to mate in the seasonal flush of runoff, temporarily inhabiting the streams before returning to land. They have been known to trek up to five miles to reach their breeding sites.

To accomplish this migratory feat, Kate Marianchild writes in her book, “Secrets of Oak Woodlands,” it is thought that a newt “apparently relies on magnetic iron oxide crystals lodged in her brain to sense the earth’s geomagnetic field and acquire an internal ‘map.'”

Along with an ability to recognize landmarks and smell the familiar scents of riparian habitat, newts are thought to have something like a “‘celestial compass’ that uses special photoreceptors.” These receptors are sensitive to “patterns created by the polarization of sunlight, moonlight, and starlight when it hits the earth’s atmosphere.”

Marianchild writes of newts taken twenty-eight miles from a stream and when placed in a tank of water they immediately turned to face their natal waters.

Newts have thin permeable skin that allows oxygen to be absorbed directly from the water into their bloodstream and extends the amount of time they can remain underwater, which is about twenty to thirty minutes.

Taricha torosa are extremely toxic and can kill a person if eaten. They are loaded with tetrodotoxin, which is “one of the most powerful neurotoxins known, it is about 1200 times more toxic to humans than cyanide and it has no known antidote.” (National Center for Biotechnology Information, U.S. National Library of Medicine)

People that have been poisoned with tetrodotoxin from pufferfish and other creatures have suffered such things as nausea, abdominal cramping, diarrhea, vomiting, vertigo, slurred speech, inability to speak, difficulty swallowing, blurred vision, a burning or prickling sensation all over the body, ascending paralysis of the limbs, altered consciousness with unreactive dilated pupils, respiratory paralysis and death in less then twenty minutes.

One story tells of a few guys camping and while making coffee one unknowingly scooped up a newt in the pot while getting water from a stream. All three men were found dead with no signs of anything having happened but for the boiled newt in the coffee pot.

The thermometer bounces between 108 and 111 degrees as I drive into the Mojave Desert on a recent June afternoon.

Several days earlier in 115 degree heat, not all that far away, a middle-aged man had left a tour bus in Death Valley National Park to take a few photos. An hour later he was found dead just several hundred yards from the bus. (Mammoth Times)

The conditions outside my thin panes of glass are deadly serious, yet have been described as “relatively moderate” compared to times past.

Moderate, they say.

These moderate conditions have existed for about the last 6,000 years. Prior to this, about 8,000 years ago and earlier for some time, the climate was one of “extreme aridity.”

Atacama I suppose.

Obsidian projectile points found at the place I’m driving to have been roughly dated to about 4,200 to 7,100 years ago. While it is unclear if human occupation at this particular site occurred this long ago, the evidence suggests that it is not unlikely.

At 110 degrees the Mojave is hellish. It seems like a great day to experience a desert site to gain some modicum of understanding about how it felt to exist here in ancient times. Yet funnily enough, the land today may well be more hospitable than it was during those times.

The gravel flat and resting stone beneath the huge painted boulder.

Here amid the barren desert mountains the granite monolith sits, a dominant feature before a hill of jumbled boulders. It is not lost in the jumble but stands apart, visually dominating, beckoning upon first sight, an attractive destination seen from the surrounding wastes.

I walk up in the brutal mid-afternoon sun seeking refuge in the shelter of its shadow. In the hottest hours of the day the shadow covers a smooth, sloping granite outcrop that appears at first sight to be a great resting place.

Sure enough a large polished slick is evident on the surface of the outcrop where people have been lounging for a very long time. Laying down and pressing a sweaty hot back against the cool shady slick of granite no doubt provides a much welcome respite from the brutal desert swelter.

I notice my five year old son sits exactly at this resting spot without any word from me.

No doubt the stone has taken on greater patina in modern times from the rumps of many visitors through the years, but it seems readily evident that people have been lounging there for much longer.

There is a striking connection made between humans separated by 5,000 years of time and wildly different cultures as my son sits to rest. For all the differences between the peoples in ways and means, the little boy of today is naturally drawn by the same brain to the same spot for the same reason as the ancient people had been.

A portion of the boulder’s painted wall that’s aside the gravel flat.

This polished resting stone is fronted by a small gravel flat which runs up against the painted wall of the looming monolith. To one side of the flat lies a large tabletop slab with several shallow, well-polished grinding slicks worn into the granite. From the gravel flat one enjoys long views of the surrounding land. Thousands of obsidian shards litter the area everywhere, lithic scatter cast off by the hands of ancient craftsmen fashioning stone tools.

The pictographs are rendered in hues of red, white and black. Several rock shelters are found nearby the painted boulder wherein scores of arrowheads have been recovered by scholars. Items of interest found in the area include cordage, basketry, ceramics, stone artifacts and human remains.

The components of nature come together here in remarkable form to create an exceptional place for a human to spend time in a harsh land. This was quickly evident to me as I walked up. It’s no wonder ancient people made it their own. I would have as well.

Standing on the gravel flat before the painted wall I am stunned to discover a remarkable acoustical phenomenon that I had not noticed on a previous visit several years ago.

When I speak my voice booms back at me in a deeper tone that seems amplified. I don’t want to make too much of this occurrence or hype it, but I was taken aback. Surely this meant something to somebody at sometime.

There is without question a naturally occurring acoustics here due to the manner in which the rocks are shaped and sit together on the land and it noticeably alters the human voice as noted.

As I experiment with the phenomenon for a moment I notice that it seems to be limited to a rather small area whereupon one can notice the effect. This spot is located beside the resting stone, which must play some role in the acoustics, and in front of the large pictograph panel on the boulder.

I have no doubt the ancient people that were here knew of this phenomenon, but I wonder if it played any notable role in their lives. Who now could possibly know?

Ungulates of some sort, perhaps deer.

Some remarkably different looking ungulates compared to the predominant form given bighorn sheep in pictographs and petroglyphs in this region. The long curved horns extending over their back makes them resemble ibex more than sheep, though ibex are not California natives.

Something that appears to be anthropomorphic figures.

Several well-polished, shallow grinding slicks.

“There were three Santa Barbara boys who started aviation careers with their kite-flying. They were the Loughead brothers, Victor, Malcolm, and Allan, whose mother, Flora Haines Loughead, was a writer for the Independent, one of Santa Barbara’s three newspapers at the turn of the century. The name Loughead was pronounced “Lockheed.”

—Walker A. Tompkins, It Happened In Old Santa Barbara (1976)

The following story written by Flora Haines Loughead recounts a folktale about hidden treasure in San Roque Canyon.

Two of her sons, Allan and Malcolm, founded Loughead Aircraft Manufacturing Company in Santa Barbara in 1916. The company name would later be changed to Lockheed.

The San Francisco Morning Call originally published the story of lost treasure in 1895.

A Hidden Treasure: Many Have Searched For It In Vain
Flora Haines Loughead

From the beginning of civilization, when people commenced to find that they had a past and to sift their legendary lore and decipher the crude records of their barbaric forefathers, nothing has taken so strong a hold upon the human race as the tales of hidden treasure that have been handed down from generation to generation.

Doubtless the old Egyptians searched for tombs and records of forgotten peoples with as keen a zest as modern explorers, under the cloak of science, pierce the Pyramids and open the sarcophagi of the Upper Nile; and there is little doubt that the races which come after us will be possessed of an ardor no less vigorous in defining the boundaries of our ruined cities and despoiling our tombs.

California is rich in tales of buried treasure, but they are mostly of a vague and unsatisfactory sort, which will not stand investigation, and can usually be traced to the barroom utterances of some dissipated miner or to the shameless fabrications of some unscrupulous citizen.

It seems to be left to Santa Barbara, which already has the best of everything in the way of climate, scenery, products and people, to lay just claim to several of the most enticing and authentic tales of hidden treasure that one often hears.

I came across the first of these while exploring a canyon some ten miles out from town, variously known as Gatos (wildcat) and Lewis Canyon, and which contains several miles from where the wagon road terminates some interesting prehistoric traces in the shape of Indian paintings on the face of two sheer cliffs, through which the tiny stream, moving with gigantic force during the winter torrents, has slowly through the ages carved its way. There is a cave high up on the face of one of these cliffs, and in this cave, no less than the strange inscriptions, was one of the objective points of our party.

“Perhaps you’ll find the old priest’s lost treasure,” was the quickening remark of a rancher who was gravely contributing directions four our guidance and who evidently had little respect for people who led by no more dignified motives than the desire to unravel the lost history of a prehistoric race. “They say it’s hidden in a cave somewhere along this range,” he added tentatively.

This led to queries and explanations. His knowledge was vague but beguiling. Sometime during the early occupation of the mission there had been a great treasure concealed for the purpose of safety, in a cave in the mountains, and the secret of its hiding place had been lost.

We reached the cliffs, but not the cave, which was thirty-five feet in the air, in the face of a straight rock, having no ladder and no means of constructing any save from timbers too heavy for our exploring party to handle. If the treasure is still there it awaits the discovery of some enterprising individual who has the courage to follow the windings of Lewis Creek nearly to the crest of the range, with the aid of ropes, scaling several falls and slippery ledges high in the air, and who then still has sufficient courage and enterprise reserved to fell a couple of sycamores and construct a ladder that will lift him to this opening.

Again and again, sometimes from old Mexicans, whose scant knowledge of English and my own scant knowledge of Spanish made conversation difficult; sometimes from prosaic ranchmen, who regarded all energy as misapplied that is directed outside of a barley field or a kitchen, vague references to this fascinating tale again came to us. It is not until I came across a German, who has his home in San Roque Canyon, that the story was spread before me, full and complete, to the last detail.

“Very early in this century,” my German acquaintance began, “about the year 1808, the Santa Barbara mission, at that time very wealthy and with great stores of gold and  precious jewels, as well as church ornaments worth a pile, was endangered by pirates, who at that time threatened the port. The priests decided to move these treasures to a place of safe keeping. Now you can see for yourself that if they had merely sent them off in somebody’s safe keeping they would have been easily traced. So they determined to make believe they had another purpose when they carried off the jewels. They put up an adobe building here in this canyon, where there were many Indians. I will show you the foundation of this chapel. But they pretended it was a dairy they were building, and they brought along all their cattle and pastured them here. If the pirates had guessed they had the treasure here it was a good place to defend it, you bet!”

We had been walking slowly up the canyon, and my informant turned and with a significant wave of his hand bade me take in the situation. He evidently was an authority upon military matters, as well as upon all other subjects. The place seemed fitted by nature for an impregnable fortress, with its narrow, rocky walls and its slight eminence, commanding the only approach from the valley. He showed me the half-obliterated foundation of the old chapel, or dairy as he would have me believe, which was easily traced, indicating the former existence of an quadrangle building, probably some sixty feet in width and perhaps 150 feet in length.

“Here they had the treasure safely housed,” he went on. But one night one of the very young fathers—not one of the old ones as some say—one Father Pedro, he got sick and they didn’t know it. You see, it was one of those kind of fevers that come on with a little twist in the brain. And he got to worrying over the treasure, and fearing that the pirates might find it there. And one night he got up when the others were asleep and he gathered it all together, and he went out in the night somewhere up in the hills and he hid it away. And the next morning he was very sick, and the very next night he died; he died without telling one of them where he had put the treasure.”

There was an impressive pause. The story, told in that solitary place, amid the wild hills with their tangle of chaparral, their stately oaks and their maze of rocky fastnesses, carried conviction with it.

“They hunted for it a long time. Of course they hunted for it. It was the wealth of the Mission. Without it they were poor,” the German went on. “They went all over and over the hills. They dug up the ground in all directions. They hunted in the rocks and caves. They hunted for fifty years. They never found it.”

“And have they given up hunting now?”

“I—wouldn’t say so. Sometimes on moonlit nights I see people with spades on their shoulders,” in a voice of mystery. “But you speak of it to the priests at the Mission and not one word will they say about it to admit or deny. If you want to hear about it you go these old half-Indians. They know all about it. I learn much from my mother-in-law. She is half Mexican, half Indian. She is old, and she remembers the talk about it when she was a child and everybody knew about it. There is scarcely a Spanish man in this town who has not dug for it. And Americans, they come too, all the time. I tell them, “Go ahead.” You find any treasure you are welcome to it. You can see the holes about here where they have been digging.

There were certainly a great many holes bearing the marks of a spade or shovel. Some of them, in our immediate vicinity, looked as if they might have been opened that morning. Yet the canyon was deserted, and in all the times we have visited it we had never so far encountered a soul besides the German. A sudden suspicion awoke.

“And you? Why don’t you try to find it yourself when you have a little time to spare? It would be a fine thing to come across such wealth in these hard times.”

This sympathetic inquiry encouraged him.

“Oh, me—I have dug a hole now and then, when I had nothing else to do,” he said with affected indifference.

“And what is your theory?” Do you think the treasure is hidden in the ground or in a cave or in a tree?”

“In the rocks,” he said firmly, “notwithstanding the evidence of the freshly turned sod.”

“You see it stands to reason,” he went on with warmth, “that the sick priest could not have dug a hole deep enough to hide the treasure that knight. And if he had, the chances are they would have found the place as soon as they found the treasure was gone. He couldn’t have gone very far, and he couldn’t of done much work. If he had gone all the way on the ground they could have followed his steps. I believe he put it in the rocks.

In this arm of the San Roque, which is locally known as Tebbetts Canyon, named after an old newspaper man who once had his residence there, the rocks and ledges and boulders belong for the most part to what might be called a cave formation, and which is traceable in every gulch and canyon in the Santa Ynez Range. It is a soft sandstone, which seems to have been interspersed in its formation by nature with soft nodules, which wear away, leaving frequent hollows and cells. Sometimes whole ledges are honeycombed in this peculiar fashion, and where the soft spots are exposed to weather or the wash of water caverns from eight to thirty feet result. Aside from this, ledges in this vicinity have enormous fissures.

There were probably a thousand caves and fissures in which a man or band of men might have found shelter within a quarter of a mile of the foundations of the old mission building. There are a hundred thousand were a small treasure might be securely hidden from sight. Some of these holes and caverns are inaccessible, unless a man chose to risk his life in the climb and descent; yet there is the possibility that one in the delirium of fever might have reached them and found his way down again without injury.

But my informant’s confidence was at full tide, and he reached a momentum where not all his prudent resolves of secrecy could interrupt it.

“Do you think that some treasure was hidden without some sign to find it again?” he demanded, earnestly.

“I tell you, wherever that it is hidden, there are marks to find it by. I’ve been hunting for those marks. They may be on trees or on rocks. Come with me and I will show you what I found.”

He led the way a hundred yards up the beautiful canyon, twice crossing a crystal brook as it came tumbling down from the heights above. He finally stopped in a glade of oaks, under a noble tree.

“Look there!” he said.

Deeply marked in the gnarled trunk at a height of some six feet was a large cross with a square base, the whole some four feet high and three or more feet across.

“And look here again!”

On a tree some twenty feet away was the rude outline of a tomahawk, almost obliterated by time and growth.

“Now, it may be,” said the Dutchman, “that if one would dig beneath these in a direct line between them he would come upon that treasure. I dug a little, as you see, but maybe I didn’t dig deep enough. And, perhaps, if one should cut down this tree,” indicating the tree with the cross, they’d find it was hollow at one time, but the bark closed around the hole, and something may be inside of it; or perhaps it is high up, where the big limb joined the trunk. What I think is this: Somewhere else there was a third sign; perhaps it is on a rock, and is washed so it doesn’t show plain after all these years; perhaps it was on another tree, that was burned down when fires swept this gulch. If anybody can find that third sign, and draws a line between the three, the place where those lines intersect they may dig, and they will find the treasure.”

He said this with great conviction, and one could not but wonder how many weary hours or days he has spent in hunting for this third sign. But there was that about the cross on the tree that it made it well worth regarding; so deep had it been cut in the gnarled trunk, so many years had the bark grown and striven to cover the ugly wound.

“One might think that it had been put there two or three hundred years ago,” said our guide, eyeing the tree with cool interest.

“I myself can scarcely see how it had time to grow so much since 1808. I am only a tenant here, and I can’t cut down a tree unless it is dead. If I could cut that down, we could count the layers of bark and tell to a year just when that was made.”

He said this with an air of triumph in his scientific lore and a little impatience that it be necessary to take such a painstaking step to perfect his stores of exact knowledge. But a more important thought was taking shape in another mind. Was it possible that this man, in his search for a treasure of gold and jewels, had stumbled across another much more important discovery? The scar, as he had rightly said, bore the evidence of centuries of growth above it. Can it be that here, in a Santa Barbara canyon, we have a new and indisputable evidence of the existence of the prehistoric cross, antedating the introduction of the Christian religion, which, discovered in Mexico half a century ago, caused such a wrangle among theologians?

The object is certainly well worth investigation. Before another fire, which has raged around it the past summer, shall have swept this ancient landmark from the face of the earth, this tree should certainly be felled, and a cross-section made through the deeply graven cross, with a view of ascertaining the exact number of layers of bark above it. That it has been made by the hand of man, its exact lines and elaborate delineation place beyond a question of doubt.

In this same canyon, not many rods away, there is another arboreal curiosity that may well claim the consideration of thoughtful minds. This is a great oak which has one enormous limb, apparently of a different species, growing out of it at a height of some ten feet from the ground, and which has plainly been grafted by artificial means, the line of the cutting and the swell beyond it being distinctly visible. This, too, it would seem, by its prodigious growth, to have been the work of a century or more ago. What could be the object of such elaborate task, performed on this hardwood tree in this lonely uninhabited canyon?

Red Rock, Santa Ynez River, Santa Barbara County

“The writer’s duty to speak the truth—especially unpopular truth. Especially truth that offends the powerful, the rich, the well-established, the traditional, the mythic, the sentimental. To attack, when the time makes it necessary, the sacred cows of his society. And I mean all sacred cows.”

—Edward Abbey, “A Writer’s Credo”

“Virtually no article of faith, ideology, or institution—be this sacred or profane, this worldly or otherworldly—escapes his scrutiny.”

—Max Oelschlaeger on Henry David Thoreau, “The Idea of Wilderness” 

I do not take kindly to being lied to. I do not accept without offense being misled. I greatly resent being treated like an uninformed, uneducated dolt to be taken advantage of and fleeced at will.

And that is how scores of people visiting the Santa Ynez River have been treated by the Parks Management Company.

The offense is greatly compounded when such deceitful practices are pursued in partnership with the federal government. The government is supposed to be an advocate and representative of the people, not an accomplice in corporate malfeasance.

Parks Management Company now tends a kiosk at First Crossing at the Santa Ynez River, where Paradise Road ends and Forest Route 5N18 or “River Road” begins and leads to the Red Rock Trailhead.

There are several improved day-use sites along River Road on the way to the Red Rock Trailhead that offer people picnic tables, BBQ grills and toilets. But there are many more unimproved areas along the road where people can pull over and park to swim or hike or picnic or space out and day dream or recreate as they so wish.

The Forest Service has granted a contract to Parks Management Company as a concessionaire to operate certain and select areas of the Lower Santa Ynez Recreation Area and charge recreationists a fee to use the sites. These sites are limited to improved day-use areas.

I do not object to this system, necessarily.

I am not opposed, necessarily, to private companies partnering with the government to manage recreation sites in the National Forest.

I am not opposed, necessarily, to paying fees to use day-use sites and campgrounds.

My fierce objection comes in response to the manner in which this system is being carried out. It is being operated in a deceitful manner that keeps the public uninformed and unaware, and it takes advantage of people financially.

This is no small matter.

When, on numerous occasions, I have arrived at the aforementioned kiosk at First Crossing, an employee of Parks Management Company has demanded that I pay a day-use fee. They have never asked if I am using the sites under their management or not. They just demand money.

There is one rather huge problem: Parks Management Company has no legal authority to demand such payment.

As per the Forest Service, the Special Use Permit granted to Parks Management Company pertains to “campground and recreation site operations” and to “the operation and maintenance of government-owned recreation facilities located on the Forest” and covers “campgrounds, trailheads, and day use or picnic areas, as well as providing the important maintenance and upgrades to these sites.”

The sites covered by the Special Use Permit are clearly defined and quite limited.

In point of fact, the Special Use Permit does not cover the vast overwhelming majority of the land above First Crossing.

Yet Parks Management Company is acting in a manner as though anything beyond First Crossing is a fee area the public cannot access without payment.

Clearly, unimproved dirt patches along a paved road do not meet the definition of being a campground or facility, and it also seems reasonable to presume based on the words of the Forest Service that these areas are also not what is meant by “recreation sites,” for the entire forest is a recreation site and the Special Use Permit does not pertain to the entire forest.

Proof of this is also found in the answer that comes from the mouth of Parks Management Company employees every time I say, “I’m not using any day-use areas. I’m just driving up the road to park in a dirt pullout to go for a swim.”

At this point the employee inevitably steps aside and waves me through without further incident.

Not once have I ever stopped at the kiosk and had any employee kindly inform me that I am not legally required to pay any fee of any kind to merely drive up the road or to park in a pullout and go swimming or hiking or to access the vast overwhelming majority of the forest above First Crossing which falls outside the bounds of Parks Management Company’s contract with the Forest Service.

Why has this never happened?

Not one single time.

Why is it routine policy for Parks Management Company to demand money from people who may not necessarily be legally obligated to pay anything whatsoever to the company?

There is a phrase for this sort of behavior. It’s called a lie of omission or what is known in technical parlance as exclusionary detailing.

That people do not have to pay Parks Management Company to drive River Road is a rather large and important detail that the company never, in my experience, mentions.

This is outrageous!

It’s a shameful exploitative act that they are perpetrating.

The Dude does not abide.

Why has there been no outcry from forest visitors?

It leaves me wondering . . . Am I the only one that cares about the rules around here?!

I recently had a conversation regarding this issue with a Santa Barbara County sheriff’s deputy at First Crossing.

I asked the deputy upon what legal basis Parks Management Company is justified in demanding citizens pay a day-use fee when not using day-use sites.

I opined that the company should be responsible for making sure people that use the day-use sites pay the appropriate fees, rather than being allowed to block access to the entire Lower Santa Ynez Recreation Area and demand payment from everybody regardless whether they’re using improved day-use sites and facilities or not.

It’s akin to setting up a road block on a long road leading to a pay-to-use campground and demanding a person pay that fee before driving the road whether they’re camping or not.

The deputy kindly ignored the question and did not answer. I asked several more times in various ways. The deputy would not answer, but would dodge and weave around the point at issue and talk of other tangential matters.

It was a civil and pleasant conversation, and it appeared he understood the point I was making. It was also plainly evident he did not want to say anything that might reflect badly on Parks Management Company.

In the end the deputy finally said that he was granting Parks Management Company some leeway, as they were new to the business here on the Santa Ynez River and still in the process of figuring out how to effectively manage the area.

(To clarify, the deputy did not mean that he was granting the company leeway to act in a manner beyond their scope of legal authority. He seemed to be speaking generally about not leveling too harsh a judgment on the fledgling company which took over management duties in November of 2016.)

Well that’s not good enough.

If Parks Management Company cannot or will not justly manage the sites covered in their Special Use Permit without abusing their authority as they currently are, then the company should have their permit revoked.

Unsuspecting recreationists misled by Parks Management Company in their pursuit of profit should not foot the bill for the company’s incompetence while they flounder about trying to figure out how to handle the duties they signed up to carry out.

If there is leeway to be granted, then the bias should be in favor of the tax paying public rather than a corporation trying to make a buck.

Mariposa lily growing along the Santa Ynez River.

“It was a glorious game. Theft robbed of the stigma of theft, crime altruistically committed—what is more gratifying?

John Steinbeck, “Tortilla Flat”

What does Parks Management Company have to say about this apparent abuse?

They must have made a killing charging all the people I saw along the river not using day-use sites on all those many busy summer days I was there.

What does the Forest Service have to say about this apparent abuse?

Can individuals also freely and without consequence act in a manner not in accordance with and outside the bounds of any special permits they may obtain from the Forest Service?

Or should we expect unequal treatment under the law?

The Forest Service asserts that they are “building the capacity for Parks Management Company to better deliver the high-quality services the public has come to expect from their recreation experience on the Forest.”

Good intentions are irrelevant.

It is a rather odd practice, to put it mildly and politely, to force people to pay a fee for services they do not use and are not legally obligated to pay!

What ever purported good intentions there may be in striving to provide people with quality recreational opportunities, it does not justify the manner in which the management company is acting nor erase the problem.

And it is a glaring problem that must be addressed.

Looking toward the Ko’onzi village site, the salt flats of Saline Valley visible in the distance beneath the snow-capped peaks of the Inyo Range.

“Saline Valley, Inyo County, California, is one of the most remarkable places in the state. . . .It is simply an immense basin, say twelve by twenty-five miles in size, surrounded on all sides by great mountains. At its lowest point of depression is found some 1,200 acres of pure salt–millions of tons of it, glistening like crusted snow. Bordering on this, on all sides except the west, comes miles square of sandy, dusty lands, caustic with alkali, borax or similar deposits.”

—Dallas Daily Herald (1882)

Saline Valley lies several hours drive from the nearest basic services and conveniences of civilization. Even today in 2017, even in the nation’s most populace state, this place is remote and desolate like few others.

The dirt road leading through the basin was horrendous at the time of our crossing, the washboards nearly debilitating in places, forcing a driver to slow to a crawl even in a 4×4 truck.

DavidStillman.com and I drove the dirt road into light snow showers and through an icy and treacherous narrow mountain pass to reach the valley, at one point having but mere inches to spare from plummeting some 80 feet into a canyon, when barely making it around a boulder that had rolled down onto the icy road. Mere inches to spare, I say.

Driving through the pass our view was short and narrow and cropped by the landscape and closed in beneath a low ceiling of cloud cover. One of the most remarkable experiences occurred as we rolled out of the pass. The hills broke open and Saline Valley suddenly fell out before us, a tremendous long view over the flats, a massive basin of open space that seemed to pull the breath from my lungs, to pull my body its way.

After the short views within the pass, the sudden long view over the valley was stunning (in the true sense of the word which is too often misused). It was as if I was enclosed in a room at the top of a skyscraper standing beside a door, which was suddenly opened to reveal that I was standing on the edge of the 100th floor overlooking a city far below stretching to the horizon. The sensation was not vertigo, but something akin to it.

On the edge of this salty basin, beneath ten thousand foot peaks, lies the Ko’onzi site. Here the ruins of single family shelters can still be seen in the form of circular-shaped stone footings. Nearby the rocks are decorated with petroglyphs, and a large erratic boulder beside the adjacent creek is dotted with mortars and painted with bighorn sheep pictographs rendered in ocher hues.

Mortar stone with a view of the lake.

The indigenous place-name for Saline Valley was (is) Ko’, which means “deep place.” The people were called Ko’onzi.

The following describes and explains a bit about these environs and the people that once lived there, as excerpted from Julian H. Steward’s book, “Basin-Plateau Aboriginal Sociopolitical Groups” (1938):

“SALINE VALLEY–This district had an extraordinary range of life zones.

The deep valley floor, 1,200 feet, is in the Lower Sonoran Zone. It is mild in winter and almost unbearably hot in summer. It supports a little mesquite, but has few edible seed annuals, the majority of its sparse flora being extremely xerophytic and unfit for human consumption.

The bordering mountains, especially to the north and south, are in the Upper Sonoran and Transitional zones, where cooler temperatures make summer living possible and where greater precipitation supports many flowering annuals, which supply the greater part of plant foods. Pine nuts are also abundant in these mountains.

The high and massive Inyo Range which bounds Saline Valley on the west is too precipitous to be readily inhabitable but affords the greatest range of life zones. Better watered than ranges to the east, it supports many square miles of pine-nut trees. Its crest, however, extends above 10,000 feet into the Canadian and even Hudsonian zones, thus capturing greater precipitation, supporting a variety of flora, and feeding the one stream that reaches the valley floor. The vast area of the range and the greater vegetation maintained in turn many deer, which are largely lacking in ranges to the east, and large numbers of mountain sheep.

This remarkable variety of habitat zones and of species of both plants and animals within a comparatively small area enabled the Saline Valley people to maintain existence securely if not abundantly without having to exploit an inconveniently large area. …

The stone footings of two circular-shaped shelters.

Two other ruins, the large white mortar boulder barely seen in the distance frame left.

The main village and division of the district was Saline Valley, Ko’ (deep place, descriptive of Saline Valley, which is very deep), elevation 1,200 feet. The people were called Ko’onzi. The village lay in the midst of a barren, infertile expanse of valley at the mouth of Hunter’s Canyon, where the stream maintains some mesquite and a few other edible plants.

Its inhabitants exploited the surrounding mountains, especially the Inyo Range to the west, where deer and pine nuts could be had. …

The Ko’ villagers obtained mesquite from the vicinity of their winter village. Other wild seeds, such as sand grass, grew in certain parts of the valley, but most seeds occurred surrounding mountains. Often they went into the Sigai country and other parts of the mountains separating Saline and Death Valleys.

Game, distinctly of secondary importance in Shoshoni economy but requiring considerable time of hunters, occurred largely to the north and west. Deer were procured in the Inyo Mountains, and antelope [pronghorn] in the lower ranges north of Saline Valley. …

Other foods were procured in various places but did not as a rule require extensive travel. Rats, mice, chuckwallas, rabbits, and birds could be hunted in all parts of the territory. Occasionally, however, trips were made, probably by single families, to Owens Lake for larvae or duck hunting.

Saline Valley yields great quantities of salt which was traded for goods or shell money to Owens Valley Paiute, who in turn often traded it across the Sierra Nevada Mountains.

Rabbit drives were held in connection with fall festivals. Usually people from throughout the district assembled for them. Sometimes, however, individuals took part in drives in the Koso Mountain or Death Valley districts.

BD said the Ko’ village as he remembered it about 50 or 60 years ago [circa 1888 or 1878] comprised five families or camps whose heads were as follows:

(1.) Caesar, the chief, (2) Caesar’s father, who had been chief before him, (3) Walkin, (4) Tom Hunter, the other chief, (5) Patu’ku. If, as in Fish Lake Valley, the average family consisted of 6 persons, the total population was not over 30 individuals.

Trace remnants of a shelter ruin.

In later years of the historic period, long after the arrival of American explorers, the Ko’onzi were known for farming in Saline Valley.

While perusing old newspaper articles I happened across the following single sentence presumably describing the K’onzi.

The article was originally published on January 26, 1889 in the Pullman Herald out of Washington state.

“The Indians of Saline Valley, California, are raising fine fig, apple, pear and peach trees.”

We wandered Venice, Italy threading our way through the narrow canyon-like alleyways of urban stonework. We knew not where we were but on the island.

A visitor doesn’t have to concern herself with getting lost on a small island as she would in a major continental city, and the insular containment offers a sense of security and freedom to roam without worry.

And so we did wander without any idea where we were headed or where we’d end up, the uncertainty and unfamiliarity an invigorating elixir of emotion.

To the outskirts of town, the edge of the island, past boarded up beachside buildings, the garden nooks overrun in rank windblown seed sprouts, fences netted over in spindly vines.

See the beach on low tide. The darkened oily-looking and algae-covered cobblestones and the easy ripple of seawater lapping the Venetian shoreline.

Onto the rubbly beach we stepped, picking our way over the exposed stony seafloor, human egrets stepping measuredly across the rounded rocks, heads angled downward, eyes scanning nooks and crannies for quarry, ready to strike out with a hand and snatch up what treasure might be found, the objet trouvé.

Therein the gravel filter of the seashore held a collection of hundreds of years worth of urban debris. A circular-shaped blob of clear glass stamped with a company or makers’ name and a date of 1812. It appeared to have once been attached to a handblown bottle, perhaps old fine wine, I mused.

A small water-worn vessel covered in a fine coating of slime. I bent, grabbed and held aloft the fine piece of vintage ceramic. Wiping the mossy growth away I could see the organically inspired curvilinear letters composing the phrase, “Drink Love.” Judging by the shape of the handicraft and the font I supposed the piece to be about one hundred years old, dating back to the era of Art Nouveau.

Those were the souvenirs for the trip, with sentimental value and backstory, thus better than anything bought in one of the many storefront tourist traps in town, as beautiful and grand as much of the work may be, such as Murano glass.

And there the objects rest. The hodgepodge. Scattered across the tops of shelves, piled in an old hand-hewn sandstone bowl and jumbled in a little wire and glass case. Each  piece tells a story. Pages in the novel of a life. Lifted from a dusty garage shelf each item starts the play of a memory of some moment had somewhere some years ago.

Were it not for the found object there may well be no recall of that moment of life. Were I to throw it out the memory would fade and disappear. Gone as if it never happened. I hold on to the object to hold on to my life.

The old black board inside Manzana Schoolhouse, a free-for-all graffiti panel. (Manzana Creek Schoolhouse Circa 1893)

Inside the old Manzana Creek schoolhouse within the San Rafael Wilderness of Santa Barbara County one hundred years worth of names and dates cover the walls. R.L. Cooper carved his name and date into the blackboard back in 1911 and one hundred years later, long after the building was officially designated an Historical Landmark, Lars Peterson added his mark.

The initials and dates are crudely rendered and commonplace, but I enjoy reading over the oldest of them. They are an intriguing piece of history.

I’m not sure where the line is, the specific year or decade, but I hate the newer dates. It’s a contradiction I find interesting.

How long does it take for something to turn from trash to artifact, from graffiti to treasured piece of history?

One of many scribblings on the interior of Manzana Schoolhouse.

White House ruins, Canyon de Chelly, Arizona

The cliff of solid sandstone loomed over us, a massive bulging lithic forehead, dark water stains trailing like beads of sweat down its face. We stood on the canyon floor on a sandy bench beside the wide and shallow stream, the puny presence of humanity amid a land of gargantuan geological features, gazing up at the ruins of Anasazi cliff dwellings built sometime between 350 and 1300 A.D.

Wanting to gain a better look at the buildings far overhead that were once accessed by ladders, Clint Elliott and I tramped across the creek to the other side of the canyon and picked our way up a rocky slope directly across from the ruins.

With a telephoto lens we could see names scratched into the side of a wall dating from the mid-nineteenth century, the handles of white American men that had passed through the canyon for some unknown reason, cavalry soldiers, perhaps, or cowboys or drifters of other sorts. Who now could possibly know?

Names and dates carved into a wall of White House ruins in the late 1800s.

While the names and dates are, or at least were at the time, the work of vandals who defaced an archaeological site, gazing through the lens at the inscriptions I felt nearly as much a sense of interest, curiosity and appreciation for the letters and numbers as I did the ruins themselves.

Rather than taking away from the ruins the names added to them. Rather than viewing them as a transgression perpetrated by disrespectful people, I looked at the graffiti as another piece of American history holding its own particular value and hinting at its own unknown story, which is no less a part of the region’s past events then are the ruins.

Yet, if I were to see a new name carved beside a recent date, say for example, J. Elliott 2004, it would anger me. If I were to run across a person in the act of carving their name into the wall I would probably confront them, and likely without exercising much if any leniency, understanding or tact whatsoever. Such is my irascible nature.

Though were I somehow to return 150 years later the same hypothetical inscription would take on an entirely new meaning and value. The scratchings would cease to be vandalism and would have matured into an artifact. If not in 150 years then surely after 500 years. At some point, after enough years had passed, the marking would become a treasured piece of history.

A remnant Native American rock art panel in San Luis Obispo County whereupon somebody deeply carved into the sandstone: “Geo Lewis Nov 5 1903.” Judging by the superficial scratch marks crisscrossing over the name, some people clearly do not appreciate the carving, as might well be understood. But what if the pictograph was painted by Indians in the year 1200 and the date carved by a European explorer in 1303? Would they feel the same? 4000 BC and 3003 BC?

In a previous post, Upper Santa Ynez Camp Vandalism, I mentioned seeing some recent vandalism at a backcountry campsite. Somebody carved “Amber and Dad” into an oak tree. Seeing the fresh, reddish hued carving emblazoned into the oak bark angered me. It was not there on my last visit the previous year.

I ran my fingers over the ugly scar trying to understand why Amber and her dad would do such a thing. I shook my head, lips pinching tight, thinking of the sort of family values that would lead the two to such selfish, disrespectful and inconsiderate actions.

I must confess, however, that as wayward youth I had done similar things. So did Eddie Fields, as noted below. And oddly, in some way, I’ve thanked Master Fields for his vandalism.

The “F” carved by a young Eddie Fields a century ago.

I do find older such markings as noted above interesting. In fact, not only do they not anger me, I actually purposely seek them out, hiking miles to see them and ponder the life and times of those that left their marks.

Along Manzana Creek in San Rafael Wilderness Eddie Fields carved his initials into an oak tree some 100 years ago, yet if somebody carved a fresh name beside those old initials I would be angered. (Eddy Fields’ Initials, Manzana Creek Circa 1900)

Are not markings left by American settlers and pioneers a valuable piece of history? Should they not be legally protected like “objects of antiquity” as the American Antiquities Act of 1906 reads? At what point do these cease being vandalism and mature into something of value worth preserving?

Although by today’s mores and social norms, and under current law, many of these same actions are frowned upon or illegal and punishable by fine or imprisonment, by some, admittedly twisted, strain of logic, if I were to prevent a vandal from adding his mark to a tree or a rock, then I’d be depriving future generations of some sort of artifact.

This may sound ludicrous, but consider an example to illustrate the point.

Chumash Painted Cave State Historic Park

“The pictographs at Painted Cave are in no sense ordinary or typical of California rock art. The complexity of subject matter, the vivid use of colors, the semi-abstract visualizations executed with great care and intricate detail, and the condition of the paintings all lead scholars to rank this site as being among the finest examples of its kind left by Native Americans in the western United States.”

—Travis Hudson, Guide to Painted Cave, (1982)

“Cabrillo’s description of the Chumash of the Santa Barbara mainland is the oldest ethnohistoric document concerning California Indians.”

—Robert F. Heizer & Albert B. Elsasser, The Natural World of the California Indian, (1980)

Would not a name and date from the 16th century carved into sandstone bedrock by an early Spanish explorer in California be a valued piece of history worth preserving? Would it not be legally protected in the same vain as an “object of antiquity”?

Imagine if Portuguese explorer, Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo, had carved his name into a boulder on the beach at the seaside town of Carpinteria to mark his arrival along the Santa Barbara coast. Undoubtedly the site would be marked with an official plaque at the least if not legally protected and listed in the National Register of Historic Places.

What if the initials and date, “JR Cabrillo 1542,” were carved alongside the rock art in Chumash Painted Cave State Historic Park in the Santa Ynez Mountains above Santa Barbara?

Would the mark somehow be less valuable or less important? Would people dismiss it as graffiti and scratch it out?

I suspect it would be a feature which visitors would purposely look for in the cave and be sure to see for themselves, and that any pamphlet or signboard about the site would mention it.

Were somebody in 2012 to scratch out that marking, would they not be legally liable for defacing a treasured piece of history?

If not codified in law would it not at least be a relic valued by contemporary culture, and the vandal that destroyed it despised?

Is it time that renders such things valuable?

Or the social or historic standing of the particular person that created them?

A remnant of a Chumash pictograph found along a trail in the San Rafael Wilderness.

Such telltale traces of times past abound in the southern Los Padres National Forest. The oldest can be seen in the form of pictographs and petroglyphs painted on and pecked into the walls of sandstone abris and other rock surfaces by the historic population of Chumash Indians.

What makes lesser, by their own cultural standard, specimens of Chumash rock art something precious, but the skilled work of a contemporary graffiti artist rendered on a cave wall vandalism?

Some of the pictographs found in the forest appear to be little more than hastily applied smudges of monochrome paint. They took no appreciable degree of skill or time to create relative the finer works found at other Chumash sites. If in their relative red ocher hued crudeness there is no aesthetic value or exposition of exceptional talent and ability or remarkable cultural expression, then it seems that the passing of time is the sole metric by which the art’s value is judged.

One might reasonably object to note that rock art paintings are priceless relics from a lost culture.

While that is true and certainly lends a significant degree of value and importance to the pictographs, if not representing their value entirely, it is hard to imagine that had historical events taken a different course, and today there remained a vibrant and fully functioning society of full-blooded Chumash still practicing their traditional culture, that these prehistoric traces left by their ancestors would in some way be devalued or less protected.

This seems to beg the question: Why then is it not acceptable for other peoples to begin their own rock painting traditions?

Rock art in the Santa Ynez Mountains of Santa Barbara County. Channel Islands National Park is seen along the distant curiously sloping horizon. Apparently your cell phone snapshot taker here was a bit off kilter this afternoon. (EDIT: 12-6-17 See comments regarding authenticity of this pictograph.)

Would society accept new and continued painting of rock surfaces throughout the forest by contemporary Native Americans? If so would that acceptance extend to people of all ethnicities?

One might argue that these hypothetical full-blooded contemporary Chumash should have the sole right to create pictographs because they would merely be carrying on old traditions. But they did not always paint rock surfaces. It surely cannot have been a practice without a beginning. There must have been a period of time when their ancestors did not paint rocks.

Yet it seems plainly evident that people today would never be allowed to start their own rock painting traditions. And it’s hard to imagine even a master artist being granted such permission.

As we’ve seen in one case, a lady that drew and painted images on rocks in at least seven national parks was banned from the parks for two years, sentenced to 200 hours of community service and made to pay restitution. (LA Times: Woman who defiled national parks with graffiti banned from 524 million acres of public land)

A sandstone boulder in the Sespe Wilderness, whereupon somebody carved the date “1901.” I would photograph this rock, too, out of an interest for relics in the forest. But a name carved into a nearby rock with the date 2001 would anger me and I would never take a photo of it.

Photo ©EM Walker (Hat Tip Mr. Walker. Check out his weblog, The Los Padres Expatriate Hiker and his vintage photo collection featuring the southern Los Padres National Forest.)

I am not advocating anybody start painting or chiseling rocks out in the forest. I’m merely pondering the matter.

Time renders many things, including vandalism and graffiti, important and of some value when enough of it has passed. Even litter turns to treasure.

What gets a person a $1000 dollar fine for littering one year, fifty years later becomes an artifact protected by law, and the person that removes the trash, lest they have a special permit, subject to a fine similar to the one who originally carelessly threw it out.

Had director Cecille B. DeMille not littered the Guadalupe-Nipomo dunes of Santa Barbara County with the remains of the movie set from his 1923 production, “The Ten Commandments,” but instead cleaned up and thoughtfully disposed of the garbage properly, then archaeologists wouldn’t be excitedly excavating the trash heap at this very moment as I write, and there would be no international headlines celebrating the “find.” (UK Sun: Sphinx head discovered beneath sands of California blows dust off one of the greatest stories of extravagance in Hollywood history)

Even trash becomes treasure at some point.

Santa Monica Mountains. “Looks like a felony to me,” said my uncle.

Looking out from under the shade canopy. Note the umbrella in the air in the distance for some sense of the action and all the dark dots of palm tree debris even higher overhead and the bend in the trunk of the largest tree. That’s some wind!

“I’ve come to know that the white mind does not feel toward nature as does the Indian mind, and it is because, I believe, of the difference in childhood instruction. I have often noticed white boys gathering in a city by-street or alley jostling and pushing one another in a foolish manner. They spend much of their time in this aimless fashion, their natural faculties neither seeing, hearing, nor feeling the varied life that surrounds them. There is about them no awareness, no acuteness, and it is this dullness that gives ugly mannerisms full play; it takes from them natural poise and stimulation. In contrast, Indian boys, who are naturally reared, are alert to their surroundings; their senses are not narrowed to observing only one another, and they cannot spend hours seeing nothing, hearing nothing, and thinking nothing in particular. Observation was certain in its rewards; interest, wonder, admiration grew, and the fact was appreciated that life was more than mere human manifestation; that it was expressed in a multitude of forms. This appreciation enriched Lakota existence.”

Luther Standing Bear, “Land of the Spotted Eagle” (1933)

Let me tell you about the last time it rained in Santa Barbara, because it never rains in Santa Barbara.

It will not rain.

It has not rained.

It may never rain.

On this particular summer day, however, it rained with a vengeance.

The clouds unloaded a deluge that dropped from the sky as if thrown from a giant bucket. The torrent hit the beach with a violent burst of wind that sent people fleeing for cover and left small children crying.

I was at The Pit, otherwise variously known as “Hendry’s” or “Arroyo Burro Beach.” I was there all day. I watched the storm build, and build, and build.

Some people, dangerously oblivious to their surroundings and utterly lacking any sense of situational awareness, have said the storm blew in without warning.

Plenty of warning signs were provided to the observant spectator of nature’s game, I’d say.

But it appeared most people’s senses this day were “narrowed to observing only one another.”

One local media source reported this as a “massive storm” with “massive rain.” Checking the county webpage for rainfall one will see that this brief down pour measured about 1/4 of an inch.

Weather that day, despite mixed high patchy clouds, was excellent. The beach was packed with people enjoying yet another exceptional Santa Barbara summer day. September here is typically the best summer weather of the season.

Yet, dark lumpy clouds began condensing ever more thickly over La Cumbre Peak in early afternoon. Standing in the sand at The Pit one can see the peak through the cleft in the rolling hills between Hope Ranch and the Mesa. The weather noticeably changed.

The mountains eventually vanished from sight behind a fuzzy gray depthless curtain, the typical cloudy look of rain showers seen from afar.

The rain front rolled over the city in due time, spreading from the mountains, over the foothills and out over the coastal plain.

I watched this play out for probably at least 30 minutes, but maybe closer to an hour as I played with the kids.

Then as the rain front blotted out the city a huge rain cloud began building over the Mesa’s Douglas Family Preserve which sits stop the coastal bluffs overlooking The Pit. This cloud was one of the blackest, wickedest clouds I have ever witnessed. That’s not saying much, but it was certainly a rarity around Santa Barbara in summer on the beach.

I pointed to the menacing cloud a couple of times, told the kids it was about to unload a downpour like they’ve never seen. All of their young lives thus far had been lived during the drought, their sister just three years older having been too young as a toddler to remember the few years she had lived before the record dry spell. They hardly know rain.

To rain at the beach in summer on what was not long before a nice day, after years of withering drought, well this was something to see.

That they feel the varied life that surrounds them.

Everybody else, so far as I could tell, were oblivious. Or perhaps I was oblivious to them. Whatever the case, there must have been at least a few other people who had some idea about what was to happen, but in general everybody seemed clueless.

Then the cloud broke open and its guts fell out, dumping a torrential burst of rain onto the beach and drenching everybody within seconds.

It was awesome.

The crowd went frantic and chaos ensued.

Having seen the coming storm approaching, I had pulled down the shade canopy to its lowest height, and I was holding onto the frame underneath like a monkey hanging from a branch to keep it anchored from the wind I knew was to hit.

People ran from the beach to the parking lot, abandoning their possessions as they made futile efforts to avoid getting wet while they all got drenched. A couple of people sought shelter under my canopy before giving it up and shuffling off into the windy downpour.

I howled with enthusiasm, cheering on the storm like a spectator in the stands watching a sporting event. The kids were awestruck and wide-eyed.

The wind blew down the canyon through which the creek flows from along Las Positas Road, hit the beach parking lot and ripped through the palm trees tearing large clumps of old dried fronds from their trunks sending them flying like spears and projectiles.

A second later the wind slammed the Boathouse Restaurant like a terrible backhand sweeping anything loose and light enough into the air and thrashing other items against the glass curtain that surrounds the outside dining area. In a split second diners went from enjoying a meal to being soaking wet in the midst of a dangerous squall.

The gust took up huge shade umbrellas from the restaurant and threw them into the ocean like tiny cocktail adornments, carrying them away some thirty yards or more. Everybody’s umbrellas and shade canopies on the beach where thrown into the air, tumbled and twisted up or tossed into the Pacific Ocean.

Some people screamed out in terror. Children cried. People ran from the beach in a duck like soldiers boarding a helicopter.

I was enjoying the spectacle, holding down my canopy. People must have thought I was a lunatic hooting and hollering.

Looking over the beach immediately after, the place was strewn with towels and coolers and busted up umbrellas and canopies that were twisted up like pretzels. It looked like a bomb went off with debris scattered everywhere and people wandering around in a daze.

Clint Elliott tells me of seeing the after effect of a microburst in the forests of the Pacific Northwest. The downdraft hits the ground with such a force that it flattens huge patches of trees.

The beach cleared out with only a small number of people remaining when just a few minutes before it was a crowded summer day. Some people left their things never to return.

Hours later there was still abandoned property left in place and trash strewn about. People were reporting left items to the lifeguards. The lifeguards were cutting up the twisted corpses of shade canopies and umbrellas with electric saws and hauling them to the dumpster on their ATV. Restaurant employees were hauling their umbrellas out of the sea.

Then as the chaos subsided, and the clouds began to break up, and the sun once more showed, and we few die-hard Pit Locs chatted among ourselves about our experience, Arroyo Burro Creek began ever so slowly swelling with runoff.

The creek had been dammed up as a shallow pooled slough behind a sand berm, as is typical. I first noticed water having slyly rolled over dry sand. Instead of the damp line spreading out from the edge of the slough, dry sand began right where the water stopped.

Despite the intensity of the rain shower it was brief and momentary, and I was surprised to see the now departed storm reflected in the rising creek. Yet here I watched as the water slowly rose and eventually later that day broke through the sand berm and drained into the sea.

After five years of epic drought, the rare summer rainfall was a treat. And the way it blew in was a special experience.

‘Twas a scene to behold, not an ordinary day.

Nature, and the people.

Clouds that did not rain on November 16, 2017.

(Postscript: I hacked out a few words of this post months ago then promptly got distracted by other priorites. Recently as I pulled it out of the drawer it still had not rained and there was no rain in the extended forecast. Hence the opening lines. However, as of this moment now, 10:34 1-08-18, it is expected to rain quite a bit. Evacuation warnings have been issued for areas burned in recent wildfires like the massive Thomas Fire as flash flooding is expected. Several inches at least are expected.)

Great Scott! He’s found it.

Our indefatigable wanderer of lands of lesser interest, fumbling, bumbling, stumbling his way onward deep within the myriad folds of the wildfire wasted, drought stricken, flash flood ravaged Santa Ynez Mountains, having mustered the resolve and endurance to grimly persevere while laboring under the slight strain and insignificant suffering of various minor and unremarkable ailments and injuries to toes, feet and one knee, has nevertheless heroically triumphed in the face of such adversity and managed to locate the fleeting and ever elusive fire poppy, Papaver californicum.

Also known as the western poppy, but that doesn’t sound as cool, does it? And nor does it appreciate this peculiar poppy’s relationship with flames.

The fire poppy is often said to grow only after wildfire burns the land, hence the name. Perhaps that makes this particular endemic annual uncommon if not something of a rarity.

Whatever the case may be, it’s certainly not seen anywhere near as often as most other wildflowers in Santa Barbara County. The fire poppy is not a flower that one can plan a future outing to see during any ol’ spring and be guaranteed to find fields of them like California poppies.

Although with the significant increase in anthropogenic wildfires in our region, this may be less true today then in decades past. One wonders if humanity is aiding in the increase or expansion of the fire poppy’s otherwise relatively small population or at least bringing them to bloom more frequently than would otherwise happen naturally.

Core samples from the Santa Barbara Channel suggest that over the last 600 years large wildfires burned about every 65 years.

So presumably, having coevolved with fire, the tiny fleck of a seed from this tender small plant can lie about on the dry and hot forest floor, in this land of long summers and so little rain, for decades on end before then surviving the intense scorch of wildfire, and finally sprouting.

That’s an impressive feat. I can hardly last a day hiking out there in Los Padres National Forest.

This presumption on my part about the longevity of poppy seed appears to be true. In 1999, the Goat Fire burned 300 acres on Catalina Island off Southern California. Following that incident fire poppies were documented for the first time growing on the island.

The seeds had apparently been lying dormant for an extended period of time before being triggered by the fire. There was no prior record of their existence on the island.

Extreme heat and scarification of the seed coat trigger the sprouting of certain types of plants that generally grow after a wildfire. The fire followers or fire ephemerals, as these plants are sometimes called, because they pop up for a brief dance in the sun after fires, then disappear for extended periods of time until the next blaze arrives.

These sorts of events may perhaps break the dormancy of fire poppy seeds, but there is another much more interesting phenomenon which might better explain why the poppies grow after fires.

The burning brush and trees of a wildfire produce chemicals found in smoke that regulate plant growth known as karrikins, which are deposited on the surface of the soil. When watered in by seasonal rains karrikins stimulate rampant germination and vigorous seedling growth.

The Santa Ynez Mountains and San Ysidro Creek canyon above Montecito following the Thomas Fire, as seen on January 11. Montecito Peak is the prominent point seen frame right.

On another note that may also be of interest, these particular poppies featured here sprouted with the epic rainstorm that hit Santa Barbara County in the early morning hours of January 9, 2018. Recall that in my last post way back on January 8, I noted the following:

. . .as of this moment now, 10:34 1-08-18, it is expected to rain quite a bit. Evacuation warnings have been issued for areas burned in recent wildfires like the massive Thomas Fire as flash flooding is expected. Several inches at least are expected.

Estimated at its greatest intensity, the downpour dumped about a half an inch in five minutes and three-quarters of an inch in 15 minutes in the mountains immediately above town. Anywhere from about two to three inches of rain fell on January 9 alone. And anywhere from four to eight inches fell between January 8 and 10 in the greater region.

The rain fell hard on the Santa Ynez Mountains which had been left bald from the Thomas Fire the month before, as seen above. The water hit the firehardened hydrophobic soil and rushed off the 3,000′ slopes with virtually nothing to slow it down and no absoprtion.

These conditions resulted in a deluge of runoff which ripped down the canyons, overflowed creeks by some 30 to 40 feet as I’ve seen on recent hikes and then flushed out into residential neighborhoods in a wave estimated to have been 15 to 20 feet high.

This was the rain event that led to the Montecito Flash Flood or mudslides or debris flow, as it’s alternatively been called, which killed at least 21 people and destroyed at least 500 homes.

Montecito looked similar to a war zone afterward. The power and force of the flood is incomprehensible to me. The destruction it wrought is shocking in the true sense of the word. I return to the damaged sites months later and stand in silence no less stunned.

No words I could possibly scrounge up and string together can appropriately convey what it looked and felt like in the aftermath or even still to this day, and I’m not a survivor; I was safe and sound that night.

I do not wish to make a clumsy attempt at describing what Ive seen so I will simply just say this: It’s a four fingers placed to a quavering mouth with wide eyes sort of thing.

Maybe a real writer might come close to relating something of what it feels like, what it looks like, what it sounds like. So if you wish, you might read what local novelist TC Boyle wrote about the incident: The Absence in Montecito by T. Coraghessan Boyle.

Anyway. . .

Notably, fierce Santa Ana winds had whipped up the same evening the Thomas Fire had been ignited and right where it had started in early December. The strong, warm and dry winds had pushed the fire at incredible speed over drought desiccated land and helped turn it into the state’s worst conflagration on record.

We had to evacuate at four in the morning at one point. Here is a text I sent my wife and her “Holy shit!” response: Mandatory Evacuation Notice.

Then the next month in early January the aforementioned rain storm hit with a vengeance no less wicked than those winds.

And the most intense rainfall, of all the places in the entire county it could have happened, was centered in the bald mountains directly above Montecito.

From the ugly and powerful destruction of those ashes and flood waters rose the tender beauty of these fire poppies.

Click HERE to see a NOAA graphic of the wind and HERE to see a NOAA graphic of the rain. The odds of those events happening must be astronomical.

Reference:

Joan Easton Lentz, A Naturalist’s Guide To the Santa Barbara Region

Catalina Island Conservancy

“Most of these places, however, were not marked as special on my map. But they became special by personal acquaintance. … I remembered what Ishmael had said in Moby-Dick about the island of Kokovoko: ‘It is not down in any map; true places never are.’”

Robert Macfarlane “Wild Places”

The Essence of Place

Our natural inheritance here in this neck of the woods may not include the largest or most spectacular of water parks. But nor have we such wants. We certainly have no need. We barely have water these days, but we get by just fine.

We appreciate each place for its own character. We do not measure our place by the standards of other places. “I—the royal we, you know. The editorial.”

We are humble in our desire. Allow us a small sandstone tub just large enough to dive into, to feel the wash of cool fresh water over our face on a warm day, to sink to the bottom with held breath and pinched eyes, to bob around. And we are happy.

For even the grandest of waterfalls and deepest, largest of pools may find it hard to compete with the affection for a small place in your home county.

Pinners. Scrawny drought-stricken coast live oak acorns in the fall of 2018. 

After seven years of scant rainfall and extreme drought—Santa Barbara arguably being hit hardest out of any county in California—finding pools that aren’t stagnant or moss-covered and still appealing enough to jump into has become increasingly hard to accomplish, if one finds water at all remaining in the watershed. Many places have dried up altogether. Many places have remained dry for years now.

And so one must put in more effort venturing farther and deeper afield where what little rain has fallen in recent years still manages to trickle out of the ground in sufficient volume to fill a few puddles worthy of attention.

My dad and uncle first stumbled upon this swimming hole over 50 years ago when out exploring the wilds of Santa Barbara County, a favorite family hobby.

They knew not what they might find that day so long ago, but went anyway with not so much as a hint from anybody that a cool emerald pool awaited them out there in the forest after a hot sweaty trek.

August 2018

On a hot summer day we sat poolside smoking Cuban cigars and listening to the blues, the two elders telling tales of meeting tobacco farmers in Cuba and enjoying the fruits of their labor.

They told of learning from the farmers how they dried and cured their leaves over the course of a couple of years; of visiting the drying sheds; of sitting in their humble homes; of chickens standing on kitchen tables beside makeshift wood-burning stoves; of a farmer withdrawing from under his straw mattress supple, golden-brown cured personal stash pressed between sheets of newspaper and hand-rolling cigars of exceptional quality for their indulgence.

These stories were those of travelers that went out to find for themselves lively experiences, not tourists having been led to trendy traps detailed in books and articles with explicit directions. That’s personal acquaintance. In that grows a deeper appreciation. It’s to love rather than merely like. And one begins to know something of the essence of true place.

Once upon a time many decades ago in a similar vein, these two adventurous travelers had set out and found for themselves this liquid gem we now enjoyed on a sunny summer afternoon, somewhere yonder deep within the wilds of Santa Barbara County.

It’s the old swimming hole. Where relaxation is found, fun had and memories made.

Oysters on a standing dead cottonwood tree in the Santa Ynez Mountains. You can see where the deceased tree’s canopy had filled in the now empty sky above, the other trees wrapping around it.

“The hunter-gatherer lives on what is conceptually the ‘fruit of the earth.'”

—Max Oelschlaeger, “The Idea of Wilderness”

With winter rains sprout the fruit of the forest, mushrooms. The fruiting bodies of wood fungus, they come in a wide range of flavors from the earthy and savory chanterelle to the meaty oyster to the lobstery hericium to the sweetish honey mushroom and more. Wild mushrooms are the most delectable of all the forest’s eyeless edibles, I’d say.

Something profound happens when a human enters the woods. When a person begins to look intensely and discerningly at the land by way of hunting, either that of animals or plants and mushrooms, something magical happens. (The necessary prerequisite, of course, is that one must take an active interest in keen observation, and walk among the wild things slow enough to be conscious of what surrounds them, and be an open and willing recipient of what the forest offers.)

In these experiences the patient observer begins to see land as Aldo Leopold described it. The observer gazes upon the land as a complex living community, “land the collective organism,” rather than a mere landscape scene that is beautiful.

The observer’s penetrating gaze, an ocular spear cast into the land targeting the finest detail within the intricate weave of a living tapestry, the threads intertwined and so tightly woven that no one fiber can be harmed or removed from the others without altering the big picture all combine to create, that no individual may be damaged without harming the integrity and health of the whole. This is land as a living organism. 

The tourist looks. The traveler sees. The naturophilic student of the forest understands what she sees when looking. She gazes upon the land not as a -scape nor as scenery. The dynamic complexity of Earth’s living systems and its flora and fauna are not reduced to a mere object of art stripped of all meaning other than the most superficial, as if it’s a painting on a wall. It is not a landscape. The land is not a Bierstadt. She is not distracted by superficial finicky and shifty notions of beauty. The land is sublime not for its mere physical appearance, but for its ecology. The land is beautiful because it is alive.

What is lost about John Muir on many people, I think, is that he found the mountains and forests “sublime” not for their superficial beauty so much as his understanding of what underlies that physical appearance. He intuitively understood the basic principle of ecology before the word existed, that all life is connected.

“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe,” Muir wrote. He knew the land as Leopold later described it.

In this manner the naturophile does not gaze upon the land through her heart but her brain. And it is in the awareness and understanding of intimate details that real and true love is born.

“Once you learn to read the land, I have no fear of what you will do to it, or with it,” Leopold wrote.

Because you don’t abuse what you love and you can’t love what you don’t understand.

‘The objective is to teach the student to see the land, to understand what he sees, and to enjoy what he understands,” Leopold wrote.

Read the land. Read it like a book. Don’t just read the cover and think it looks pretty. Read every page there within, the details, the footnotes, and know the whole story.

In A Sand County Almanac (1949), Leopold wrote of reading pine trees like books on his Wisconsin farm. The “spaces between the successive whorls of branches. . .are an autobiography that he who walks with trees may read at will.” The longer the space between each annual whorl of branches, Leopold advised, the more rain had fallen the previous year. The shortest spaces reflected drier years and droughts.

“But we are all here for the wild hunt. The true one. The oldest one of all.”

—Adam Nevill, “The Ritual”

In “Omnivore’s Dilemma,” Michael Pollan writes about his first experience hunting wild pigs in California. He describes falling into a state of intense focus while everything else in the world vanished from his mind but the collective organism of the forest before him. He describes his ears and eyes “tuning in—everything.” He writes of his otherwise nearsighted vision that, “The sharpness of focus and depth of field was uncanny.” He writes that he felt as if he’d “entered nature through a new door” and for once “was not a spectator but a full participant in the life of the forest.” Later his friend, an avid hunter whom knew the feeling, described his experience as “hunter’s eye.”

I know this phenomenon well. When out in the woods alone I often fall into a trance wherein all senses are exceptionally sharp and responsive and my focus on the forest is laser-like in its intensity. During these states of heightened consciousness, distractions, like a voice in the canyon or scared deer charging away, can rip me free of that trance and it takes a few minutes of staring back at the forest for it to return, as if I’m waiting for my eyes to slowly refocus so that my brain too may refocus.

“The tourist achieves no such immersion or connection; all he sees is a landscape,” Pollan writes. “The tourist remains a spectator to a scene.” The naturophile is not a spectator, but reads the book of nature as an active participant and is fully engaged and deeply immersed in the story.

In the Santa Ynez Mountains, when the coast live oak trees drop bumper crops of acorns during a mast year, the naturophile expects to have competition from mice and rats nibbling and ruining good mushrooms the first year after, and to suffer a horrendous season of ticks when foraging during the second year after the mast.

The tourist will look over the oak trees as a beautiful landscape. The traveler will see through the beauty to notice the unusual amount of acorns. But the naturophile sees the abundant acorns and understands that it will spur a boom in the rodent population which feeds on them, which in turn will lead to a spike in the tick population which feed on rodents.

To the tourist it may seem like magic that the naturophile can stand in an oak forest on a fall day and tell them that in two years the ticks in spring are going to be really bad. But once you’ve been introduced to that page in the storybook of nature it’s an obvious, quick observation.

Pollan quotes Spanish philosopher, Jose Ortega y Gasset, whom in “Meditations On Hunting” describes what it’s like to perceive the forest through the hunter’s eye:

When one is hunting, the air has another, more exquisite feel as it glides over the skin or enters the lungs, the rocks acquire a more expressive physiognomy, and the vegetation becomes loaded with meaning. But all this is due to the fact that the hunter, while he advances or waits crouching, feels tied through the earth to the animal he pursues, whether the animal is in view, hidden, or absent.

. . .

The tourist sees broadly the great spaces, but his gaze glides, it seizes nothing, it does not perceive the role of each ingredient in the dynamic architecture of the countryside. Only the hunter, imitating the perpetual alertness of the wild animal, for whom everything is danger, sees everything and sees each thing functioning as facility or difficulty, as risk or protection.”

What a great description!—“The role of each ingredient in the dynamic architecture of the countryside.” Each thing in the forest, animate and inanimate, pregnant with meaning, tells the hunter something worth knowing and plays the role of a character in nature’s story. This is entirely lost on the casual looker.

Consider Paul Shepard’s description in “The Tender Carnivore and the Sacred Game” of the “rich knowledge of the hunter,” a true knower of wild things:

“. . .think of him as lean and muscular, lying on a sunny ridge amid tundra flowers, surveying a distant herd of fifty horses. He recognizes each individual by sex and age, by its movements, by its role. He sees the drift of the herd in relation to terrain, forage, and predators; rank-order relationships of individuals; subtle signs of sickness and infirmity; the daily round of herd life, feeding, drinking, resting. He compares the pattern of one herd to that of others. He learns their communications and signals, the nuances of seasonal rhythms in behavior, the effect of stress, aware of these in relation to the season and time of day. He is also listening. . .and all sound is voice.”

The nuances of nature and subtle signs are what the naturophilic student of the forest is after. All sound is voice and all voice tells the listener something worth knowing.

Shepard also quotes Jose Ortega y Gasset in a passage about how each element in the countryside informs the hunter.

“[The hunter] will perceive all his surroundings from the point of view of the animal, with the animal’s peculiar attention to detail. This is what I call being within the countryside. Only when we see it through the drama of the hunt can we absorb its particular richness. Articulated in that action which is a minor zoological tragedy, wind, light, temperature, ground contour, minerals, vegetation, all play a part; they are not simply there, as they are for the tourist or the botanist, but rather they function, they act.”

Through this sort of intense observation and personal and intimate experience the hunter is lead to a deep and complex understanding of the land, and a relationship with wildness that is impossible to achieve from the outside looking in or through brief and superficial brushes with wildlands. A person must be an active participant within the countryside.

I don’t think, however, that a person needs to kill animals to achieve this. One may still hunt animals without harming them or choose to participate in the other pillar of our evolution in gathering.

I’ve never hunted an animal to kill in my life, but when I walk in the woods I do so carefully as if in pursuit of a clever and wily creature. I try to take everything in, to absorb into my mind all factors in the natural equation before me and process their meaning individually and as a complex whole. To read the complex living organism that is the land and see what it tells me.

In this pursuit of keen perception the natural world has bloomed before my eyes through the years in ways I never expected, the flower still growing larger and expanding with each new experience out there, becoming ever more attractive and, in turn, so too does my appreciation grow and my desire to conserve and protect the wild. And that is the real point I am trying to make!

Stomping down the trail just to reach a destination—chasing waterfalls, bagging peaks, or to arrive at a campsite—the common hiker, while perhaps admiring superficial beauty along the way, may miss all of these subtleties and as a result their experience is less dimensional and far less rich.

This sort of destination hiker thinks in a narrow, linear fashion. The goal, on the other hand, is to think geometrically like Jason Bourne in Robert Ludlum’s spy thriller novels.

“You’re lacking,” Bourne tells a guy at gunpoint. “You can’t think geometrically.”

“What does that mean?,” the guy asks.

“Ponder it,” Bourne tells him.

Let us ponder it. Nature works geometrically through what we silly humans have decided to call ecology. Each point, that is each character or element in the forest, is tied to innumerable other points in an ever expanding net of interconnection. Think of a fishing net. In other words, Point A is not “hitched” only to Point B, which is then only “hitched” to Point C. To continue the analogy, think of a length of fishing line to illustrate the linear. Or better yet, click the two links above for a rough illustration of the point.

People ask what I do out there in the forest if not hiking to arrive at some destination, as if there is nothing of worth to be found in nature but end points noted on maps. I wish I could open their eyes and mind to all they are missing. This post is an attempt of sorts to achieve that. On the contrary, there is much more to behold than simple destinations. Destinations are least of the forest’s offerings. The very least. Meager, really. Crumbs.

Paul Shepard on the result of the careful observation of nature by our species through its evolution:

“What emerges from a million years of such study is much more than a practical knowledge for killing—it is a knowledge of the typical life cycle of each species, its details and peculiarities. This is natural history.

But a person must immerse themselves in nature to earn that knowledge. This requires participation. It is not enough to be a spectator on the sidelines. And you certainly will never earn it reading books. “I have a low opinion of books,” Muir wrote,

“They are but piles of stones set up to show coming travelers where other minds have been, or at best signal smokes to call attention. . .No amount of word-making will ever make a single soul to know these mountains. . .One day’s exposure to mountains is better than cartloads of books.”

You must get out there in the thick of it and dirty your hands. Ortega y Gasset would say with the blood of an animal you’ve skillfully hunted and respectfully killed, but I think a sweaty brow and soil under the nails from hunting mushrooms and foraging for wild edibles suffices just fine.

Once earned, a person will be able to stand and gaze over the land and read its many and various subtle signs and only then may they begin to understand something of the sublimity of the natural world.

My quarry for the day, a humble harvest of but a little that I found.

My favorite way to cook oyster mushrooms is to keep it simple: pan-fried in a cast iron skillet with a little avocado oil and a dash of pink salt to finish. Es todo no mas. 

Avocado oil has a high flash point and will not smoke and burn as easily as olive oil, which can taint the flavor of the mushroom.

Use a grill press or another smaller cast iron skillet to press the mushroom down firmly on the hot pan. As the ripply-edged mushroom heats through and begins to cook it will lose its stiffness, wilt and the whole fruit will eventually be pressed flat against the pan like a burger.

In this way you’ll be able to develop the crispy brown steak you’re after. It’s the crispy browning that makes it great. The trick is to fry it slowly on a medium to medium-high flame and give it time to develop that flavor. Too low of flame and you get slimy. Too hot and you get scorched.

These mushrooms don’t taste anything like oysters. They take their name from their growth habit or shape not flavor.

Plane Jane in appearance, but exceptionally tasty. Especially those curly crispy edges.

I’m big on personal responsibility, and so I don’t much see any reason for warning labels and so-called “trigger” warnings. But I suppose I should try to play the part of a responsible party and offer a warning.

If you eat the wrong mushroom you will die.

Dead.

People in Santa Barbara have died from eating poisonous wild mushrooms.

You need to know what you are doing when eating wild mushrooms.

If you are looking in a book to see if you can or cannot eat the wild mushroom growing before you in the woods, then you do not know what you are doing!

I will leave it up to you the reader to figure out the rest.

Don’t come back and blame me if you die from eating a mushroom after reading this here lil’ ol’ weblog.

A Related Post On This Blog: 

Mastodon & Mammoth Sign: Reading Trees in the Santa Ynez Mountains

A typical road on the Isle of Skye.

I’m listening to Dylan. And driving fast in a small, or wee as the locals would say, car.

“Throw on the dirt, pile on the dust”

Husbands leaving wives. They’re out to roam. Jack woke up early. Got the hell out of home. She wouldn’t change it. Even if she could.

“You know what they say? They say it’s all good.”

Loch na cuilce (Map Link)

It’s a wee two lane road without shoulders. In many places it narrows to single track with occasional wide outs to give way to oncoming traffic.

By way of a pamphlet I read at a pub, I take it the folks here on the bucolic and sparsely populated Isle of Skye take pride in paving over as little land as possible. This is readily evident no matter where one drives. The roads are puny and thin. There are never shoulders.

Some places the roadbed has subsided on the constantly rain saturated soil and shifted off camber.

A local in a pickup truck speeds past, overtaking me in the opposing lane on the outside along a corner now sloping at the wrong angle. It looks like it wouldn’t take much for the truck to roll. But he takes the corner smoothly nonetheless, the truck pitching back and forth with the force.

In the States I have found I can typically take corners about ten miles per hour faster than the posted speed limit.

Here on Skye it seems the posted limit runs about ten kliks an hour too fast for comfort. I’m driving fast, but the locals roll faster. Much faster.

Bearreraig Bay (Map Link). A small stone cottage lies in ruins in the grass down yonder there.

The ruins sit beside a burn or a small creek flowing into the sea.

Despite the narrow lanes and frequent pulling aside to allow passing, everybody is exceptionally polite and easy going. They all wave or tap the horn in thanks.

Though the locals must surely get annoyed with tourists like me once in awhile.

Stopping along the shoulderless road, pulled as far as possible into the weeds. I threw open a car door at one point just as a man was easing by with little room to spare.

He slammed on his breaks as I hopped out onto the road only to come face to face with an old, frizzy white-haired, ruddy-faced angry Scotsman dropping f-bombs on me.

“For ***** sake, man!” he growled in his thick accent. Oops.

Master James Elliott walking down to Brother’s Point to hunt dino prints. “They’ll never make it. It’s quite dangerous.”

Same site as noted above. The footprints are found on the beige slab of stone jutting into the sea.

Here on the island layers of sedimentary rock from the Jurassic epoch have been exposed along the seashore. Rock of this particular type rich in dinosaur fossils can only be seen in a handful of locations in all the world.

In a few seashore locations on Skye footprints from several different kinds of dinosaurs have been found, but can only be seen on low tide and are otherwise under water.

Some of the footprints, Brontosaurus in particular, appear to be mere roundish, water filled depressions on the seaweed-covered stone flats. They resemble elephant prints.

When standing back a few yards one can clearly see the trail left by a wandering Brontosaur. There is no mistaking it once you know what to look for. It’s easy to see the sequence of dinosaur footfalls as they wandered what was once a tidal mudflat or shallow lagoon some 170 million years ago.

In other places the fossil prints are remarkably distinct considering their age and location, constantly worn by the wash of the Atlantic Ocean.

A Sauropod print on Brothers’ Point. Note how relatively well preserved the toe prints are for being 170 million years old. To the left one can see the mark left by a claw.

The claw mark left behind as the sauropod’s foot sucked back out of the mud when walking.

The footprint showing its surroundings.

One particular site can typically only been seen in winter when big storms and rough seas sweep the beach clear of loose sediment. Throughout the rest of the year the prints are buried in sand.

A stone’s throw from this site, just above the beach and at the foot of stone cliffs, archaeological surveys tell of am ancient human habitation site some 10,000 years old.

I presume those early humans must have seen the prints, so keen in observation they had to have been and so in tune were they with the natural world in order to survive. The prints are incredibly distinct. One wonders what the ancient humans that lived nearby thought of the prints. The prints show in winter across a now fossilized rippled mudflat of reddish brown hue.

The tracks and the mudstone flat were not visible at the time of my visit. Both were covered by today’s sand which was, interestingly enough, also rippled from the same hydrophysical play that was at work there over 100 million years earlier. A lot has changed, but then again much remains the same. The same rippled design floated overhead in the wind whipped clouds of an otherwise sunny day.

A tridactyl foot print at Brother’s Point. Look for the triangle shape with a fourth point on one side, there at my toe.

The trail down to the rocky headland Rubha nam Brathairean or Brothers’ Point begins from the paved road as a short gravel driveway leading to several cottages perched on the steep grassy hillside overlooking the ragged shoreline below.

Just beyond the first cottage the actual footpath begins. The path leads through a sheep pasture and falls steeply to the rocky beach.

“I’m afraid this isn’t a place for small children,” the lady said in a firm, sincere voice with what appeared to be her husband in tow. “They’ll never make it. It’s quite dangerous.”

I didn’t even slow my stride nor give her warning worthy consideration.

“Thanks. We’ll be fine. We’re a rugged bunch,” I said kindly with a smile and a friendly wave. I kept going, leading our five party clan.

I’m used it to it by now. I’ve been seasoned through the years by many odd looks and frequent warnings about places I take my kids being too dangerous for one reason or another. The cliffs. The rattlesnakes. The ticks. The lions. The poison oak. The whatever. Had I heeded all the warnings, my children would be a lot poorer for it and much less capable.

So onward we all walked eager to find the prehistoric treasure we were after. I asked a younger couple on their way off the beach if they’d found the prints. They said just a few small ones but nothing big. They didn’t find anything, I figured by the sound of it. They just didn’t want to admit it. My hope shriveled a bit.

But after just a few minutes on the exposed sheet of bedrock I found one of several of the best preserved prints. It was the first dinosaur footprint I had ever seen first hand. Sweet!

Another dinosaur footprint site holding Brontosaurus tracks.

I had previously captured a screen shot from a short video posted online by a major world-wide news agency, which had announced for the first time ever the world class find just two months before I arrived on Skye.

Using landmarks briefly shown in the video clip, I was able to pinpoint the site and proceeded from there to scan the area, walking systematically back and forth until I found the first print.

If I’m a pirate, then this is my type of treasure hunting. I may be genetically incapable of asking for directions and I certainly cannot bring myself to ask for location information on these sorts of sites. That would be a gross violation of etiquette. But it also takes something valuable away from the whole experience.

And so I gather cryptic clues from the Internet and various print publications and have fun piecing them together. Finding what I’m after without asking for directions or, God forbid, GPS coordinates is itself alone hugely rewarding and makes the experience far more enjoyable.

That is all.

Brontosaurus print.

Same Brontosaurus print sequence as detailed above showing here four distinct prints filled as puddles on low tide, the three animals Elliott in the background.

A cave’s eye view of San Ysidro Canyon in the Santa Ynez Mountains; the Thomas Fire burn scar and initial regrowth evident.

Total rainfall county-wide for Santa Barbara measures in at 95% of normal so far this season. With the month of March still to come, which typically offers the potential for substantial rainfall, we should see that total rise well beyond the 100% level. This would be only the second time in the last eight years that we have received a full dose of rainfall if it happens.

San Ysidro Tank is a vernal pond that sits high atop a rocky ridge hundreds of feet above the creek, just behind San Ysidro Ranch, at the mouth of the canyon on the west side. In drought years it does not fill up and sometimes remains dry through several seasons.

The Tank will not be found on any mainstream maps, which hints at how little is conveyed on such otherwise admirable and necessary informative works of orientation and place that forest gadabouts depend on. There is a lot more to the forest than mere contour lines, major watercourses, names and campsites. This site is one of them; a place I stumbled upon myself years ago when out exploring off trail.

The canyon right now is aroar with the voice of San Ysidro Creek. The noise seems novel and amazing after so many years of droughty silence, the flow of water alluring and mesmerizing after a long absence.

Sitting and listening and watching the flow rushing from the Santa Ynez Mountains, entertained and amused and soothed by finally a good drenching of the forest, I wondered what a desert dweller must think when seeing a river or deep pools and large waterfalls for the first time. Such an experience must be like gazing over the vastness of the sea for the first time. It must be incredible. I don’t ever recall in my life being so appreciative of the forest having what is merely just a normal amount of water in it. Cheers!

San Ysidro Canyon a few days ago looking fairly well cleaned out a year after the Montecito Flash Flood that killed at least 21 people.

A similar view of San Ysidro Canyon in 2017 prior to the flash flood, when it was full of vegetal growth. This view here shows a point in the creek seen about center frame in the photo above, just as the creek bends leftward around the bedrock outcrop. The reason, specifically, for the close cropped view here was because any wider of an angle and all one could see was a riparian thicket, all of which was swept out and fed to the sea several miles down canyon.

The tank.

Exceptional views of the Pacific Ocean and Channel Islands National Park can be enjoyed.

The alcove with a window view of the coast. A body can sit inside the shallow cave and peer out the window.

Looking south eastward over the pool toward Carpinteria.

Santa Barbara County Chanterelle

“In an oak forest alone, more than a hundred different species of fungi may be present in different parts of the roots of the same tree. From the oak’s point of view, this is a very practical arrangement.”

—Peter Wohlleben, “The Secret Life of Trees”

Chanterelle mushrooms are the fruit or reproductive structures of a fungus that grows on the roots of living trees.

The fungus and trees coexist in a symbiotic relationship, both benefiting by gaining sustenance from each other that they could not otherwise get on their own, alone.

In Santa Barbara County chanterelles typically partner with oak trees and the fungus plays an essential role in the health of a forest.

The better the fungal connection is the healthier the oaks are. As fungi disappear, the trees are weakened.

Most plants, from grasses to scrub to trees, grow with fungi in such interdependent relationships and plants in league with fungi contain much greater levels of nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorous than those plants without fungal partners.

Michael Phillips, in his award winning book about growing fruit trees, “The Holistic Orchard,” spends a significant amount of time explaining the critical importance of encouraging and tending what he calls the “fungal duff” zone around the base of trees.

Phillips advises feeding the soil fungi through regular spray applications of neem oil and liquid fish, as well as the routine application of ramial wood chips from deciduous trees (rather than evergreen) that are dumped in irregular haphazard patches around fruit trees throughout the year.

When reading Phillips the fruit grower comes to view the tender care of the soil and all its tiny organisms as being just as important as, or part and parcel of, the loving care of the tree itself. To feed and strengthen the fungi is to feed and strengthen the tree.

The healthier and more diverse the community of fungi are in the rhizosphere or root zone of an orchard, the healthier the trees are and the better their ability to defend against insect attacks and disease and to consistently produce abundant, tasty fruit.

When the chanterelle fungus taps into the oak’s roots, the tree gets plugged in to the expansive subterranean network established by the fungus through its mass of root-like hyphae called mycelium.

These minuscule root-like filaments spread through the soil in an extremely fine meshed webbing, soaking up nutrients and moisture otherwise out of reach or unavailable to the much larger tree roots. 

The amount of these fungal filaments in healthy forest soil is hard if not impossible to imagine.

In a single teaspoon of soil there are many miles of hyphae.

In a meter diameter of soil, about the space between two spread arms, more than eight trillion end branches can occur in the mycelium.

The mycelium greatly increases the surface area of the oak tree’s own root system, but it also serves as a conduit for nutrient exchange between trees.

Within a well-connected forest, stronger trees aid weaker or sickly neighboring trees or juveniles and saplings in their shadows by transferring vital nutrients and water through the fungal network.

A valley oak in the Santa Ynez Valley.

An oak tree does not just gain food and drink from the helpful chanterelle, however.

The symbiotic connection also enables the tree to communicate with other trees through the subterranean fungal network that functions as a natural sort of fiber optic system.

When mycelium run through the soil they connect with other mycelium growing from the roots of other nearby trees, thus linking one tree to another to another.

These fungal networks can be vast and large swaths of a forest may be connected in this manner.

A specimen of honey fungus found in Switzerland is thought to be around 1,000 years old and covers 120 acres.

In Oregon, one fungus is thought to be at least 2,400 years old and covers  some 2,000 acres and is three miles wide; it’s  said to be the largest organism on the planet and can be spotted from an airplane.

Trees communicate through these fungal networks using chemical signals as well as electrical impulses.

These impulses can travel a third of an inch per second to notify neighboring trees about potential threats like insects or relate information about drought.

In the case of an insect attack, each oak tree connected to the network receives news of an imminent threat from trees already being eaten by bugs, and each tree then responds to the message defensively by boosting their output of toxic and bitter tasting tannins into their bark and leaves.

Lone trees not plugged into the network not only lack access to the communal plumbing that supplies additional food and water, but are also incommunicado and completely unaware of what’s happening in the forest around them. Loners live much shorter lives than community members, as a result.

That’s some mighty gnarly stuff!

When in the forest next time around, ponder what it is you may be walking atop. There’s a lot going on under your feet.

The Santa Ynez River was once hailed as “the most productive of all the little steelhead rivers of the south” in California. (Native Steelhead of Yore)

Sitting in the public library some twenty years ago or more I stumbled upon vague directions and an alluring black and white photo in one of Dick Smith’s old books from the 1960s. This would be the same Mr Smith for which the Dick Smith Wilderness was named.

The photo showed a man and a “youngster,” as he was apt to call them in his various writings, standing aside a relatively large and deep looking pool of water surrounded by thick grass. A dog appeared to be swimming.

I had been recreating in this specific area since I was a small boy and the black pool sitting on the slopes high above the creek, as I recognized it in the photo from knowing the area, was astonishing at first sight.

I wondered how a water feature in this semi-arid region could possibly be located in what seemed such an unlikely spot on the side of a dry mountain. And, of course, I knew immediately I had to venture out for a looksee myself sometime; into the notebook an entry went.

But interest in other places distracted me and life’s priorities kept me busy and it was about a decade before I followed up and found my way out there for the first time. What I found was a dry depression but no pool.

The Los Padres National Forest may seem fairly small when looking on a map, but a fella could spend a life time out there beating himself to a pulp, dragging his hind end all over the woods and still not see all there is to see.

Who knows what’s out there? More than you may think.

A few years back, a guy that took Stillman and I to a Chumash Indian pictograph site in the Sespe Wilderness found a Chumash basket in a dry cave, which is now displayed in the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History.

The map, as much as I appreciate all that it offers and the work put in to create it, doesn’t show you much. This is yet another place not labeled on the map.

How many other places or things do you think there are out there waiting for you to discover for yourself?

And don’t forget the intangible discoveries you may stumble across when out in the forest away from it all, you know what I’m saying?

I gotta gotta take a trip, gotta take a trip out of this place
I gotta gotta get away, get away from the human race
I don’t know what I’ll see, don’t even know what I’ll find
I don’t know what to pack, never been to a trip at the mind

Trip at the brain, trip at the brain, trip at the brain

Do you know what I’m saying?

—Mike Muir

Smith described the pool back in the 1960s as being spring-fed and a home to turtles swimming about. What?!, I thought as I first read his book. It was all too alluring for me to ignore.

I don’t believe the spring works much anymore if there was indeed ever a spring. Back when I stumbled across the photo in Smith’s book I imagine the pool would have remained filled most years, as the 1990’s were an exceptionally wet decade.

These days the pool only fills intermittently on rainier years like the season at hand now, when we’ve thus far enjoyed over 100% of normal precipitation county-wide after years of drought.

A seasonal brook runs down the mountain near the pool. A few oaks, coast live and blue, stand adjacent the pool on the grassy slope. The place looks a bit more scraggly and sparse than usual as it recovers from a forest fire. At the moment scores of chocolate lilies are in full bloom all over the area. At least one and possibly two Chumash habitation sites are located not far from the pool.

On the day of my last visit it was a supremely peaceful place with nobody else around, behind locked gates and the fast flowing and frigid Santa Ynez River, which forced howls of pain from my person as I waded across on icy bare feet.

Once the river crossing is cleared and the gates open, the bowl of the canyon will once more resonate with the racket of “machine mad motorcyclists,” as Ed Abbey wrote.

On this day, there wasn’t another soul around but for the wild.

Yeah, Jack likes mud puddles. So what?

Fritillaria biflora

Argh. The entire state of California (yes, that’s hyperbole) at the moment seems to be either gripped by what journalists and the news media love to hype as a wildflower “super bloom” or is suffering in the throes of dealing with the frenzied madness surrounding it as fueled by the media.

I read one report from NPR of 50,000 people pouring through one small town with a population not much larger.

Other reports lament the herd of onlookers trampling sensitive lands and leaving behind scores of braided footpaths slicing apart fields of flowers, so much so that the use-trails are visible in satellite imagery.

News articles are being pumped out daily dressed up with sparkling, eye-catching lures like, “It’s the best it’s ever been.”

Really? Ever is a long time. I don’t think that applies. But sensationalism sells. Hence Hearst Castle.

Two years ago, 2017, the media was filled with commentary about a California “super bloom.” A report from US Today tells of “California’s second ‘super bloom’ in two years.” That headline is immediately followed by a photo caption asserting that it is “a rare super bloom.” Twice in two years is rare? I don’t think so, Cletus.

One wonders how super it really is when it also occurred just 730 days ago. Maybe it’s not so super after all even if is indeed a grand show.

I can’t deny that it is a grand show. And I certainly don’t fault people for wanting to see it. But I don’t know that it’s “super.” Maybe it’s just normal.

When we receive a normal measure of rainfall for the season after seven years of intense drought you know what we call it here?

Normal.

100% of normal county-wide is the way it’s put by officials.

Despite every runnel, brook, creek and river flowing with gusto like we haven’t seen in years, and despite the novelty of so much water running everywhere after it being so dry for so long, we still just call it. . .normal.

Twenty years ago, on days I’d venture out to the Carrizo Plain to take a looksee at the wild flowers, I rarely if ever saw anybody.

Surely people came, but not like they do now in the age of social media saturation, which has combined with the usual age-old media hype and yellow journalism as a force multiplier when it comes to propelling thousands of people into places they would otherwise never have gone.

(I suppose I may share in owning some of the blame by giving yet more exposure to certain places through this here little weblog.)

In 2011, following a season of abundant rainfall well above average, I spent an entire day immersed in Carrizo Plain National Monument and saw nobody. You can see what it looked like that day at the following link: Temblor Range Wildflowers. It looked pretty super.  I don’t recall wall to wall reports of a “super bloom” that year, but maybe I just wasn’t paying attention.

A rather large lily standing over a foot tall. Many years they only reach about half that size.

Anyhow, with so much attention focused on this season’s wildflower bloom I feel compelled to ignore it around here. I have posts up from previous blooms for those interested. I included below a link to one such post or search “wildflowers” in the sidebar.

I’ve been out to see some of the flowers this season, but my contrarian-against-the-grain-swimming-upstream nature precludes me from wanting to post anything about it.

When it’s on the national news I think it’s been pimped out enough as it is.

So I’d like to show a simple, sparse, far less spectacular bloom in chocolate lilies. So sparse that they aren’t even worth a landscape shot, as they’d be all but invisible.

Because just as I am a wanderer of lands of lesser interest, so too am I an aficionado of things of lesser interest in those lands. What most folks ignore I like to pay attention to.

These lilies grow by the hundreds in good years in certain places like the serpentine soils on Figueroa Mountain and in Oso Canyon draining into the Santa Ynez River.

But they do not grow so thick as to paint over large swaths of land attracting media hounds and hoards of eager viewers.

So there you go. That’s it. That’s all.

Related Post 

Sage Hill Wildflowers

A view of the Pacific Ocean overlooking the Gaviota Coast from the crest of the Santa Ynez Mountains atop San Lucas Falls canyon.

San Lucas Falls is rarely visited and hardly ever seen by anybody despite being one of the better waterfalls in the Santa Ynez Mountains of Santa Barbara County.

There is no easy access by way of an official, US Forest Service sanctioned and maintained trail. There is no trail at all, so far as I know.

The gatekeeper has long been the impenetrable forest of chaparral that surrounds the waterfall, although I suppose an enterprising hiker may find his way there bootlegging it up a long stretch of a particular dirt road, which I believe is private property, however.

There is an old overgrown, slough-covered road cut that runs by the falls.

San Lucas Falls is located center frame, the old road cut visible near the lower left.

Some years ago I stumbled across the falls on a US Geological Survey map from several decades ago.

A thin blue line marked its location with the name beside it.

I had never heard of the waterfall.

I needed to see it, but could not locate a single image online.

Obviously the mountains were calling and I needed to go. I had to study the falls first hand, up close and personal.

Ain’t that right, John Muir?

Cachuma Lake

But how to penetrate that impenetrable thicket that guarded the waterfall?

That was, for all but the most masochistic lunatics, not possible so far as I was concerned. Not even I, the lone weirdo wanderer of the woods and places of lesser interest, had an appetite for that sort of rough and bloody work.

It could take a body hours to move even just a mile. Something like Campbell Grant describes in his book, “Rock Paintings of the Chumash,” when on his way to a painted cave deep within the Santa Barbara backcountry.

“Carrying packs and cutting our way down a brush-choked arroyo with machetes,” Grant writes, “we made a mile in two hours.”

Fun.

And once under scrub canopy a hiker is effectively lost, for all visible reckoning and route finding becomes extremely difficult if not impossible due to the thick cover of chaparral. You can’t see where you are nor where you need to go.

So San Lucas Falls lodged in my brain as a project to be done at some point. The years kept sliding by.

Looking down San Lucas Canyon toward the Santa Ynez Valley.

And then the Whittier wild fire swept through the area and thinned the forest just enough to offer a much easier, although still strenuous, passage.

And then two years later, right now, the winter finally brought a normal season of precipitation, which after seven or so years of drought seemed like a torrential deluge.

Every little runnel in the hills came back to life and flowed with gusto, while the major creeks once more roared and the Santa Ynez River, which San Lucas Creek flows into, raged high along its banks turbid, dangerous, swift and chilly.

This was the year to visit San Lucas Falls, while it was gushing, before the drought possibly continued, before the chaparral grew back, before the figurative doors were slammed shut once more for decades to come.

I hiked down the spine of a steep ridge just east of the waterfall, through the spotty patches of burned brush. The route was fairly open from the fire, but as you know forest fires do not burn evenly.

In several places I was forced to meander here and there through thickets of scorched but still standing brier, to retrace my steps and double back in search of openings, and in a few places resort to crawling.

The ridgeline falls steeply toward the Santa Ynez Valley in a series of stair steps, the backsides of which are not visible when hiking down into the canyon. From the valley floor these slopes appear closer to vertical than not.

I was not sure if each of the backsides of those stair-like graduated hilltops was burned clear or had been untouched by the blaze or merely just singed.

There was a good chance each of those backsides did not burn as they face northward on the north slope of the mountain range, and so tend to be wetter and greener and thus less susceptible to fire.

This translates logistically into standing atop highest of those stair steps on the ridge near the crest of the mountain and wondering, “If I hike 1,000 feet down to that far step which looks to provide the closest point of access into the creek, will the backside of that step be burned clear and easy to walk or did it not burn and is still shrouded in impenetrable brush?”

You have to make the call knowing you may get down there and find it impenetrable and then be forced to retrace your steps right back up the beastly steep slope to try and find another entry point.

This could consume a couple of hours of precious time and energy and leave you right where you started with nothing to show for it but dirt and charcoal stains, scratches and lots of sweat.

The bears around here, or “bars” as Abe Lincoln purportedly pronounced the word back when, have a funny habit of stepping right in the same foot prints every time they pass along their own trail. This results in rather deep and well-worn footprints like this one here.

There were two other possible entry points breaking off from higher up the ridge I was on, but the first and closest one led into the creek farther above the falls than I liked, which risked leaving me ledged up above the falls without any way to get down below for a looksee.

The second possible entry point appeared to end in a dense patch of brush that hadn’t burned and which was too far above the creek to want to bushwhack through.

But to determine if this was the case, I’d have to traverse along that hill quite some distance before being afforded a view down towards the creek to see if it had burned enough to get through.

If it hadn’t burned, then I’d have to retrace my trail back farther than I would have liked. So I wrote it off.

San Lucas Falls

Therefore, I made the call to proceed down to that aforementioned third entry point, the lowest one, that offered possible access into the creek shortly below the waterfall.

Off I went, down, down, down chasing a possibility, pants, long sleeves, leather gloves, trekking poles.

Fortunately the fire had indeed burned down the backside of that last stair step and cleared out the dense scrub enough to allow relatively easy passage.

But I didn’t know this for sure until I was right down atop that earlier mentioned sloughed over road cut just above the creek and just below the falls.

The entire hike down the ridge I was going on a “maybe” regarding weather or not I’d actually have a chance at getting into the creek.

Fortunately I was able to find my way through with relative ease.

The water falls with much more force than might be suggested by these photos and it casts off quite a misty breeze.

San Lucas Falls is located at the confluence of two streams. What might be called the highest east and west fork of San Lucas Creek were it a more substantial drainage.

The waterfall is found on the east fork not many yards upstream from this confluence.

San Lucas is among the best waterfalls in the local range, not a mere cascade and in no way small.

I’m a terrible judge of height and distance, but I’d hazard a rough guess that it is a 70 foot waterfall give or take 10 feet or so. But it may well be much taller. I think it probably is taller, but I don’t want to hype it. From my last post you know I don’t appreciate hype.

Whatever the case may be this waterfall gushes and roars. It doesn’t just trickle. But there is no plunge pool at its foot, just a very shallow slick of water over a gravel bed.

The whole canyon was loud with the sound of falling and running water when I was there.

New sprouts from seed of various scrub comprising chaparral were popping up all over the mountain burn scar in addition to the basal regrowth from established root systems of scorched bushes.

A normal amount of precipitation this season and a cooler winter that’s helped keep things wet seem to be setting the stage for a remarkable flush of new growth to fill out the forest that had been dying and shrinking in density and volume from the long drought.

The “west fork” of San Lucas Creek at the confluence showing a peek of the miniature “gorge.”

When we get a normal season of rainfall, it’s incredible how much water flows from the sandstone aquifer that are the rather short and stubby Santa Ynez Mountains.

The waterfall is difficult to get a decent view of because it is hemmed in and shrouded by tall trees.

This may be one reason why a trail was never cut to it; you can’t really see it from any distance and so it may be harder to appreciate than other more open falls.

The west fork of the creek at the falls cuts through a miniature gorge just above the confluence, which itself is a rather nifty place.

After the hike, I had pulled over on West Camino Cielo Road along a blind corner on the wrong side of the road to take a gander of the view from the top of the mountain.

Seeing a white truck rolling up behind me I waved it around signaling to the driver that it was clear to pass.

The driver stopped to hassle me for some damn reason. Understand that any interaction with another human when I’m out alone is a hassle for The Grouch of the Woods. It’s nothing personal.

He interrogated, er, asked me what I was doing, the door of his truck fashioned with some sort of official seal I guess I’m supposed to take seriously.

I told him I was just taking in the view, that I had just returned from a hike down to San Lucas Falls, that it was rough and rugged. I’m not sure he even knew what or where I was talking about.

“Well, so long as you can get in and out yourself,” he remarked and drove off.

Trona Pinnacles. Enter, if ye dare.

The Trip Out Yonder

Some monstrous industrial ramrod ferociously hammered at long intervals some unseen target of progress, the metallic slamming a devilish metronome, the concussive impact reverberating off a pinch of rolling mountains and across the salt flats.

We stood warmly colored in the slant of early morning sunlight.

The town of Trona lay scattered like flotsam along the foot of those desert mountains, the scattered wrack of abandonment and ruin washed ashore along the ancient high water line of Searles Dry Lake.

Semi-trucks clamored around the bending strip of asphalt behind us, speeding by in a vibratory sucking whoosh of swirling grit like big rigs in Stephen King’s Pet Sematary, barreling toward the tangle of pipes and towers and metalwork spread about the railroad tracks just down the road toward town.

He stood hunched under the hood of his truck fiddling to secure, yet again, the hood latch, the monstrous ramrod keeping the beat from somewhere off in the unseen distance.

On a previous outing the latch had busted loose. Nearly going airborne as we launched off a dirt berm, out of the desert scrub, and back onto the asphalt probably hadn’t helped.

We had driven out of the Mojave Desert after that to find a piece of wire to lash it shut amid the ruinous gutted remains of an auto repair garage beside the famed old Route 66.

This time we were on the road again after adjusting a couple of bolts and tightening them down.

Onward forth yet deeper into the desert, on our way from Trona Pinnacles where we had spent a wild mind-warped night under a harvest moon, and into the Panamint Mountains of Death Valley National Park.

Looking over the salt flats toward our destination high in the Panamint Mountains.

The brilliant stark white and glowing yellow paint stripes of the Shell gas station beamed obscenely in the morning slash of sunlight, sitting as it did against the drab backdrop of the half-dead town and its ragged and leaning and collapsed artifacts of better times.

The gas station recalled pop art pioneer Ed Ruscha’s iconic “Standard Station, Amarillo, Texas (1966).”

“I go out to the long, lonely stretches of desert,” Ruscha said in a recent interview I read in an in-flight magazine while over the Atlantic, commenting as he was about where he draws inspiration from.

Yes, sir, Mr Ruscha. Indeed. Inspiration.

I caught a peek of a local resident pulling off the byway and into his neighborhood. I strained to see what sort of person could possibly find this place worthy of living in.

The man drove a late model well-kept full-sized pickup truck, appeared clean shaven and dressed well enough, for what little I could glimpse as we sped by. He looked normal, which here looked out of place.

We passed the sprawling, out-sized campus of the local high school, an immaculate, well-built and maintained symbol of pride, but impossible to believe enough children were around to attend even half of it.

The school building stuck out from the town conspicuously like a knobby crystal inclusion cutting through dark stone.

The two best kept articles of property in all the town appeared to be the filling station and the school, so far as was seen at speed from the outside.

Ballarat (Previous post: The Bandit of Ballarat)

“Turn here.”

We left the two-lane asphalt and followed a dirt road across the salt flats toward Ballarat, once a town now not.

We passed the two buildings known as Ballarat, a lone man standing in the shadows outside gazing at us from afar.

We sped by climbing a long alluvial jumble of fractured rock spat out of the canyon mouth to the desert floor below. We reached the end of the old road and set up shop for the night in an old miner’s camp.

The next morning when I woke, laying on my cot and wrapped in my sleeping bag, I caught sight of a single desert bighorn sheep making its way up the canyon we would soon be hiking up.

The bighorn’s presence foreshadowed the day to come searching out as we would be Native American pictographs depicting the same type of mountain sheep.

The canyon hike.

Looking through the canyon on the hike up.

Canyon walls looming overhead.

The Hike

Once within the canyon walls I was surprised at the new world we had entered, so different from the desert just outside its mouth.

Cool water flowed giving life to a verdant flush of various plants. Orchids grew along the creek, while cacti sat perched high overhead along the stony walls. Riparian and desert habitats met headlong. Higher up the creek the canyon opened and gave way to juniper and piñon pine and sparse scrub.

We trudged up the relentless alluvial acclivity for some six miles, gaining over 4,000 feet, to an elevation of almost 7,000 feet. Long swaths of the trail led over loose shards of scree that shifted beneath your feet with each step and drew yet more energy from our peregrinatory engines.

The slope went on, and on, and on.

Finally we came to the site of an old mining operation and what was left of its town built in a boom during the late nineteenth century.

We saw the boulder, the underside of which we had come a long way to gaze upon and ponder. The boulder rested on a gentle slope overlooking the wash not far below and had a view of the ruined town.

Stilly in his element. Captain Crash leading the way, as always.

The ruins of the mining town. 

First Impressions

Perhaps the oddest and most remarkable and immediately evident point that struck me was that the Indian rock art on this lithic canvas was virtually free of vandalism.

How could this possibly be?

The boulder sat in clear view mere steps from what was once a bustling mining operation, whose inhabitants, like most if not all early mining towns, where drunken rowdy and violent rough-and-tumble types.

The historic town here has been described as the meanest, toughest hellhole around, but then again that is a popular description and the same is said of many such mining towns. It ain’t called the Wild West for nuttin’.

Somehow the Indian rock art survived unscathed. There were no initials nor names etched into the panel. I failed to find even a single bullet mark. Not a one. Imagine that. It was astounding!

I wondered if the paintings had come after the mining boom went bust and the town fell to ruins. The paint was certainly not too old looking being thick and pasty, the colors vibrant.

The rock shelter. (All photos from October 2017)

Some of the design elements found in the cave:

Quadrapeds (unidentified) 33
Bighorn sheep 26
Horse or mule and rider 9
Anthropomorphs 16
Anthropomorphs with weapons 8
Sun-like symbols 3
Deer 2
Bird 1
Ring 1
Star 1

The Cave Site And Interpretation 

This Indian rock art site is associated with hunting magic and the Ghost Dance movement of the latter nineteenth century in California. This site appears to depict hunting scenes as suggested by the bowmen and animals that appear to be pierced with arrows.

The Ghost Dance movement was a reaction to the decline and destruction of Native American cultures resulting from the various consequences of Euro-American settlement and the expansion of the United States.

The movement sought to revitalize native traditional ways of life to empower its people and bring on the return of bountiful lands and a fruitful and fulfilling existence for hunter gatherers.

Native American prophecy held that the world would be destroyed, but following this cataclysm the animals and plants would return along with the Indians and their dead ancestors, and the Europeans would disappear.

The Ghost Dance movement stimulated a renascence in rock art creation. And because rock art reflected important life experiences it is believed that many pictograph sites are adorned with aspects of the Ghost Dance.

The desert bighorn sheep design element at this site is key in linking the paintings to the Ghost Dance. It is thought that these paintings were inspired by participation in this movement.

The particular stylized design of the sheep was an important choice made by the artists in their efforts to restore depleted sheep herds and reinvigorate their cynegetic way of life.

The design of the bighorn sheep at this site are reminiscent of the many bighorn petroglyphs in the nearby Coso Range, which are thought to have been created around 1,000 years ago.

Although it is theorized that the creation of those ancient petroglyphs coincided with a sharp decline in bighorn sheep numbers, looking today at the many Coso petroglyphs, thousands of them depicting sheep, it gives the sense that game was incredibly abundant back then.

It may be that the artists at this site featured below, inspired by the Ghost Dance movement’s call to return to and enliven old ways, had been looking back at that ancient art found in the Cosos and saw a time of fecundity and therefore sought to mimic that style of art in their efforts to bring back abundant game and a vibrant culture.

The various horse or mule and rider designs along with the depiction of people wearing hats are believed to be Indians rather than Euro-Americans as might be commonly thought at first glance.

These riders are believed to be Indian Ghost Dance messengers.

The spread of the movement was facilitated by the adoption of horseback travel by native peoples. The arrival of such messengers on horseback would have been a special occasion worthy of the creation of rock art, whereas the sight of Euro-American riders in the late 1800s, long after the advent or arrival of white folk and domestic horses, would not likely have been worthy of special record.

This is the theory of, and all the preceding information comes from, anthropologists that studied the site in the 1980s. As always, such theories and conclusions, although underpinned by evidence of various sorts, are only “maybes.” And if newer studies have been conducted of which I am unaware, it may be that these conclusions by those scholars are now out dated. Take it as you wish.

This is an illustration depicting the design elements found in the cave. A close and careful examination of the illustration will help identify the same design elements shown in the photos below, though the snapshots are of poor quality.

White bowman center frame, as featured below.

A possible hunting dog seen here at the bowman’s side.

Here a horse or mule and rider can be (barely) seen on the very lower left just above the rocks. It was a hard canvas to capture clearly by this ‘ere rank amateur cell phone snapshot clicker.

Note the bowman on the lower left, which appears to be taking aim at a large horned animal of some sort.

Bighorn sheep and a horse or mule and rider on the left hand side.

The view from the top of Hageman Falls, which overlooks the Santa Ynez River.

It is an ephemeral waterfall that only flows during periods of heavier rainfall and only for a short time thereafter.

Facing somewhat north eastward on the backside of the Santa Ynez Mountains, and being that it only flows during the winter months when the sun is low in the sky, it is not an easy waterfall to photograph in action because of the lighting. (Of course, I’m not a photographer, stopped using my SLR for this blog years ago, and now typically just use a cell phone.)

Even when flowing vigorously, it appears from below and at a distance to be not much more than a gush of white water framed in dense chaparral. It’s not among the most scenic falls in the county.

While it is a true waterfall, that is a vertical fall rather than a tumbling cascade, and it measures several tens of feet tall, the best view may just be from its top overlooking the river valley, rather than gazing up at it from below.

Whatever the case may be, it is a character in the local forest around this neck of the woods and so must, at some point, be featured on these pages even if only a relatively minor feature of the Santa Ynez Mountains.