“It was a rough land that bred a tough man.”

—Louis L’Amour, Utah Blaine (1984)

The observer may glean some insight into the nature of the land by looking at its native inhabitants. When you’re wearing a helmet of horns and shrouded in barbed chain mail, then you know the San Rafael Wilderness is some rough country.

When I was a kid on a Monte Vista elementary school field trip to Cachuma Lake, one of the kids in my class caught a horny toad. It was a raving huge hit.

And so pestered did the lizard become as the center of rambunctious childhood attention that it demonstrated one of the oddest sights in this here county.

The crazy thing spurted blood from its eyeballs!

It was probably the first time most of the kids even became aware that such a wild looking lizard lived in their greater backyards, to say nothing of actually holding one, and then, of all things, watching the lizard shoot blood from its eyes.

It was a wild scene, I tell you what.

All these many years later, despite catching many of them through the decades, and even poking a few here and there, I still have not yet seen another horny toad bleed from its eyes.

Santa Ynez River

“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” 

When I use developed day-use sites to picnic or BBQ I pay the fee.

But we the people do not have to pay Parks Management Company anything to drive Santa Ynez River Road on the way to Red Rock swimming hole or to park in the dirt. So don’t.

*   *   *

Folks, Parks Management Company is up to their ol’ dirty business of fleecing unsuspecting recreationists of their hard earned money.

They have been perpetrating this outrage for years now.

Recall my post on the matter from 2017:

Parks Management Company’s Red Rock Racket

*   *   *

On Saturday, May 25th, 2019, I was pestered—or is harassment and bullying at this point?—for over ten minutes by two different PMC employees while sitting in my car at the checkpoint they’ve long ago installed at First Crossing in order to halt traffic and demand money.

When I first drove up to the checkpoint at around 11 or 12 noon the middle-aged blue eyed woman with straight sandy blonde hair asked for $10 for day-use.

“For what,” I simply asked.

The tone and mood was business-like but amiable and fine.

She repeated herself in some form saying there was a $10 fee for day-use.

I told her I was not using the day-use areas.

Again she requested payment having me believe that I was not allowed to pass without handing over cash.

I told her that I was not paying anything, and that she was wrong, and that she could not bar access to a public road. I told her that I wanted to talk to somebody else, somebody in charge, because this was not right.

She then questioned me as to my intent in wanting to drive the road, wanting to know where I was going, what I was doing.

This is an outrageous question. PMC has no business interrogating people as to their intent when driving a public road.

When a driver is pulled over by a cop, that driver does not have to answer any questions nor say anything at all to that cop. Not a word.

And we certainly don’t have to answer the questions of PMC interrogators.

I told her I was going to park on the side of the road in the dirt.

She told me I was not allowed to do that; that there was no parking beyond First Crossing without payment of a day-use fee to PMC.

I told her that was not true and that she was incorrect. I told her that this—Santa Ynez River Road—is a public road and that I did not have to pay anything to anybody to drive it.

This would be like plopping down a checkpoint at Cachuma Saddle on Figueroa Mountain on the way to Davy Brown Campground and NIRA campground, and barring access to the entire length of the road leading there except to those people whom pay a camping fee even if they were not camping.

“It’s a $20 fee for camping,” the checkpoint worker would demand.

“But I’m not camping,” I’d reply. “I’m just driving the road and parking in the dirt.”

“It’s a $20 fee,” they’d continue to insist.

That’s some BS right there.

If I am not using the developed, improved facilities and day-use recreation sites then I am not paying the fee and nor am I legally obligated to do so.

The checkpoint at First Crossing operated by Park’s Management Company. PMC has a profit incentive to keep the public uninformed and under the mistaken impression that people have to pay a fee and the company actively works to keep people uninformed, as explained in this post and in a previous post.

At this point in the argument a younger dude with a ring through his lip and a small scraggly mustache stepped up and began a terribly uninformed attempt to wax eloquent about my rights and the law and bowl me over with his understanding of the matter. He cited a law from 1985.

Excuse me. Pardon me. But this man was an ignoramus. The other option, an out-and-out liar. I would not ordinarily mention it but for what he did in trying to get my money.

“I’ve been coming up here since before ’85,” I said, “and I’m well aware of how it works around here and I have never paid to drive the road. So what’s your point?”

Of course, he had no point other than thinking he could intimidate me with some vague reference to a law from 34 years ago.

At what point does this behavior become bullying?

It didn’t work. He had no other reply, because he didn’t understand what it was he was talking about or the law from ’85 he referenced.

So he changed the subject.

The guy then told me that I could not “park along the road especially at night.” I raised a finger and interrupted him.

“Whoa. Whoa. Whoa. Wait a minute here. Do you hear what you just told me? That I can’t park along the road. Especially at night? That’s not true at all. And I’m also not parking at night anyway so it’s irrelevant. And what’s with ‘especially’? It’s either legal or not. There is nothing especially about it. You need to be careful about what you say and choose your words more judiciously, because you’re talking about the law and my rights and what you’re saying is not true.”

In trying to get me to pay PMC money the guy told me something that is absolutely not true. He misrepresented the law in pursuit of profit. Say nothing of intent if you wish, but that is what happened.

When called out the guy began to stumble and stutter, his eyes shooting up to the corner of their sockets in thought as he floundered about trying to formulate a reasonable thought and put it into coherent sentences.

Mariposa lily or Calochortus growing along the Santa Ynez River.

The man with a ring in his lip had no intelligible reply. So he once more changed the subject.

He then told me that the public road stops at First Crossing there at the checkpoint booth. This false statement further gave the impression that I had no right to drive the road or access public forest without paying PMC.

I interrupted him again. That is not true either. Paradise Road is a Santa Barbara County road which runs to and meets Santa Ynez River Road (Forest Route 5N18) at First Crossing: See map.

From First Crossing onward Santa Ynez River Road (Forest Route 5N18) is a federal road by way of the US Forest Service.

In other words: It’s a public road. People are legally allowed to drive Santa Ynez River Road and park in unimproved dirt pull-outs along this road at any time, day or night.

When I sleep in the Los Padres National Forest at Matias Camp, I park in a dirt pull-out along Santa Ynez River Road. Overnight. This is legal.

When I hike the Camuesa Connector Trail I park day or night in a dirt pull-out along Santa Ynez River Road. This is legal.

What the hell is this bejeweled idiot talking about?

Back to the hypothetical Cachuma Saddle checkpoint scenario. This would be like telling people they cannot park in the dirt along the paved road to Davy Brown and NIRA to access hiking trails or just to stare at a rock, as I’m apt to do, without first paying a day-use fee to PMC.

It’s absurd. And I refuse to be bullied and intimidated by ignorant people telling falsehoods under the color of authority while in hard pursuit of my money.

My money is my life. Each dollar represents an increment of my life, my time spent working and worked away, which I will never get back. And I am not handing my life over to PMC stooges who have no legal authority whatsoever to force me to pay.

When I called the guy out on these, uh, mistruths, he stumbled and stuttered and then—yes, you guessed it—he changed the subject.

He then told me that I had entered into a recreation area back down the road when I passed Fremont Campground, the first campground along Paradise Road on the way to First Crossing.

I interrupted him again.

“Excuse me. The entire Los Padres National Forest and all designated wilderness areas are recreation areas,” I noted. “So you’re going to need stop a moment and define what exactly you have in mind because what you keep telling me doesn’t make any sense whatsoever.”

Again he stumbled and stuttered, the eyes darting about in his skull. And again he had no reasonable answer.

The improved, fee required Day-Use Area at First Crossing. 

I took the reigns and continued.

“You’re with Parks Management Company, right?” I asked, already knowing the answer.

“You operate under a Special-Use Permit granted by the US Forest Service, right? Yes, that’s correct. Thank you”

“And the permit grants you permission to run what?” I asked. “To manage improved or developed day-use areas and drive-up campgrounds and some trailheads,” I told them and pointed over to the large day-use, paved parking, picnic tables, BBQ grills and bathroom at First Crossing. “Like that over there. The permit does not grant you management of the entire forest, dude.”

The following is taken directly from the US Forest Service website:

The following recreation sites are included in the SUP with Parks Management Company:

Santa Barbara Ranger District: Fremont Campground, Los Prietos Campground, Paradise Campground, Sage Hill Group Campground, Upper Oso Campground, Falls Day Use Area, First Crossing Day Use Area, Live Oak Day Use Area, Lower Oso Day Use Area, Red Rock Day Use Area,  Sandstone Day Use Area, White Rock Day Use Area, and Red Rock Trailhead.

Those are the “recreation sites.” Santa Ynez River Road itself is not a recreation site. And nor is the verge or the numerous dirt pull-outs along the road.

I plodded on: “You have no authority to bar access to a public road or to demand payment to pass your checkpoint or to demand payment to park in a dirt pull-out,” I told him. 

The guy didn’t know what to do. He had been flying by the seat of his pants and making things up out of whole cloth the entire time and when called out and refuted at every turn he resorted to threats and accusations.

The guy then mentioned something about calling “sheriff Doug” because I was being “confrontational.”

This was comical.

That I was not buying this guy’s lies because I was far more informed and educated on the matter than he was; because of this I was “confrontational.”

I don’t think so, Cletus.

I had my three young children in the car. There was no confrontation, I assure you.

In fact, I’d turn it around on this guy and assert that he was being confrontational in his constant pressure and demands pushed with misinformation that I pay a fee which I am not legally obligated to pay. And then threatening me with the sheriff because I refused to be fleeced. That’s the confrontation!

We just wanted to park in the dirt and swim in a river that’s been there forever without need of any supposed “improvement.”

We did not want the so-called “improvements” peddled by PMC at a fee.

I had actually requested to speak with somebody of authority right at the get-go when the lady refused to let me pass without payment.

I wanted to speak with a sheriff. I have before. And it went well. Then PMC could explain to a law enforcement officer why it is that they are barring access to public roads and lands under the color of authority.

How about that?! How about PMC be held to account and made to explain this outrageous behavior?!

I’d like to see Noozhawk publish a piece detailing this long running problem.

How about it, Macfadyen?

Calochortus growing along the Santa Ynez River.

Then the manager in duty for PMC pulled up behind me and walked over. I had already turned my engine off several minutes before he arrived.

The pale, fuzzy-faced man of short stature kindly identified himself as the manager on duty and asked how he could help me.

“Howdy. Great. You tell me,” I said.

It’s on PMC to explain itself not me to explain myself.

And you know what happened?

Within 60 seconds the manager told me to my face, eye to eye, that if I was going to park in a dirt pull-out along the paved road that there would be no charge for that.

“Uh,” I exclaimed with a puff of wind in exasperation, raising my hand, palm upward, looking at the lady in the booth I first dealt with.

I said to her: “Is not that exactly what I first told you when I pulled up? Yes. It is. That is exactly what I told you. And him,” I pointed to the guy with the ring through his lip. “I told you that, too.”

“And he accused me of being confrontational,” I told the manager. “And he threatened to call the sheriff on me,” I said. “What’s up with that? This is outrageous!”

“I’m perfectly calm,” I said. “Calmer than you are.” Nobody laughed.

The manager attempted to change the course of the discussion not liking my tack. I’d just rhetorically hanged these people with their own rope, and they knew it, and the manager clearly just wanted to settle the matter rather than hear me continue to point out how outrageously out of line his employees had been acting. He reached out and tried to hand me a day-use pass. “Here be my guest for the day,” he said.

“What?!,” I said, rejecting the offer with extreme prejudice.

“No!”

“No. No. No. That’s not right. That’s not the way it’s supposed to work. That I’m your guest and how fortunate for me that you’re allowing me to pass into my public land,” I said.

“I just want to go swim. Can I go swim now? Are you all done with me? Is the interrogation over? Is there some secret password I can utter next time I come through so I can avoid all of this nonsense,” I asked, and slowly drove off.

What good reason is there that I should have to pay a $10 day-use fee to park in the dirt along a public road so my kids can swim in the river? 

On Memorial Day Monday I returned. The same lady was working the checkpoint.

“Remember me?” I asked. This time I had my wife along, too, as with our three kids.

“I thought you looked familiar,” she replied.

“Has anything changed,” I asked?

She stammered, not understanding my point.

“I’m still allowed to drive the road and park without payment to your company, right?”

Her guarded reply: “As of today, I will let you pass.”

Can you believe this ****?

“Whoa, wait a minute. What do you mean as of today? You’ll let me pass? That’s not right. You are obligated to allow me to pass because that’s the law,” I insisted.

“I’ll let you pass today because as of now there is some disagreement on the matter between the sheriff and the Forest Service,” she said.

In point of fact, there has been “disagreement” on this matter for decades. This is nothing new and long predates PMC’s arrival on the scene.

She’s going to let me pass because she doesn’t have any legal authority not to. That’s the truth of the matter. How big of her, of PMC.

Well, my interpretation of what the lady told me is that yes, indeed, I am correct in my arguments and the sheriff agrees with my position on the matter.

Because if the sheriff did not agree with me, then, presumably, PMC would stand on the law enforcement’s official line of opposition to my argument and insist that I, that we the people, must pay and PMC would not allow any free access.

This is why the manager of PMC let me pass without payment. And that is why the lady did so again on Monday.

Because they know they have no legal authority to charge day-use fees for driving Santa Ynez River Road or parking in the dirt.

And they know that the sheriff will not back them in claiming that authority.

This is why other private corporations that previously managed this area under a Special-Use Permit prior to PMC also always acquiesced, always, eventually, with enough argument at the checkpoint, and allowed me to pass without payment so long as I was not using the improved day-use sites or paved parking lots.

When I use developed day-use sites to picnic or BBQ I pay the fee.

But we the people do not have to pay Parks Management Company anything to drive Santa Ynez River Road or park in the dirt. So don’t.

Santa Ynez River

Earlier this year in March, out scampering around in the Los Padres National Forest, I stumbled across a rather impressive stand of a rare wildflower, Fritillaria ojaiensis or the Ojai Fritillaria lily.

I had previously noted this Seldom Seen Slim of Santa Barbara County wildflowers on this here blog in 2015: Fritillaria Ojaiensis, Rare Wildflower.

The U.S. Forest Service describes this plant as being “critically imperiled.” I wonder why it’s so imperiled.

I assume habitat loss is one problem, which seems to be the ever increasing problem for much of the nation’s wildlife.

I’m going out on a limb here, admittedly, in further pondering the issue based on this assumption, but I wonder if the loss and absence of Native American forest management practices or what is often called “traditional ecological knowledge” has played a role in this flower becoming critically imperiled and rare.

This may be seen as rank speculation, but I’m not advancing a theory, and this weblog is an open journal of sorts where I ponder my surroundings, and so the following might better be seen as merely the inner workings of one man’s mind in response to what he reads and what he experiences in nature. Something like this here other post: Mastodon & Mammoth Sign: Reading Trees in the Santa Ynez Mountains

California at the time of Euro-American contact was a blooming garden of sustained abundance brought about not just by nature alone, as is commonly believed, but encouraged and fostered and cared for by many generations of Indians through thousands of years. (Anderson)

California was a botanical wonderland prior to Euro-American contact not because it was a so-called pristine “wilderness” that was unmolested by humanity, but because California’s original or native human inhabitants made it so by their own hand. And fire was their favored tool of choice.

“Fire was the most significant, effective, efficient, and widely employed vegetation management tool of the California Indian tribes,” M. Kat Anderson writes in “Tending the Wild: Native American Knowledge and the Management of California’s Natural Resources.”

Native burning practices tended to maintain a clear understory beneath the canopy of oak woodland, which is precisely where the Ojai Fritillaria lily seems to like growing.

The forests of California prior to Euro-American contact were far more open and park-like in their character than what we see today, because for hundreds if not thousands of years, Natives had routinely burned the land with light intensity blazes every few years to remove dead forest litter, thick brush, senescent growth and to encourage the sprouting of fresh crops of culturally important plants.

After wildfires like the Day in 2006 and the Zaca in 2007, we read stories of the Forest Service hunting out Chumash rock art sites deep in the Santa Barbara backcountry that had previously been concealed by thick chaparral and we see headlines such as, “Long-hidden sites emerge as archaeologists explore burned-out Santa Barbara County backcountry.” Local outdoor adventure scribe, Chuck Graham, writes in Noozhawk:

“The fires have exposed long-hidden rock art where old, concealed trails lead to previous sites unseen. … Most of the old trails exposed are those of Native Americans.”

Well, an inquisitive mind might wonder why were those important sites covered in dense impenetrable forest today before the fire, but were obviously open for travel in prehistoric times.

Fire is the probable answer. But not lightning because it did not strike often enough. And the Chumash likely were not out pruning trails. Anderson cites Native American Rosalie Bethel, North Fork Mono, on the use of Native fire:

“They burned around the camping grounds where they lived and around where they gathered. They also cleared pathways between camps.”

Anderson notes:

“One can discern how different the vegetation was when Indians were the sole inhabitants by walking the land after a catastrophic fire. Old village sites reappear where impenetrable chaparral lay before the fire. Sandstone cave areas with indigenous pictographs are exposed after coastal scrub is burned back by wildfires.”

When the use of fire was prohibited by Americans some time ago and the focus became fire suppression, as carried out by the US government at a military-industrial scale to snuff out all wildfire, natural and anthropogenic, the forest began to close in, biodiversity tended to waned, homogeneity tended to increase, and the botanical composition of the land or habitat was radically altered.

“Fire in natural, as in cultural, systems is as effective an agent by being withheld as by being applied,” Stephen Pyne writes in “Fire In America: A Cultural History of Wildland and Rural Fire.”

Fire suppression has been no less effective in altering the lands we see today than the use of fire had been in altering the lands Native Americans saw in their day, because fire is an agent of great environmental change.

“In many environments fire, anthropogenic or natural is the controlling agent of ecological dynamics, exerting an inordinate influence on the composition of flora and fauna, on their historical arrangements, and on their contemporary energetics.”

Pyne on the drastic change to the land brought about by Native fire:

“So extensive were the cumulative effects of these modifications that it may be said that the general consequence of Indian occupation of the New World was to replace forested land with grassland or savannah, or, where the forest persisted, to open it up and free it from underbrush.”

Local ethnographer, Jan Timbrook, and John R. Johnson and David D. Earle on the use of fire by the Chumash in Santa Barbara County:

“It seems likely that the Santa Barbara coast in pre-European times was dominated by grassland and oak savanna. … Indian burning may also have been an important factor in maintaining the openness of oak savanna in coastal areas.

(Vegetation Burning by the Chumash [1982])

The absence of Native fire from the land for so long and policies of fire suppression have had profound consequences.

“The hands-off approach to management of wilderness preserves,” writes Anderson, “is jeopardizing the long-term stability of many plant communities.”

And so it is that I wonder about the Ojai Fritillaria lily’s critically imperiled state.

This season I “discovered” a stand of no less than 66 individual plants growing in the Santa Ynez Mountains along the headwaters of a creek draining the north slope of the range.

That’s the number at which point I stopped counting, surely there are more growing at this specific site and I imagine many more as well at other sites in the same canyon lower in the watershed.

About two thirds of the plants were in active bloom while the remainder were showing only a leaf or two and had not yet reached florescence.

It was a nice find growing under the canopy of an oak woodland where the understory was notably open and free of brush.

The plants were growing in habitat that I imagine would have been far more prevalent in prehistoric times when the land was under Native American management.

And so it is I wonder about the Ojai Fritillaria lily’s critically imperiled state.

Apologies offered for the vertical video syndrome.

You’ve heard of the babbling brook.

Everybody’s written about it.

Well, meet here the clattering seep.

I’m fascinated by small things in nature other people are oblivious to and even when clued into have no interest in.

The severe drought from about 2011 until now instilled in me a new appreciation and interest in water and hydrology in the Los Padres National Forest of Santa Barbara County.

We were up at Lizard’s Mouth a few days ago and I was standing on the rocks and I heard a clicking or clattering sound. I zeroed in on the location of the source and came to stand atop a large boulder balanced over a huge crack in the sandstone bedrock outcrop, which waters runs through during active rain events.

I could see tufts of ferns sprouting from the cracks in the rocks down below surface level of the overall outcrop of Lizard’s Mouth. The boulder had come to rest like a roof over the split in the bedrock that had pulled apart through the millennia and had formed a sort of room or subterranean grotto. A handful of people can fit in the grotto and stand.

Standing on the boulder and listening to the clatter and looking down into the grotto I thought it might have been a frog making the sound, as the niche down there was obviously moist and protected.

I scampered down into the crack, got down on all fours, pulled back a fringe of ferns and found that a small hole blowing bubbles was responsible for the noise.

Apparently water was seeping through cracks and fissures in the bedrock and pushing air along and forcing it out of the hole.

This was remarkable being that this seep is less than a stone’s throw from the very crest of the Santa Ynez Mountains.

In other words, the seep drains a small area. It’s not low down in the canyon with a large source from which to draw where one might expect runoff to be trickling out of the mountain for months after winter rains.

This was the crest of the mountain in late May. That’s something.

A few minutes after I had hopped out of the grotto and walked away my eldest daughter called out to me telling me to come over and check out what she had found.

She too had heard and found the clattering seep, observant and tuned in to the nuances and subtleties of the natural world around her like her father.

Situational awareness. Acute consciousness. Sentience.

To be alive, fueled by a mind ravenous with interest, keenly perceiving nature through senses honed from immersive, visceral, intimate personal experience.

We do all we can to avoid that state of dulled, oblivious indifference common to the post-modern dweller of the metropolis.

We like the little things.

The seep was located center frame there in the dark void beneath the boulder.

Santa Ynez River

Long days on the river.

Six. Seven. Eight hour sessions.

The sun.

The wind.

The sweet mineral scent of the cool emerald water.

Jet airliners soar over the Santa Ynez Mountains trackless and silent through the depthless blue, their bellies glowing hot white in the blast of sunlight reflected off the top of the fog blanket lying unseen along the coast, over on the Otherside.

Four killdeer eggs.

On one of these days not long ago it became evident that I should explore a gravel bar along the far side of the river.

Long, wide swaths of gravel was spread neatly like a Japanese rock garden between tufts of mulefat and cottonwood saplings and clumps of young willow.

Nothing out of the ordinary caught my attention over there, where it was dry and hot.

There was no apparent reason to walk over yonder for a wander, which of course may just be the perfect reason in itself.

You just never know what’s in that box of chocolates out there.

I found myself hobbling barefoot along the searing hot gravel bar in mid-afternoon motivated by whatever to go look somewhere for something or. . . whatever.

I walked up on a killdeer nest, which is, as evident, a generous description for the egg bed.

Although the eggs were in plain sight in an open setting they were hard to see from any distance.

I hadn’t seen the eggs until I was looming over them about to crush them under foot.

When I came back with the kids the eggs disappeared in the rocks even when I knew they were right there somewhere in front of me. The camouflage was brilliant, my brain easily tricked.

Two eggs disappeared since we first found the clutch about a week ago. No shell fragments have been found. No babies have been seen. The parents still tend to the remaining two eggs.

Inside a cave in the Santa Ynez Mountains on the Gaviota Coast somebody carved an inscription memorializing the United States Coast Survey of 1873.

The name is apparently in reference to Carlile P. Patterson, the Hydrographic Inspector for the USCS at that time.

The wall of the cave with what is apparently an historic inscription is increasingly being covered in graffiti, some of which has recently been scratched right over the old marking itself.

It seems this cave may go the way of other more easily accessed caves in the area, which I have watched over the years become filled with names and initials and dates and whatever else. Bare stone not too long ago is now covered in graffiti, some of it carved deeply into the surface.

I wonder if this inscription from 1873 will be covered over and scratched up and carved out of existence not long from now.

One can only expect a sign to accomplish so much, which might be little, but at this site there is nothing to note the significance of the inscription or to politely plead for restraint for sake of preservation.

Of course, it wouldn’t be long, probably, before the sign was annihilated in some manner in a fit of misplaced emotion and energy. I’d return to find vestiges of its corpse strewn about the kill site and a hole in the ground from whence it had been ripped with causeless fury. You know how these things work out there in Humanityville.

But then again, maybe, just maybe, some of these people with shallow thoughts and twitchy hands would be just a tad less likely to carve up the old inscription if’n they only knew about it.

Inside the cave, the historic inscription center frame amid a growing tangle of names, initials and other vandalism. The “Jack” written there in the upper right is not me.

What appears to read “i Patterson Camp U.S.C.S. 1873.”

In the latter half of the nineteenth century the Santa Barbara Channel environs had yet to be properly charted.

Maps of the time were not accurate, locations misleading. The US Coast Survey corrected the matter.

An image taken from the original 1873 Coast Survey annual report showing the triangulation network between points on the Channel Islands and the mainland coast from Santa Barbara to Point Conception, with Gaviota clearly having been a major station. Click for a larger view. (Hat tip Sam Green)

Cropped view of previous image showing Gaviota Peak station.

Reportage from the 1873 document mentioning Santa Barbara and Gaviota:

A stream orchid (Epipactis gigantea) growing near the Santa Ynez River in late May of 2019.

Stream orchids grow where constant water is found at seeps, springs and perennial streams. The plant is known for its mood altering and sedative effects.

“Medicinal Plants of the Pacific West,” Michael Moore:

“I have seen it help depression resulting from cocaine burnout; it can also aid people with a lot of emotional stress, in whom every little ache and pain is magnified and whose tolerance for noises, smells, and bright light is virtually nonexistent.”

“Wild Plants of the Sierra Nevada,” Ray S. Vizgirdas and Edna Rey-Vizgirdas:

“Native Americans made a decoction of the fleshy roots for internal use when they felt ‘sick all over.’”

April 2019

Black     So what am I supposed to do with you, Professor?

White     Why are you supposed to do anything?

Black     I done told you. This aint none of my doin. I left out of here this mornin to go to work you wasnt no part of my plans at all. But here you is.

White     It doesnt mean anything. Everything that happens doesnt mean something else.

—Cormac McCarthy, The Sunset Limited

I can’t help but wonder. What’s it mean? It shouldn’t mean anything. Just because it happened doesn’t mean something else. Or does it?

Seven years ago I found a metate in the creek: Chumash Grinding Stone. No trail led through the canyon and the creek was still dry in November.

I had been hiking the cobblestone bed, several hours by foot into the mountains, when the narrow otherwise unremarkable canyon opened into a pocket of oak woodland surrounding a creekside meadow, mountain slopes rising all around, and views of rocky crags in the distance.

I walked up to this enticing transition in the land and I saw the shallow sandstone dish sitting in the middle of the creek like any other cobblestone.

Intact artifacts are always a thrilling sight, especially something rather large, but I didn’t think the experience was out of the ordinary.

The place I had just wandered upon was so attractive to my mind that I had not been surprised to see the artifact.

At first sight, in merely looking at the place, I knew other people had long ago spent time there, not just walked through.

There were a number of geographical features characteristic of this place that were rather appealing to a person with my way of thinking about these sorts of things.

These forest things. These sites and settings. These odd and infinite arrangements of innumerable natural features—the hills, the meadows, the streams, the rock outcrops, the plants—put together just right in certain ways only in certain locations which all then come together to create a unique. . .place.

Seeing this place, I had expected to find remnants of humanity’s past, it seemed, although I had no thoughts earlier that day of setting out to hunt artifacts.

I showed no more excitement in first seeing the Chumash artifact than I would have in seeing a fossil stone I might examine for a moment during a hike. I wasn’t surprised nor thrilled. It was like finding a plant growing in its preferred habitat. It was expected. If you find the proper habit you’ll find the animal you’re after.

I didn’t wonder if the chance happening or if my luck meant something.

I didn’t wonder if the chain of events peculiar to myself alone in my life which led me to that singular place in space and time added up to a larger meaning. I don’t generally think in that manner.

I had been out for a hike to explore a canyon. That is all.

I just happened to find something.

It’s not an unusual occurrence for me as I spend lots of time out in the forest. I find things. People find stuff.

Chumash cynegetic art. A relic of a master craftsman, keenest of hunters. An artifact laden with the knowledge of countless generations as gleaned from individual personal experience through thousands of years of close and intimate, visceral interaction with the land, plants, animals and the earth’s elements and natural forces. The breadth and depth and amount of knowledge is unimaginable. It is beyond my ability to imagine. So much knowledge has been lost. The intellectual hard drive destroyed through conquest with no back up, no record. And so it is that I walk into the same land where they lived and I quickly perish from ignorance and an inability to merely survive where they once thrived. 

The following year I returned to the canyon for further exploration, but the land is rough and difficult to travel through afoot with no worn trail aiding access. Walking is strenuous, hard work.

Rocks are abrasive and unstable, brush pointy, sharp and burdensome to pass through.

Rattlesnakes are camouflaged, somewhere, potentially everywhere, every minute all day long. Walking in the woods is not just physically demanding and tiring, but such sharp and constant focus on unseen deadly risks is mentally exhausting, too.

(An aside: Earlier this year on a hike up the canyon with a buddy I nearly stepped on a long thick viper, my buddy grabbing my pack from behind and yanking me backward.

The trip alone up the canyon prior to that incident I twice crossed paths with vipers in close ways.

One large rattler I unknowingly stepped over while inspecting the underside of a rock outcrop, only to then follow my steps back around the boulder and nearly step on it a second time before I noticed it lying still, well camouflaged in the shadowy mottled light amid rocks and dry grass. I must have stepped right over it the first time completely oblivious to how close I was to death’s deliverer.

And then on my stupidly hasty way back down the creek, nearly jogging, I jumped over a tuft of grass and small rocks, and my foot landed heavily in an explosion of gravel and furious rattle on the far side as I almost landed on a viper, which then went sidewinding out of my way and slammed itself into the underside of a rock to hide.  That one was real close.)

Then the sun. The ball of fire blazing overhead is, uh, hot. And it’s difficult to hide from. The sun wears you down to a nub the day long, robbing your water, burning your skin, working your body even when just standing still.

On this day’s hike up the canyon six years ago I lost interest and motivation. I crawled under a boulder, beaten by the sun and hot dry conditions, and napped before returning to the truck. I failed to get any farther up the drainage than I had the previous year when I found the metate. In fact, I hadn’t even made it that far.

Five more years would pass before I made it back to the canyon. The time ticked by, but thoughts of the canyon always simmered on the back burner of my restless mind.

I tended through those dry and droughty years a deep desire to get back up there once more for a looksee around, as I continued to wait for a decent, normal season’s worth of rain.

This last winter the rain finally fell.

The forest this year, if the benchmark is water and all it brings, is the best it’s been in almost a decade.

This was the spring to get back up that hot, often dry, miserably fly infested, tick-strewn, rattlesnake slithered canyon. Finally.

So on a Sunday I was hiking toward the canyon, toward the place. It’s not a particularly long hike, but the going is not easy through the creek without a trail.

After nearly three hours of hiking with minimal, short rests, I began to think I had confused the canyon I was in with the canyon where I had found the metate.

I wrestled with the fact that after three hours I still was not at the place. I should have been there by now, I thought. How much farther up the bloody creek should I push myself when not knowing for sure if I was even in the right canyon?

Shortly after that consideration, I came around a meander in the creek and forest features that I recognized came into view.

I had finally arrived, I believed, with relief. I hiked a bit farther up the creek and toward what I was hoping was my destination.

I hopped out of the creek, up a bank and into the oak trees for a view around to confirm I was where I had been six years earlier. Yes, indeed. This was absolutely it.

I jumped down the bank and back into the creek bed and walked across a sandstone rib of bedrock bridging the flowing water.

I hopped off the rock and into the gravel beside the water, spun to face the sun for proper lighting, and within 60 seconds I spotted the arrowhead shown above.

Seven years later and a three hour hike and within one little minute of looking I had found the arrowhead.

As if that’s not strange enough, I will have you know that I found the arrowhead within ten feet or so of where I had found the metate seven years earlier.

What are the odds?

And in my mind’s ceaseless quest to make orderly sense of random nutty events, other strange factors stick out.

A week prior to returning to the canyon and finding the arrowhead I received an email out of the blue that provided added impetus in driving me back up the canyon.

I had received a note from an old friend I had not talked to in about a decade and had not hung out with in about two decades.

In the email my friend mentioned this particular canyon, of all places in the world, and he asked if I had ever been up the drainage before. He had just come back from a few nights backpacking in the area and had been in the upper reaches of the canyon.

I told him I had indeed been up that canyon and how crazy it was that he happened to mention it, because I had found a metate up there and I really wanted to get back to explore and had just been thinking about it.

A few days after this email exchange I made the hike and found the Stone Age projectile point seemingly just waiting for me in the creek for years.

Now, just because something happens doesn’t mean something else, but I can’t help but search for meaning in happenings like this.

Sandy Dearborn in Stephen King’s From a Buick 8 says, “I don’t believe in coincidences, only chains of event which grow longer and ever more fragile. . .”

The chain of events that in my life led me to this canyon and these finds was indeed long and fragile.

At any moment I could have made innumerable different decisions that would have led me away from this canyon and these finds. (Obviously, this can be said of any occurrence in a person’s life.)

Yet somehow everything came together as it did.

The links kept coming together just right, one joined to the next, the chain growing ever longer.

The chain never broke. And it eventually led me to the treasure.

Maybe it’s just coincidence, but maybe what happened means something else.

I can’t help but wonder.

A snapshot showing plastic debris in the mulch. I walked out my back door, knelt down in a random spot in the garden, looked for just a second to spot some plastic, and took the photo. So pervasive is the plastic trash in the mulch that I can find it anywhere I kneel within seconds of looking without even digging.

I have made a point of trying to keep this weblog free of politics and tightly focused on my experiences when recreating outdoors and my related interests in nature and history.

Believe me, you do not want to hear from me about politics!

I would for a moment, however, and I beg your pardon here, like to publish a letter I emailed to a local news outlet months ago regarding the issue of plastic pollution and drinking straws in Santa Barbara County.

Perhaps this here may serve in some tiny way to raise awareness and spur discussion about this issue.

For context readers may hit the link below to a Noozhawk story regarding the Santa Barbara City Council’s decision last year to ban plastic drinking straws, which is the story that spurred my letter.

The City’s action garnered national attention in print and television outlets and stimulated widespread discussion.

Santa Barbara City Council Bans Plastic Straws, Expanded Polystyrene

A small sampling of the plastic found in the mulch. This took about 10 seconds to collect while kneeling in one spot.

In 2008, I wrote an article published in a local magazine describing the catastrophic impact of plastic pollution in our oceans and the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch” off the coast of California.

I had noted at the time that, in 2005, a scientist had found a scrap of plastic inside the stomach of a dead albatross. Countless marine creatures die from ingesting such trash, from fish to birds to whales.

By tracing the origin of a serial number on the shard of plastic, the researcher found that it had come from a World War II-era airplane.

The discovery served as a shocking testament to the longevity and lethality of plastic pollution. Six decades later the small piece of trash was still a killer.

Plastic is forever. It degrades in sunlight, breaking apart into smaller and smaller pieces, becoming minuscule particles, dust eventually, but never rotting or biodegrading.

A decade ago when I wrote that article, I described the problem as a “a global blight of epic proportions.”

At that time researchers taking samples of sea water in certain places found that bits of plastic outnumbered plankton by as much as 6-to-1.

What must the ratio be now?

In recent months, numerous international news headlines have chronicled shocking accumulations of plastic garbage washing ashore in various locales across the world, from Indonesia to the Dominican Republic.

The sea is awash in plastic.

On July 17, 2018, the Santa Barbara City Council banned plastic drinking straws. So serious does the council believe the problem to be that the new ordinance affords a possible six-month jail sentence for violators. See story here: Santa Barbara City explains jail time controversy over potential plastic straw ban.

As a side note, that’s the same jail sentence given to some rapists in this county.

See two different stories here: (1.) Former UCSB Student Receives 6-Month Sentence for Rape. (2.) Isla Vista Rapist Gets Six Month Jail Sentence.

Something seems a tad askew. Nevertheless, the issue of plastic pollution is a serious problem.

The City of Santa Barbara advises residents to spread free mulch on their yards, which is available for self-service pick up at a couple of locations.

The City even pays for its water customers to have mulch delivered by the dump truck load.

But there is a huge problem here: The mulch is contaminated with large quantities of plastic.

Surely I cannot possibly be the only one to have noticed.

Ironically, the City tells us that the mulch is made from the garden clippings we put in our so-called “green” yard and garden recycle bins.

The City promotes the use of this contaminated mulch wholeheartedly with a full-throated promotion of the practice under, of all labels, and once more ever so ironically, the tab “organic.” See the City’s page here: Mulch Does A Garden Good.

The City tells us this is “natural” mulch. See their page here: Santa Barbara County’s Mulch Program.

In other words, under the advice and financial sponsorship of the City and their dubious assertions of “natural,” “organic,” “green” mulch, plastic is being spread across the land in large quantities at the same time the City launched it’s anti-plastic drinking straw crusade.

Does this make any sense to anybody out there? It’s utterly, and obviously, senseless.

Day after day, year after year, the plastic is being spread.

I made the colossal mistake of mulching my garden with a load delivered to my home.

Now my yard is littered with bits of plastic. It. Is. Everywhere.

As the mulch biodegrades, more bits and pieces of the trash begin showing until I am left with native soil covered in a layer of microplastic confetti.

I have even found bits and pieces of hypodermic needles in this mulch in my yard!

And, considering how plastic photodegrades into dust, the pieces visible to the eye are only a fraction of the amount now on my property.

And what about the rest of the gardens and landscapes across all of Santa Barbara County?

It’s disconcerting to think about how much plastic has been spread over the land out there, as advocated and subsidized by the city for years on end.

There is no doubt that some plastic washes into streets, sewers, creeks and, eventually, the ocean.

This was precisely the concern the City had in mind when passing the straw ban; plastic pollution getting into streams and the ocean.

If we as as a community are serious about addressing the deadly and poisonous problem of plastic pollution, then this issue must certainly be addressed with resolve.

Something must be done.

Will something ever be done?

I have yet to see any public discussion about this issue at all. Please show me something I’ve missed. Where and when has this issue been raised?

I suspect that an immediate moratorium on the plastic mulch program, at least until this issue can be remedied, would do far more in reducing plastic pollution than the straw ban and the City Council’s lunacy of six month jail sentences for straw-use violators.

Such a halt would certainly be no more drastic than giving straw providers or users the same jail sentence as rapists.

“I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was 12 – Jesus, did you?”

—Stephen King, “The Body”

I spent an inordinate amount of time at the beach when I was ten and eleven and twelve. My mom and I would show up in late morning or around noon and we’d stay six or seven hours.

Our preferred patch of sand was a long walk from the car, to a nude beach, so we had to haul a day’s worth of supplies with us.

Cold, thick, home-fried cheeseburgers on slices of white bread soggy with ketchup was often for lunch.

Something like the storied “house burger” detailed by Eddie Murphy. But I loved them. The hard, crusty, coagulated, iron skillet-fried, well done, corn and chicken shit-fed, cardio-toxic wad-o-beef. A nutrient dense power pellet to fuel a boy at the beach.

There was the usual suspects at the beach. Our group of friends. We were black and white and various hues in between and gay and lesbian and straight and whatever. We spent many hours sizzling on the sand.

Although boogie-boarding was our favorite thing to do, my best friend and I, there are typically no waves during summer in Santa Barbara. And the particular shoreline we frequented was not a surfing beach anyway so it was especially flat.

My friend and I found other entertainment during those long summer afternoons. For a few years we were inseparable. We were brothers of the beach. Those were some of the best times of my life.

Back then as a kid it seemed like that seaside routine with great friends and family carried on for a long time and many, many years. Now looking back I realize it was fleeting and only but a short glorious dance in the sun. Some of those people are dead now. Including my friend.

We’d run as fast as we could on the wet sand at low tide and pounce onto our boogie boards on our knees, skimming over a thin sheet of fizzing seawater after a wave broke, and slam headlong into each other.

A natural seep nearby issued from the foot of the bluffs and formed a small pool just above the sand and then drained onto the beach. We’d play in the organic stink of the black pasty soil, then wash off in the sea. Somebody once put a few goldfish in the pool.

On the misty and gloomy days of early summer in May and June the beach became the set of a Scooby-Doo cartoon shrouded in fog, mysterious and full of adventure.

We played hide and seek, one kid counting, the other one or others if we had company running off and disappearing into the thick swirling fog.

With so many hours to fill, sometimes we’d wander the backshore way down the beach away from the adults to see what we might see.

We discovered that our bare feet squeaked when slid quickly across dry hot sand, the friction ridges on the soles playing against the miniscule grains of stone.

There were always loads of beach bugs in the cobblestone rubble along the high tide line. They resembled gargantuan pill bugs or sow bugs or rollypollies like we’d find at home in the yard. We smashed the hell out of those big beach bugs with rocks a time or two. The rocks sparking and a burnt smell in the air.

June 2019

One day we found ourselves scrambling up the steep south face of the coastal bluff. This wasn’t a smart idea being that my friend’s beloved dog, Bongles, died on the same beach after running up the face of the bluff like a mountain goat, at first, then loosing his footing like a clumsy dog, and tumbling rag doll to the sand below.

Think about naked California hippies in Santa Barbara and a certain weed and the name “Bongles” should make perfect sense.

Up off the beach, on the eroded shoulder of the coastal bluff, we kids came across a huge deposit of old weathered abalone shells. Shells were scattered everywhere. 

That’s some of my story at this place in recent time. A select slice of the happenings of one wee lad at a beach otherwise long frequented by other humans. This beach where somebody’s old stone bowl lay tumbled in the surf. I wonder about their stories. I wonder about their children’s playtime on this seashore. What of those stories at this beach? What else has happened here?

“In the beginning was the word, and rightly so: the world is constructed of stories, supported by stories, inhabited by stories. We get up in the morning, go for a beer, tumble into bed at night, and before we know it our lives have blinked out and we are none the wiser as to the essential story, the only one that matters: the story of what we are doing here on this mysterious planet.”

—Santa Barbara County resident, T.C. Boyle, as quoted from his introduction to Robert Coover’s short story collection, “Going For A Beer”

As kids Kelcey and I couldn’t make sense of all the old shells. Why were they there and where did they come from? We wondered. It was mystifying. We knew there was a story behind all the shells. There was an answer. But we couldn’t understand what it was the shells told us.

Decades later as an adult, I came to understand that we had found a midden heap left by the Chumash Indians. A village had once been located a short walk down the beach from where we always spent our days as kids. Ancient skeletons had been unearthed. The pile of abalone shells were a telltale clue that only later I was able to understand.

I returned to this particular beach recently to see what our old hang out looked like after so long. It’s not a beach I frequent these days. I was particularly curious about the old abalone deposit.

I searched the coastal bluffs, scrambling around the steep, loose and unstable hillside, but was unable to locate a single piece of abalone. Not one little bit. I remain baffled about how it all disappeared and where it went. 

It very well may still be evident somewhere, but in the fraction of an hour I put in looking I didn’t see anything. Another shell midden deposit is located nearby, but there is no sign of the abalone. None that I saw.

I don’t imagine the site has been cleaned up by people. Maybe the slough eroded from the bluff over the years and has once more buried the abalone. Maybe a huge slab of the bluff calved off and buried the shells. Maybe I was a kid and my memory is apocryphal. Maybe  I lost my mind at Lizard’s Mouth one night and there’s a Scab On My Brain and all these shells never existed.

On my way back down the beach on that recent walkabout, I was hopping cobblestones along the high tide line and saw the Chumash bowl, amid the rubble, right on the beach below or very nearby where we had found the abalone decades earlier.

The load of abalone shells may be missing, but there still remains other telltale clues telling stories about those people that came long before me. With open eyes, once in a while I stumble across one.

The bowl is a deeply personal item. Like a bowl from my kitchen. An artifact of the home used to prepare food and to eat.

If I were to ask what to do with the bowl that would presuppose that something should be done.

Should the bowl be let alone? Should it be left to nature so that eventually the earth takes it back and it is no more? And nobody ever sees nor feels nor contemplates it again. It has already been broken.

Some folks say let artifacts be. Admire them on-site, then return them to the earth.

In one of his books, “Soul of Nowhere,” Craig Childs writes about finding an Anasazi pot, “an artifact of the home,” that is nearly 1,000 years old. He discovers the artifact deep in the myriad folds of the trailless American Southwest canyon country.

After admiring his find he returns the pot to the earth, packing it full of soil for support so that it does not collapse upon itself under its own slight weight, and then burying it in the ground.

Three years later Childs returns to the canyon to show a friend the ancient pot. As if an intact thousand year old pot wasn’t an incredible enough find, this time they unearth the pot and discover that, due to wetter weather conditions than when Childs had first found the clay vessel, an intricate black and white geometric design now showed that had been invisible in drier conditions.

Once more, Childs admires his find, astonished at the design rendered in thousand year old invisible ink of a sorts, and he allows such of his friend, and then he returns the pot to the earth, and walks away.

The fleeting, odd bit of noise sounded mechanical when it first hit my ear. But we were in a designated wilderness wherein nothing of the sort is allowed. And so brief was the sound I almost wasn’t sure I heard it.

Then it sounded again. Definitely something humanmade.  Maybe it was a horse since it couldn’t be a machine. It didn’t sound like a horse. I was grasping for meaning. It didn’t sound like anything to do with any horse.

“Did you hear that?”

“Yeah.”

“What the hell is that?”

Silence. A thin wisp of air through pine needles. That far out spacey, desolate sound. Two men and their thoughts. A long wondrous view overlooking a huge swath of piñon forest.

And there was that noise again. A metallic rattle from the direction of our camp where we had left behind our packs with our food, and so now there was another concern.

Other odd sounds drifted over, impossible to decipher and unsettling in the midst of wilderness. More rattling. Muffled rustling. Something.

“Sounds like a bear getting out food.”

I don’t know if it sounded like a bear shredding packs to get food, but the mind imagines and I had no other idea what else it could possibly be.

The noise was loud from such a distance. Whatever it was wasn’t small. It wasn’t a bird nor a rodent.

I stood on a rock gazing over the forest down toward our camp and I saw the tall tree the camp was under. I saw no movement but nor could I see our packs.

“I’ve never had any problems with bears in the Los Padres.”

“Neither have I.”

The afternoon sun struck the south slope of the high desert foothills with an unseasonably warm intensity for November.

We sat in the rocks for an hour or so watching the forest and the sun set behind mountain peaks in the far off distance and several times we each unsettled a yellow jacket nest in the ground nearby and they swarmed out to investigate our intrusion and we withdrew for fear of the tiny buggers.

And the bewildering noises continued.

“Wanna go see if we have anything left to eat?”

Just after the sun fell below the horizon we moseyed back to camp to see if the bear had left anything for us to pick through.

Nothing was touched in camp. No sign of any animal could be found.

Then the metallic rattle erupted as we stood in camp. The noise was nearby. A stone’s throw, perhaps.

“What the hell is that?” The mutual question.

The noises had been carrying on now for quite some time, inexplicably, and became ever more vexing.

Maybe it was a can rattling among rocks in the wind. But there was no wind, just a breeze too light to cause such a noise.

We walked from camp not many yards across the adjacent glade and to its far edge where the piñon pines began again. The noises continued intermittently.

Then we heard the yowls.

The lion cub as found.

The voice was that of a mammal. Finally we had some solid sense of. . .something. No doubt it was. . .hairy. It was a bloody milk drinker! Of some kind.

We surmised either a cat or possibly a bear was over in yonder darkening forest. Maybe a bob cat or lion. Maybe it was a young cub of some sort playing with trash, a can perhaps.

Bingo! Finally something was beginning to make sense way out there in the woods. Yes. Of course. It was a cub playing with a can. A curious and playful kid.

The first visit I made to this camp some number of years ago I found numerous old pull tab beer cans scattered about the trees. Imagine that.

There must be a trash dump a young animal got into, I thought. But the noises continued. On and on. And on. It made no sense.

“What kind of animal could possibly be occupied by a ******* can for so long?!”

None. No animal, of course. We couldn’t figure it out. The longer it carried on the stranger it seemed.

In the lingering twilight of autumn with an intense and fiery sunset burning up the tree silhouetted horizon, we walked through the glade spotted with Great Basin sagebrush to see if we could find a clear way into the piñon pines and scrub oak and take a gander at whatever it was out in the woods there.

We found no open natural easement through the forest with a cursory glance and so pulled up short and stood looking into the woods, not seeing much.

“Want to go see what it is?”

We stood along the treeline in a darkening forest. We’d have to push through some scrub and light branching and enter a more enclosed area within the trees, listening for the odd noise or a screech and trying to pinpoint. . . something. . .in there.

“I’m not inclined.”

Very funny. Some poor fool walked into the woods one fine fall night to investigate an eerie noise and he was promptly ripped to shreds by a mother mountain lion protecting her cub. That was the hypothetical news story imagined at the time.

No. We’re not entering Pan‘s lair to investigate. The origin of the word “panic.” We’ll save that for mañana, ese.

I returned my rather large and freshly sharpened carbon steel blade to its leather sheath. Maybe I wouldn’t have bled out from catastrophic lacerations and puncture wounds about the body and face after I liberated myself from the lion’s jaws and paws using my knife, and I would have instead crawled home like Hugh Glass. Very dry humor, indeed. It was all we had besides the deterrence of our presence, two lumbering bipedal primates.

We moseyed back to camp which took all of thirty seconds or so. The noises continued. Of course they did. I thought of the Blair Witch Project.

“What the hell is going on over there?”

It was too late to see. We’d wait ’til morning.

I had a nervous twinge. Not that I’d suffer harm. But the animal we thought for sure must be over there, because we heard its voice earlier, that animal was not actually acting at all like we know animals should normally act.

The animal didn’t seem to care about our voices or our loud walking about in the crunchy and sparsely covered soil or our scratching through the wiry scrub brush as we walked or our scent. And no animal plays with trash for hours on end.

We laid out beneath the Milky Way in the warm night. Stars shot across the speckled firmament. White dots drifted unblinking in orbit, satellites and space junk. And the noises rattled on once in awhile.

Maybe there was a cat den over there. But even so, we’d expect silence and not hours worth of loud noises and no seeming concern whatsoever for our presence.

At four o’clock in the morning I rose from my cot to irrigate the bushes and I stood within a trillion points of light sparkling all around even despite the beaming moon. The air was not cold. All was quiet. Finally.

But the noises had not ceased through the night, so my friend advised the next morning after sunrise, suffering as he had a fitful night of virtually no sleep, listening to the beast in the bush rattle around on occasion.

After coffee and a few slices of a Renaud’s almond croissant we finally went to investigate the noise. By this time I was thinking an animal had somehow gotten tangled up in old trash, like fencing or wire, and it was thrashing about trying to free itself.

We found an old latrine pit without a lid. Trapped inside the hole was a baby lion three or four months old.

I have only seen two mountain lions in the Los Padres National Forest in all my time out there. The first was a desiccated body of a young lion that had been hit by a car on the 101 freeway along Gaviota Coast and crawled into the creek and died in a cave. The second lion was this one here trapped in an excrement pit among beer cans.

We collected a few old bits of cut wood and tree limbs and stacked them inside the pit as a ladder for the lion to climb out. The poor animal was terrified, shaking.

The lion eventually climbed to the rim of the pit and stood there for a long time on the branches looking around at the forest, its head silently turning in the quiet morning air with a real slow fluidity that almost looked machine-like.

The little cat waited quite some time before venturing out. Then it finally crawled ever so slowly from the pit and crept off in slow motion, slinking, super leery, as if not wanting to provoke a chase and get eaten should it run for freedom. Then it did bolt and was gone.

Slopes of chaparral in the Santa Ynez Mountains.

On down the slopes and all the way to the canyons was a thicket of varied shrubs that changed in character as altitude fell but was everywhere dense enough to stop an army.

On its lower levels, it was all green, white, and yellow with buckwheat, burroweed, lotus and sage, deerweed, bindweed, yerba santa. There were wild morning glories, Canterbury bells, tree tobacco, miner’s lettuce.

The thicket’s resistance to trespass, while everywhere formidable, stiffened considerably as it evolved upward.

There were intertwining mixtures of manzanita, California lilac, scrub oak, chamise. There was buckthorn. There was mountain mahogany. Generally evergreen, the dark slopes were splashed here and there with dodder, its mustard color deepening to rust. Blossoms of the Spanish bayonet stood up like yellow flames. There were lemonade berries (relatives of poison ivy and poison oak). In canyons, there were alders, big-leaf maple bushes, pug sycamores, and California bay.

Whatever and wherever they were, these plants were prickly, thick, and dry, and a good deal tougher than tundra.

Those evergreen oaks fingering up the creases in the mountains were known to the Spaniards as chaparros. Riders who worked in the related landscape wore leather overalls open at the back, and called them chaparajos.

By extension, this all but impenetrable brush was known as chaparral.”

John McPhee, “The Control of Nature” (1989)

Everywhere and always around here, chaparral. The woody and wiry brushwood that grows in thickets so tangled and prickly it renders foot travel impossible without being ripped to shreds.

I hate it so much I’ve grown to love it. “Worthy ******* adversary,” to quote Walter Sobchak. Chaparral demands respect.

The hideous overgrown weeds are penetrable only through violent force in most places. “Carrying packs and cutting our way down a brush-choked arroyo with machetes,” Campbell Grant wrote, “we made a mile in two hours.”

Through the years chaparral has defined and many times dictated the day’s (mis)adventures by obscuring trails, barring access and making travel afoot exceedingly difficult and uncomfortable.

I can’t deny feeling a certain degree of pleasure whenever a wildfire scorches vast swaths of chaparral. Take that, vile weed!  And how nice it is to walk freely through open terrain when it’s been reduced to ash and bare sticks. That never lasts long, though.

It’s a rather perverse and maddening feeling to have been “lost” one night within sight of people and the city only because an impenetrable wall of chaparral stood between me and Gibraltar Road. I could see cars driving on the mountain road not too far off from where I was stuck in the dark without a trail, but short of a brutal bushwhack–which might have taken hours to cover only a short distance and require an extreme amount of effort and result in being scratched raw and bloody–I could not make it to the road.

In the land of chaparral, the trail is a thin savior through the thicket. A twelve-inch wide life raft promising safe passage home and a return to the comfort and convenience of civilization and the bottomless well that gushes at all hours everything anybody wants.

To lose the trail is to fall from the raft and be cast adrift in rolling seas of chaparral that stretch to the horizon. A puny human marooned in an ocean of dangerous wilderness. A castaway caught amidst heaving peaks and steep mountain slopes that rise and fall like monstrous green swells.

Mortar

No trail leads there. A careless body could fall along the way and be bloodied up, break a bone, die busted and splattered across the sharp angular stones of canyon rip-rap and jumbled boulders and bedrock slabs.

Such has happened in the canyons of Santa Barbara County. People perish here hiking in the Los Padres National Forest.

Walking a ridgeline on a different approach during a subsequent visit proved no less precipitous.

I peered down double black diamond dry ravel slopes.

I get soft and fuzzy headed in unstable high places these days. I felt the pull of the void.

I imagined myself loosing traction on the descent and tumbling rag doll head over heals into the canyon’s stony toothed maw.

With luck, maybe, I could have saved myself by glissading the slope on my rear end, trekking poles for stability, but at that steep angle, gravel working like ball bearings, the speed might have been unmanageable.

This place still remains difficult to reach, today, and the strain in getting there impresses upon me how remote it must have been for people in prehistoric yesteryears.

Later, back home, I would ponder with amusement the fact that those people came to this place adorned in finely crafted jewelry. If the tiny cylindrical bead found there was any indication.

Sweating profusely, red and steamy, hot and thirsty and dusty and dirty, hauling a pack with liters of water and calories, pushing and pulling and holding myself in place aside the mountain slope with trekking poles, feet wrapped in protective coverings, covered head to toe in the burly synthetic fiber toughskins of outdoor adventure clothing made to withstand the abrasive brush and rock; I busted my hind end it to get there.

This place where they once hung out so well-adorned and nearly naked by comparison.

The contradistinction between us seemed ludicrous.

I hauled myself up the acclivity, lumbering through the geologic wrack, dragging my body, that suit I came in that now felt like a sack of molten lead.

I didn’t know where I was headed.

I had no destination.

Old seashell found high on the mountain.

In this late year in this long settled and overrun American land, less than fifty miles from the most populace county in the nation in the most populace state, the forest still holds secrets.

Once in awhile the forest yields riches to fortunate souls whom invest time immersed in the other world out there, outside the metropolis, across the fence lines, beyond the end of the road, down the trail and into the wild.

Sometimes the wealth earned is abstract and metaphysical, something that happens in your head when you’re out there.

“Myself, crouched in this cave,” Craig Childs writes in Soul of Nowhere, “I am hoping to become the same, a person who is changed by the land, who puts a pen to paper and tells what I have seen.”

On other occasions, the woods may reveal  something physical to the keen observer and wanderer of wilder places.

I hear murmurs of an extraordinary Native American zoomorphic stone artifact, possibly a cetacean, recently found in a certain canyon above Montecito, revealed after the catastrophic and deadly Montecito Debris Flow of 2018, discovered by a lady out for a hike in one of the most popular canyons in the Santa Barbara frontcountry.

That earth churns and old buried treasures turn up from the dirt may not be surprising.

People have lived around these parts for over 13,000 years (Arlington Spring Man). Some artifacts are found over twenty feet deep in the ground.

But to stumble on a landed artifact several weeks ago myself, sitting around above ground for innumerable years, surprised me.

In the land of lower California in 2020 crawling with millions of people, hidden treasures and secret places still remain in our remnant wildlands.

What a fantastic revelation!

On a hike in late January I discovered a cupule boulder I did not know existed and that was unmentioned in the literature.

“That is a surprise,” he said, the well-known published expert I consulted and whom was unaware of the site.

He suggested I notify John Johnson, Curator of Anthropology at the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History.

Cupules

Located high in the mountains, this place offers an incredible view over the land spread out far below.

I was stunned! when I made it over the last steep slope and emerged from the trickling creek and I stood straight again and walked instead of clambered and I saw how the forest floor fell out before me into a gulf of open air with a long view over the land below as far as the clarity of the air allowed framed on either side by plummeting ridgelines.

Whoa!!!

I marveled at my surroundings. I weaved a slow uncertain line across this remarkable promontory, struck by its incredible geography that so pleasured my mind.

This place, for its view and geography, is something like the Knapp’s Castle site in Santa Barbara County.

See the faint circular depression surrounding the hole? Is it natural or human-made?

The Chumash long ago discovered all the finest nooks and crannies of the forest or perhaps they inherited them from the Hunting People and the earlier Oak Grove People or whomever.

The places of long views, eccentric and useful rock formations, peaks and valleys and fields and streams and seeps and springs and deep pools and natural stone tanks and tinajas and the differing neighborhoods of various plants and the collections of animals drawn to them.

There is a true story of a deer hunter finding two Chumash bows and a bundle of about 20 or so arrows inside a dry cave in Santa Barbara County in the late 1950s.

The cave is located in a canyon in and around which the modern deer population (circa 1965) had been found to be among the densest in the county.

The old Chumash knew these things by necessity. I struggle mentally and physically to learn what had long ago already been known about this land and then lost.

I recall as a boy driving into this canyon and on a grassy slope beside the dirt road I spied deer antlers through the truck window.

I remember having been rather impressed with the size, and that George, my friend Willy’s dad, pulled rank and ended up taking them much to my disappointment. I wanted the antlers. My boyhood bedroom resembled a museum with shelves burdened with collections of bric-a-brac.

It rained hard on that trip to the house in Peachtree Canyon. We ended up having to hike out in the rain on the sloppy and tacky dirt road with its burdensome heavy mud that stuck to our shoes and made adobe bricks of our feet.

The cupule boulder.

I walked along admiring this high mountain promontory and the view therefrom on an immaculate winter’s day.

I came to a short and flat tabletop boulder, about waist high, and upon it a roundish area appeared worn.

This brought to mind the sort of grinding slicks seen on granite in the desert and in the Sierra that were once used to process seeds or nuts or whatever.

But the wear was subtle enough to remain unclear and the bottom of the bowling depression seemed too rough to have been used. Maybe the rain had made it.

One day the bottom of the depression, worn by sitting water, might be perfectly flat like a miniature dry lake and smooth and hold gallons of water, a tank. I found several such tanks on this day, all dry in this once again droughty winter.

I ran my fingers over the roundish area on the flat boulder, and moseyed on, aimless as usual, so often aimless out there.

I stepped at a slow pace around another much larger boulder and it seemed as though something inside my head told me to look down and when I did there before me lay a small artifact of white chipped stone in a crescent shape.

I stood still, looking at the telltale bit of stone, mentally feasting upon the intellectual meal I had just discovered. People had been here a long time ago.

The artifact appeared to be the back end of an arrowhead protruding from the earth.

Still standing, I could see notches in the stone once used to haft the projectile point to an arrow shaft or so it appeared.

But when I knelt and first picked up the artifact some forty-five minutes later its form differed from the projectile point I had in mind.

I turned the small piece over in my hand and I was surprised to see that it was not a broken half of an arrowhead. The break was not a break, but in fact a finished edge.

Later when I showed it to my young daughter the first thing she said was that it looked like a bear. I hadn’t seen it at first, myself, but when mentioned the resemblance was remarkable and unmistakable, though perhaps coincidental.

Some time after that first artifact, one of many of different sorts found in addition to bone and seashell fragments, I used a tree to hoist myself atop a boulder.

On top of the boulder, in a natural depression, I found some 30 or more cupules.

In another boulder a stone’s throw away and nearer the edge of a cliff I found a single mortar.

Between the mortar stone and the cupule boulder, some person or people had apparently spent much time knapping and crafting stone tools as evidenced by a concentration of light lithic scatter and numerous stone artifacts.

*

At the start of the day, as I began my hike, and later while dragging my body all over the mountain, I wondered what I was doing and why. I thought perhaps I had wasted my day rather than seizing it.

Why do I go to places where few people if anybody else at all ever bothers with?

I wondered if I had wasted my day, because I had no set destination, nothing planned to reach or achieve—no waterfall, no deep pool in the creek, no peak, no trail camp, no flowers, no foraging for mushrooms or other wild edibles and nothing labeled on any map.

And then I stumbled onto this archaeological site by happenstance.

Related Posts on this Blog:

Chumash Rock Art Discovered

The Los Padres Box of Chocolates

Cottonwood trees showing fall color along the Santa Ynez River in Santa Barbara County.

“Well the summertime has gone,” Van Morrison sings. “And the leaves are gently turning.” And come fall season in Santa Barbara County the black cottonwood trees drop leaves and grow buds.

The sappy buds develop and swell in size through winter and as spring approaches a super sticky amber resin oozes from cracks in the bud scale.

The tarry goo has a strong, heady fragrance somewhat similar to the best flowers. The natural fragrance is reminiscent of perfume sometimes.

Over the years I’ve noticed a slight variance in the fragrance of the bud resin of different trees growing in different areas of the county and maybe it’s also to do with the vagaries of weather from season to season or subspecies differentiation.

Depending on how black cottonwood balm is prepared the fragrance varies as well.

A stand of black cottonwood trees budded out and dripping resin casts its sweet scent wafting in the wind for some distance.

I have fond memories of sitting in the sea on a surfboard in winter along Gaviota and smelling the black cottonwood fragrance filling the air from the windblown beachside trees.

Black cottonwood bud oozing resin.

Black cottonwood buds are brown, as seen here, while Fremontii cottonwood buds are green. 

Black cottonwood balm has taken on legendary status in the Elliott home. The bud resin is a remarkable natural remedy.

Each winter I carefully and judiciously harvest buds, which I use to infuse organic avocado oil.

After some time steeping I strain the oil and blend it with beeswax to make an exceptional medicinal moisturizer our family uses in a variety of ways.

I’ve said of it in jest, Jack Elliott’s Custom Deluxe Super Premium Los Padres Liniment.

Or, you know, just cottonwood for short.

I harvest my buds from the Los Padres National Forest and use top shelf ingredients.

The cottonwood, as we call it, is a three ingredient handcrafted product made of local matter.

I use avocado oil because it’s rich in vitamins A, D and E and omega-3 fatty acids, which all benefit the skin in ways that complement the black cottonwood.

Avocado oil promotes skin regeneration and the healing of minor wounds and may help reduce itching and inflammation.

Avocado oil serves as a good vehicle to carry the active ingredients in black cottonwood deeper into the body, because it penetrates the skin more deeply than many other oils.

The oil also absorbs quickly and without a lasting greasy feeling.

Fresh super tacky cottonwood bud resin.

What fingers look like after two hours of harvesting. 

We here in the Elliott household rub this luxurious liniment onto insect bites and stings, minor scrapes, scratches and cuts, dry skin of various causes, burns from fire, heat and sun, poison oak rashes and other issues of dermatitis and most anything else to do with skin.

Black cottonwood soothes minor pain, discomfort and stinging associated with skin injuries and minor wounds and has been used in various forms for thousands of years.

The tree is in the willow family, Salicaceae, and like willows it contains salacin, the basis of salicylic acid from which aspirin as originally named by Bayer was derived.

Salicylates have been derived from the willow tree bark. The Sumerians were noted to have used remedies derived from the willow tree for pain management as far back as 4000 years ago. Hippocrates used it for managing pain and fever. He even utilized tea brewed from it for pain management during childbirth.

In a 1763 clinical trial, the first of its kind, Reverend Edward Stone studied the effects of willow bark powder for treating fever. About a 100 years later the effects of the willow bark powder were studied for acute rheumatism.

In 1828, Professor Johann Buchner used salicin, the Latin word for willow. Henri Leroux used it to treat rheumatism after isolating it in a crystalline form in 1829. In the 1800s, the Heyden Chemical Company was the first to mass produce salicylic acid commercially. It was not until 1899 when a modified version by the name of acetylsalicylic acid was registered and marketed by Bayer under the trade name aspirin.

National Center for Biotechnology Information, U.S. National Library of Medicine

But wait! There’s more.

Black cottonwood is also thought to promote the healing process by stimulating tissue regeneration, acting as a vasodilator or an agent that dilates blood vessels and an antimicrobial antiseptic to keep wounds from getting infected. Reference Michael Moore’s “Medicinal Plants of the Pacific Northwest.”

What more do we need?

When I was stung by a stingray I used the cottonwood to dull pain and heal the wound in the days after the initial excruciating and debilitating explosion of pain had subsided.

When in the past my small wounds reddened and festered the cottonwood put an end to it.

The balm does away with the stinging and soreness of skin scratched by wild roses or blackberry brambles or brush when hiking.

Sometimes within seconds the stinging vanishes.

That I can tell you from personal experience.

Unlike so many other artificially derived and synthesized over the counter products that reek of an unpleasant medicinal odor, black cottonwood fragrance is remarkably pleasant and soothing, even a might addicting to huff so fine is its perfume fragrance.

I smell it up whenever I apply it.

Sometimes I open the jar just for a whiff.

Black cottonwood buds blended in avocado oil and steeped for an extended period of time. This jar sat in a darkened cabinet for 22 months. The oil takes on an amber hue from the cottonwood. The longer it’s steeped the darker it gets.

In short, black cottonwood balm soothes minor pain, prevents infection, promotes healing and moisturizes the skin.

I no longer use store-bought topical antibiotic agents or moisturizers and I take the balm on trips away from home.

I find it remarkable that no mention of the early Chumash having used black cottonwood for similar purposes can be found in Jan Timbrook’s book, “Chumash Ethnobotany.”

That is one of two items missing from that encyclopedic work, which has been a personal favorite of mine since its publication.

And I’m not saying Timbrook left anything out.

There is apparently no reference to the Chumash having used black cottonwood for pain relief and healing in the sources available.

For how well the black cottonwood works, I’m surprised to find no mention of its use.

Final product.

One notable problem with harvesting black cottonwood buds is that the twig end dies when the bud is removed.

The twigs do not sprout again.

Pinching off a bud does not result in two or more new shoots sprouting from the broken twig end; it results in a dead twig.

I can tell you this from personal experience through careful observation of particular trees over the course of years.

Therefore when harvesting it is imperative to take just a little from here and there and from various places.

And to take from numerous different trees over some space in order to reduce the harm done to each tree and avoid stunting growth or possibly killing entire branches, limbs or perhaps in time the whole tree if young enough.

Related Post On This Blog

Black Cottonwood Wildcraft

A vernal pool on Figueroa Mountain. A male and female mallard were seen in the pool. March 27, 2020

I find it difficult to live in a society governed without reason.

My mind operates logically. I am irascible by nature. I am not submissive. I am free thinking and independent. I do not subscribe to dogma nor doxy. I’m off the reservation. I’m wild and free in spirit and mind. My vision is not blinkered. I am obnoxious and loud mouthed with my opinions and points of view and I do not hedge against this trait nor offer apologies. If confronted, I can be rather confrontational. I fire from the hip. My fuse is short. And, as a student of history, I am deeply suspicious of authority and organized power.

What I see transpiring in my hometown of Santa Barbara, the Gilded State within which I live, and these United States at large is a daily irritant that festers with each new headline.

On March 19, Governor Newsom declared a statewide lockdown order that compels by force citizens to remain home. Citizens are only legally allowed to leave home for “essential purposes” such as work, purchasing food or medicine or for healthcare purposes.

Newsom’s dictate is backed by the threat of a fine and jail time. This is a law with teeth, not merely a suggestive guideline.

People are now being arrested in other states for violating these statutory lockdown orders and for being outdoors.

The Chicago mayor stated this in no uncertain terms.

Lightfoot added that spending long periods of time outdoors, anywhere, is not allowed.

And neither is going into closed spaces, like playgrounds.

“You cannot go on long bike rides. Playgrounds are shut down. You must abide by the order. Outside, is for a brief respite, not for 5Ks.”

https://chicago.cbslocal.com/2020/03/25/beck-lightfoot-on-stay-at-home-order-citations-to-be-issued-parks-could-be-shut-down/

Chicago threatens fines, arrests for coronavirus crackdown violators

https://nypost.com/2020/03/26/chicago-threatens-fines-arrests-for-coronavirus-crackdown-violators/

The ruling class tells us to stay home and socially distance and isolate ourselves to prevent our own infection and to prevent ourselves from infecting other people. To “bend the curve” and lessen the ballooning infection rate, they tells us.

Then the same officials threaten to incarcerate us and force us at gunpoint into closed and confined areas with other people, thereby violating their own distancing protocol at the same time prisons are releasing convicts to avoid such conditions for fear of an outbreak.

This is madness!

Headlines:

Checkpoints set up on Kauai, 2 arrests on Oahu as police enforce stay-at-home order

https://www.hawaiinewsnow.com/2020/03/26/kauai-police-begin-islandwide-checkpoints-lockdown-compliance/

Coronavirus behind bars: Prisoners being freed to slow spread in ‘virus vectors’

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/coronavirus-behind-bars-prisoners-being-freed-slow-spread-virus-vectors-n1169881

The smooth weathered slopes of chaparral carpeted hills along Sunset Valley.

In Santa Barbara the ruling class has told us that the local recreational marijuana stores are “essential business.” And so they remain open catering to potheads. Because getting high in Santa Barbara is “essential.”

A MESSAGE REGARDING
COVID-19

At Coastal, we are vigilantly monitoring events related to the novel coronavirus outbreak COVID-19. At this time, Coastal will remain open for both medical and recreational customers for normal business hours. . .

Coastal Cannabis Dispensary

These stores operate out of closed and confined spaces–buildings–where it is not possible to maintain the stated six foot “social distancing” protocol and where vectors of disease are set out for patrons to freely handle and set to their faces to smell.

I do not have a problem with adults being allowed to legally purchase weed from documented licensed vendors. I do not care if people want to smoke flowers or the derivatives there from.

But at the same time, the backcountry campgrounds like Davy Brown have been cordoned off and closed and are actively patrolled by goons from the abusive and overreaching moneygrubbing Parks Management Company, as I myself have recently witnessed.

(Previous Posts: Parks Management Company’s Red Rock Racket, Parks Management Company’s Red Rock Racket Continues)

This despite the fact that the campsites are well spaced and it is easy and possible with no extra effort to camp in each site and maintain a far greater distance than the six foot protocol.

Stoners are legally allowed to walk around inside a building and carry on transactions with clerks face to face, exchanging forms of payment and presenting identification and each touching what the other touched, and patrons breathing on and sniffing the same product containers at the display cases.

This is utterly senseless.

Yesterday, the family Elliott spent the afternoon on Figueroa Mountain in gross and flagrant violation of Governor Newsom’s stay at home lockdown dictate. And we were happy to do it.

To take our children to the mountains to play is now illegal and punishable with a $1000 fine and six months in jail, as per the Governor. (EDIT 3-30-2020 8:08 AM. To clarify, I am taking a strict constructionist interpretation of the Governor’s order. Yes, indeed, the lockdown dictate permits limited outdoor recreation. But as per the Governor these activities are only allowed within your “local neighborhoods.” We have been instructed that “Californians can walk, run, hike and bike in their local neighborhoods as long as they continue to practice social distancing of 6 feet.” I do not interpret that to mean the entire county. https://covid19.ca.gov/stay-home-except-for-essential-needs/#top)

We’re all outlaws now. We will not submit to this madness!

Do not misunderstand. We take the novel coronavirus deadly seriously.

We are highly educated people. We are well read. We follow closely the minutiae of current events on the national and world stage. We have susceptible seniors and old folks in our family like most everybody else. We have family members on the front lines working in the hospitals right now. We do not take this threat lightly!

We removed our children from school before the government finally decided to close them down. We began to self isolate and stopped interacting with friends and family and the public at large before the government decided to issue the various dictates and protocols regarding “social distancing” and home lockdown. In our essential business, which remains open, we formulated specific protocols to limit interaction between employees and clients before any of our professional peers in the county, so far as we know.

In point of fact, we have as a family and as a business been ahead of the curve with respect to self isolation and distancing and proper protective measures.

Santa Barbara County is mostly rural. This is a demonstrable fact. Large swaths of the county are unpopulated if not unpeopled and much of the land here is designated National Forest and Wilderness. Within just a couple of minutes from my doorstep I enter the forest.

Santa Barbara County is not a densely populated metropolis. Yet, the same rigid one-size fits all lockdown dictate applies as much to citizens here as it does to those living in the middle of Los Angeles city proper.

This is senseless.

The Dude will not abide!

To paraphrase Kipling: If you can keep your head when all about you men are losing theirs and blaming it on you. If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, but make allowance for their doubting too. Well then, you’ll be a man my son!

In Desert Solitaire, Edward Abbey wrote of the wilderness as a refuge from abusive government:

“The wilderness should be preserved for political reasons. We may need it someday not only as a refuge from excessive industrialism but also as a refuge from authoritarian government, from political oppression. Grand Canyon, Big Bend, Yellowstone and the High Sierra may be required to function as bases of guerrilla warfare against tyranny. What reason have we Americans to think our own society will necessarily escape the world-wide drift toward the totalitarian organization of men and institutions?”

March 2020. “Some of the false morels are dangerously poisonous,” Aurora warns.

Morels may be the most elusive mushrooms in Santa Barbara County.

“Morels can be extremely difficult to see,” David Aurora writes in All That The Rain Promises And More.

Indeed. They’re probably the most camouflaged and well-hidden mushroom around this neck of the woods other than those found underground. The morel’s neutral and earthy hues combined with its intricate prismatic combed form can, at times, make it impossible to discern from the surrounding forest litter.

I find it amusing how easily and thoroughly these little mushrooms can deceive the most intelligent brains on the planet in Homo sapiens. We’re not as smart as we’d like to think.

Morels do not glow white amid the dark colors of the shadowed forest like hericiums or bright golden yellow like chanterelles. To mention just two much more easily spotted mushrooms.

Moreover, as Aurora notes, morel mycelia “tend to be short-lived, so new ‘patches’ must be found every year.” Mycelia are the vegetative portion of the fungus from which bloom the mushrooms we call morels.

While that is not exactly true, that new patches must be found each and every year, it nevertheless appears to be the case in Santa Barbara County that morels only bloom again from the same patch of ground for two or perhaps three seasons at best before disappearing in latter years never to be seen again.

This stands in contrast to other mushrooms which may be picked in the exact same place for many years and sometimes for decades.

“These factors combine to make morel hunting especially challenging and competitive,” Aurora writes.

Aurora writes in jest about the “demorelizing experience of tramping through the forest for hours, weeks, months, or even years without finding a single one. Only by being skunked repeatedly can you savor the sweetness of ultimate success!”

Or as Nixon advised, “. . .because the greatness comes not when things go always good for you, but the greatness comes and you are really tested, when you take some knocks, some disappointments, when sadness comes, because only if you have been in the deepest valley, can you ever know how magnificent it is to be on the highest mountain.”

March 2020

The first morel I ever found in my life was growing deep in the Santa Barbara backcountry, as mentioned in this previous post nine years ago: Nira to Upper Oso: An Early San Rafael Experience

I was a teenager and had been out on the trail for several days when, while trudging up a rain-swollen upper Sisquoc River after hard rain the day before that had forced us to take shelter inside the old South Fork Sisquoc cabin, I glanced over and spied the conical combed cap sticking up out from a jumble of flotsam in the river bed.

Well over a decade would pass before I spotted another morel.

The second mushroom I saw while walking back from surfing a point break along Gaviota Coast, while talking with a friend; the dude featured riding one hell of a tube in this previous post: Gabe Surfing Sandbar, Hurricane Marie 8-27-14

We were talking and I glanced to my side for no particular reason and there the morel stood growing from a clump of ice plant. I haven’t talked to him in a long time. I wonder if he remembers.

Another two decades, give or take, would pass before I found more morels.

March 2019

“Mushroom hunting can teach us a lot about the larger world,” Andrew Weil writes in Aurora’s book. “A common experience of mushroom hunters is not being able to see a particular mushroom when they first try to collect it. It’s not a question of visual acuity, but pattern recognition.”

He goes on to tell a short story about a woman that once spent hours searching the forest for morels. After failing to see any sign of a morel, she dropped to her knees and began sifting through the leaf litter. Just as she was about to admit failure and give up, she saw a single morel. Then, a moment later, she look about and discovered that she was surrounded by hundreds of the them.

“A useful lesson can be drawn from this,” Weil writes. “Our brain acts as a filter, screening out what it doesn’t consider significant. . .The larger principle is that what we experience is determined by what we are able to perceive.”

After several decades of mushroom hunting there are still times when out in the woods I look and search and see no mushrooms anywhere. And then just as I am about to give up suddenly a mushroom seems to appear out of thin air. Then suddenly I find a bunch right before me I had somehow not been able to perceive.

Such experiences may make a forest gadabout wonder just how much else apart from mushrooms they may be overlooking and missing when out there in the woods and how much richer their personal experiences may be if’n they could just see what it is they are actually looking at.

I explored this idea of perception an understanding in greater detail in a previous post: Wild Oyster Mushrooms and Reading the Nuances of Nature.

Weil writes that these sorts of experiences leads him to believe we should accept or at least consider other people’s experiences we may otherwise find fantastic, like telepathy or precognition.

“Otherwise we could live in a forest full of morels and never see them.”

March 2019

In September of 2016, under cover of broad daylight, assisted by her two trusty partners in crime, whom also served as convenient sweet little innocent distractions to any suspecting walkers in the area, Jackie Willowtree smuggled in and planted the contraband.

“It often tends to be, uh–well the whole concept of legality doesn’t matter much. It’s the intention. As long as you know what you’re doing.”

–So advises Tony Santoro on his pilfered scooter in his Guide to Illegal Tree Planting, as delivered in his profanity-laced classic New York City Italian-American accent.

There’s this gal. It’d be unfair and incorrect to say she hates people, but she doesn’t tend to like them. And that’s different than saying she dislikes them and nowhere near close to saying she hates them. Whatever the particular case may be, she’d rather avoid them, those people, all of those people.

She might like to volunteer with some of the local forest and wilderness organizations and associations that work to maintain open and usable trails or work to restore and revitalize natural habitats.

But these groups tend to be as much of a social club as they are work parties out to actually work. She’d like to work, to lend a hand and help improve and protect the backcountry and wildlife, but she’s not looking to socialize.

Then there is the rigmarole of safety requirements and legal obligations. She is not donning a hard hat like a New York City construction worker only to clip twigs and branches along a flat trail.

So she went out on her own. An unofficial undocumented botanical subcontractor for the Department of Unauthorized Forestry.

As a keen spectator in the stands of America overlooking the public arena and watching the ruling class, political and business alike, she well knew it’s easier to ask for forgiveness afterward than permission beforehand.

And then if caught and interrogated, to claim poor memory. “I don’t recall.”

She imagined, with amusement, the bureaucratic tangle of laws and regulations and rules and policies and protocols the official in charge of the nature preserve would sputter on about having to abide by and fulfill.

She found it impossible to believe she would ever receive a prompt, “Yes! Marvelous idea. Go right ahead and plant that tree.”

Her experiences in such pursuits strongly suggested such quick and easy approval would never occur.

And that’s to say nothing of the personal preferences of the official in charge whom, as kind and upright as they must be, may not appreciate the suggestion of some lone unassociated stranger horning in on their turf or who may have specific opinions of their own about what type of tree should be planted and where, if anything should be planted at all.

Never mind it all. Just plant the damn tree! she thought. A real rebel. Risking nothing.

Jackie Willowtree. Out to, gasp, plant a tree.

She imagined, once more with amusement, being busted for planting a tree, being interrogated and lectured for such a transgression. The teacher’s voice from Charlie Brown.

She imagined the tree ripped from the ground by officials like spray-paint graffiti wiped from a building.

The willow cutting growing strong in July of 2019.

She walked a section of the dry Santa Ynez River in the spring of 2016, where in her younger years a quiet swimming hole once pooled, but which was now choked with sediment and cattails.

What was once a long open gravel beach just a few years ago was now bristling with young willow trees that had sprouted and grown tall during the current record drought and low water levels, the river never running swift enough to clear out its bed.

Here she scanned the thin, tall trees for the straightest, best shaped and healthiest specimens.

She selected a 20 foot sprout and cut the top off and trimmed the large six foot scion, removing the lowermost branches to create a tree-shaped cutting.

She placed the cutting in a bucket of rain water for several weeks, changing the water as necessary until a thick mat of pink and red roots formed.

She planted the huge sprout in a pot where it grew for several months through summer to establish a robust and dense root ball.

Then on a fine late summer day she hauled the rooted clone to the spring at San Marcos Potrero on the North Side.

She dug a hole and sunk it in the ground beside the small puddle that was still, despite the drought, being filled by the reliable little trickle of ground water that poured from the rusted pipe.

Four years later the tree remains today, standing much larger and fuller now with a big green bushy head of leaves, and a fattened crazed trunk, casting a cool afternoon shadow over the puddled spring water wherein the frogs swim and where from the mammals and birds drink.

Here at the spring where before no tree stood in what had been a bare naked exposed and shadowless, sun-scorched hot spot.

Now, a green new future grows.

El Roca Grande in 1909 overlooking the Santa Barbara littoral, Pacific Ocean and Santa Cruz Island in the distance. Note the metal poles and cable handrail.

“In the 1970s this was The Place. Well, if you were a teenager on a Saturday night it was. Located on Gibraltar Road about two miles past Mountain Drive there was a large place to pull off the road to park, party and enjoy the lights of the city below.”

—Neal Graffy, “Santa Barbara Then and Now”

“There was a time when courtesy and winning ways went out of style, when it was good to be bad, when you cultivated decadence like a taste. We were all dangerous then. We wore torn-up leather jackets, slouched around with toothpicks in our mouths, sniffed glue and ether and what somebody claimed was cocaine. When we wheeled our parent’s whining station wagon out into the street we left a patch of rubber half a block long. We drank gin and grape juice, Tango, Thunderbird, and Bali Hai. We were nineteen.”

—T.C. Boyle, “Greasy Lake”

“Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well-preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming ‘Wow! What a Ride!'”

—Hunter S. Thompson, The Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman, 1955-1967

Party, Graffy writes, a local historian. That comes off far too innocent. There’s a lot packed in that small word.

Boyle nailed it, a local writer. I see him walking his dreadlocked dog by my office window.

Far more was enjoyed up yonder at The Rock than mere city lights, and maybe all those fantastical lights weren’t from the city anyway.

El Roca Grande

Farewell to The Rock.  Somebody will be living there now.

For decades a dirt pullout on Gibraltar Road, the outcrop of sandstone bedrock wrapping the bend in the road, and the long views up and down the coast, along the south face of the Santa Ynez Mountains overlooking the Pacific Ocean, formed a singular attraction known as The Rock.

Here the local intoxicati and psychonauts loitered day and night to take flight. They never left the ground. But boy did they fly high!

Numerous illicit drugs and controlled substances and brain depleting chemicals and vast quantities of alcohol of various kinds fueled savage pursuits of addled depravity worthy of a rambling mutter of approval from the late Hunter S. Thompson.

The bennies, the ludes, the coke, the weed, the ether, the nitrous, the acid, the mushrooms, the mescaline, the XTC, the crack, the crank, and aerosol cans of computer cleaner lifted from high school classrooms.

Animalistic loveless sex in the darkened bushes and silly warm young love in cramped cars with feet out the window.

Warm Santa Ana winds in summer with shirts off at midnight.

The Ratch fell off The Rock. My good friend since fourth grade at Monte Vista, he stumbled over the edge and fell to the road below and broke his leg and had to hobble around Santa Barbara High in a big cast.

Cheech: “Wow, man. That’s some heavy shit.
(Extended pause)
Hey man. . . Am I driving okay?”

Chong: (Slowly looks around through car window)
“I think we’re parked, man.”

—Up In Smoke (1978)

Note the old steps carved into El Roca Grande.

Remnants of the old handrail on El Roca Grande.

Then there were the earlier generations and heroic tales of sheer stupidity from the 1960s and 1970s related first-hand by the family and friends that survived them, and could remember.

A metal pipe once jutted from a knob of sandstone historically known as “El Roca Grande” that protrudes from the mountainside just below Gibraltar Road.

“This was a must-see stop reached by a trail leading up from Mountain Drive and connecting to La Cumbre Trail,” Graffy writes of El Roca Grande.

See related previous post: Trail Up Mt. La Cumbre (1914).

Today’s Gibraltar Road, he notes, was built during the 1930s and was originally known as “Depression Drive.”

Back in the day hikers and equestrians would walk up a series of steps carved into El Roca Grande, along a metal pole and cable setup as seen on the old postcard image above.

Today the remnants of this metal handrail remain.

El Roca Grande noted here, which sits just below Gibraltar Road. The new house still under construction sits stop the larger sandstone outcrop which is just above Gibraltar Road.

For shits and giggles in the 1960s and 1970s the boys would scramble over the sandstone outcrop of El Roca Grande, grab a piece of the old pipe, and dangle over the steep chaparral slope below.

Performing the white-knuckled stunt was a hell of a thrill.

If you were really brave or stupid or a little of both you did it at night.

But nothing compared to “hanging the pipe” in the dark on three hits of acid.

I tell you, I can’t for the life of me imagine why they closed this place down.

Probably the same reasons they closed Goddard: Goddard Campground: The Lost Jewel of West Camino Cielo. I know a guy that was run over on West Camino Cielo back in the day one night by Goddard while lying in the road out of his mind on hallucinogens. He lived to tell his tale.

This is classic Santa Barbara.

“When Santa Barbara was first incorporated, back in 1850, of the first 32 business licenses issued by city fathers, 30 were for dealers in spirituous liquors,” Walker A. Tompkins wrote in It Happened In Old Santa Barbara (1976).

These days, Santa Barbara County may be the cannabis capital of California.

Ventura County Star: Santa Barbara County leads California in the number of permits to legally grow marijuana

LA Times: The World’s Largest Pot Farms.

During the statewide lockdown order declared by Governor Newsom amid the novel coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic, which shuttered most businesses, recreational weed shops were declared “essential businesses” and remained open slinging smoke and various other cannabis-derived intoxicants.

Because getting high in Santa Barbara has always been essential, from the beginning.

After decades of generational use, the authorities placed cement barricades along the dirt shoulder of Gibraltar Road to bar access to the big dirt pullout at The Rock, where everybody parked.

And that was it. They killed it. Dead. Done. In one fell swoop. The end of an era.

Somebody bought the land above the road, where we once stood on top of the big outcrop we called The Rock.

Somebody built a house.

Somebody’s front yard now is where it all happened back then.

Farewell to The Rock.

Standing on the old dirt pullout, now barricaded by cement walls, looking back at what we called The Rock.

Santa Barbara backcountry

The men emerged at dawn from the confine of darkness with strained faces wet and ruddy as writhing newborns and the forested land materialized before their bloodshot eyes by the minute in the lightening day, ever larger, until mountain wilderness reared all around in the faint and colorless twilight and the view was strange and desolate. 

Slopes thick and tangled with bristling chaparral rose from the creek and folded and blended into one another and compressed with distance into an olive drab felted wall of mountains that encircled their world.

They stepped off the main trail pounded bare and wide through the river valley and slunk into the bush to enter the narrow canyon mouth of a tributary creek. 

The stream flowed clear and steady. The cool water pooled among boulders in the shade of alder and willow and sycamore.

Tree tops spread over the creek and the canopy filled the canyon like a lumpy green reservoir pooled between sheer sandstone cliffs framing the canyon mouth.

The men bounded across creek stones through the tunnel of trees.

Native trout flitted between the stones like green torpedoes fired underfoot each time they leaped over the purling water, fish of the oldest origins untainted by the genes of McCloud River rainbows that had by mankind’s hand taken over the world. 

Holt Carson stopped and turned about his small wiry frame, chest heaving, mouth agape.

“We’ll know we’re close to the Indian cave when we see the sign warning us from going there.”

He sucked in a fresh breath through a wry smile and turned and waded onward through the creekside scrub. 

“What?” Daniel Hillman snapped.

Holt kept walking letting his comment hang.

Hillman followed, waiting for him to elaborate. 

“Can’t go there?” Hillman pressed in a confused inflection when Holt offered nothing more.

“Nope,” Holt said, almost sounding pleased.

“What the hell you talking about?”

“It’s illegal. Five thousand dollar fine and a six month jail sentence for trespassing,” Holt said.

They kept walking. “Maybe I forgot to tell you that part,” Holt said.

“Yeah pretty fucking sure you never mentioned that tidbit of invaluable information,” Hillman said. “So what’s the deal? We get to leer at this place from afar through field glasses?” 

Holt laughed. Always quick on the rhetorical draw, he fired from the hip: “Well, if you can climb the fence, that might work.”

“A fence? There’s a fucking fence? We’re in the middle of nowhere!”

Holt laughed. They hiked on.

* * *

The blaring white sign reared up in the forest as they approached, an intimidating, bristling hackle of authority unwelcoming of anybody.

“There it is.” Holt pointed up the draw with his chin, hands resting atop trekking poles.

Hillman tramped past him with eyes on the sign and his mouth cracked open. He pulled up short and leaned back on a straight leg, other knee bent, gripping his two trekking poles with tight fists. “Unreal.”

“Read it.”

“Hear ye. Hear ye,” Hillman bellowed in a stentorian blast that resonated from his bearish chest. “To protect fragile resources for future generations the area behind this sign is,” and here he outright yelled to convey that the next few words were printed in all capitals, “CLOSED TO ENTRY.” Then he tagged on the end bit in a low rapid mumble, “until further notice.”

“How ‘bout that?” Holt said. “Guess we have to go home.”

Hillman turned. He fixed Holt in an intense glare through crystal blue eyes. “Horseshit!”

“Here we go,” Holt said, grinning.

“So let’s follow their reasoning. . .”

“Whose reasoning?” Holt interjected, leading the conversation in a direction he knew Hillman would appreciate.

“Good question. Nobody knows. The nameless. The faceless. The unelected. The unaccountable. Some desk-bound cog in the bureaucratic regulatory wheel whose profession it is to revoke without reasonable justification the rights of others on the pretext of supposedly protecting sensitive resources.”

“The wheel that just rolled us,” Holt said, wiping his wet beaded brow with the back of his forearm.

“Ground like grist,” Hillman added.

“No soup for you!” Holt shouted.

They stood in silence, thinking it over, looking about, sucking warm tap water through clear hoses running into their backpacks.

“So the man that lives today,” Hillman began. 

“The man that woke in the wee hours like some tortured lunatic from over the cuckoo’s nest,” Holt declared “and hiked his ass through half the night and all the next damn day.”

“Yes. Yes, indeed. This glorious sentient man of action present before you in the here and now. He is forcibly denied access from his own public lands on behalf of the man that does not exist, for the man that has yet to be born.”

“Insane.” Holt said, shaking his head.

“Utterly. We’ve been stripped of a right that’s been reserved for fictitious people that don’t even exist. What the hell kind of sense does this make?”

“That’s not now a right, my friend,” Holt said. “That’s called privilege.”

“Un-American. Is what it is. What about equal treatment and access and opportunity?” Hillman said. 

“Well, come back in a decade or two, after you’ve been born again as a future generation, and you’re in like Flynn,” Holt said, a double click of his tongue sucking wind through his teeth as if guiding a horse.

They stood silent.

“Or wait here for further notice,” he added.

Hillman grinned and lowered his chin to his chest looking at nothing in particular. He looked up at Holt. “Meanwhile the chosen few come and go as they please, no doubt.”

“Oh yes, of course. It’s all in who you know. We lowly unassociated kulaks get nothing.”

“Nope. We get lectured by Gevlin Dandy. Do as he says, not as he does. He asks for directions to trespass while telling us not to.”

“Yes he does.”

Hillman looked up into the vast cloudless sky, looked ahead, and marched on in a sudden surge of energy, touching the sign with a single gloved finger as he passed. 

Holt fell in behind him. “Just keep to the ravine,” he called ahead.

“Aye.”

A single baby blue eyes now blooming in the folds of the Santa Ynez Mountains, maintaining proper social distancing from family and friends in the background, beneath a blue spot of sky above.

Happy Easter. Happy Sunday.

To health and happiness!

Sunny day
Sweeping the clouds away
On my way to where the air is sweet
Can you tell me how to get
How to get to Sesame Street

Come and play
Everything’s A-OK
Friendly neighbors there
That’s where we meet

Can you tell me how to get
How to get to Sesame Street

It’s a magic carpet ride
Every door will open wide
To happy people like you
Happy people like—
What a beautiful day

Sunny day
Sweepin’ the clouds away
On my way to where the air is sweet
Can you tell me how to get
How to get to Sesame Street
How to get to Sesame Street
How to get to. . .