Category Archives: the land

Ah, the coming of fall in Southern California. Flakes of ash fall as thickly and softly and white as snow. Clouds of smoke bigger than mountains fill the sky. Orangish sunlight and hazy gray skies last for weeks on end. Thousands of firefighters struggle to contain blazes with flames twenty and thirty feet high. BulldozersContinue reading “The Angry Fall”

The Day Fire (so named because it began on Labor Day) continues to burn in the Los Padres National Forest northeast of Ventura County. It so happens I spent about the last month working intensively on a fire story, to be published tomorrow, so this issue has been on my mind. The good news isContinue reading “Day Fire, Day Nine”

Once, I hear, the Western desert attracted crazy dreamers; prospectors, pioneers, fanatics waving crazy religious tracts, some of whom even claimed to have seen and spoken to Jesus Christ and God the Father. Now the Southwestern desert attracts developers, and people who dream of a house of their own, even if they can’t afford theContinue reading “The New Desert Dwellers”

An El Nino condition is developing, which will likely bring a good helping of clouds and rain to the West Coast this year…for the third year in a row. This is also breaking up hurricanes that could develop along the Gulf Coast. It’s worth mentioning that the record-breaking rain Southern California lived through last yearContinue reading “Unusual El Nino Develops”

Excerpted from Walt Whitman’s "Leaves of Grass." The poem was written in 1874: Sixty years later, the California legislature named the sequoia the state tree. "Song of the Redwood-Tree" The flashing and golden pageant of California, The sudden and gorgeous drama, the sunny and ample lands, The long and varied stretch from Puget sound toContinue reading “Song of the Redwood Tree (Sunday Morning on the Planet)”

I’ve been trying for two weeks to find the time to talk about the fog and the possibility it might be leaving us here in California in the future…but it’s a complicated subject and I just haven’t been able to pull it together. But we can still be thankful when it comes…

Summer blackberries. ‘Nuff said.

Just another summer sunset…taken tonight on an evening walk. 

Hmmmm. My favorite meteorologist, Bill Patzert, yesterday linked the drought in the Southwest–now heading into its eighth year–to the unusually hot summer we’ve been having down here in Southern California. According to the story in the LATimes: The cool ocean breezes and clouds that meteorologists call Southern California’s natural air conditioner broke down this year,Continue reading “Southwestern Drought Linked to Hot SoCal Summer”