On Sunday, July 15 [2022], Bold Bison continued an epic journey from West Coast client to West Coast client by flying from San Diego to Washington State. Patrick would only be there four days, but I would be there for over a week and a half. Along with a bunch of adventures and a lot of good work, I ended the trip with a day at Olympic National Park, the park that Sean and I visited just second on this whole National Park odyssey.
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On Sunday, July 10 [2022], we technically had the day off, but—as we had during our Texas adventure and as we would again on future Bold Bison trips—Patrick and I spent the day hiking, this time in Kings Canyon National Park. Often with Bold Bison, our work responsibilities and recreational activities blend, and they would on this day. In addition to hiking in Kings Canyon proper, we continued capturing photos and video footage of the devastation wrought by the KNP Complex Fire.
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After our time in Oregon and San Francisco, Bold Bison’s summer 2022 West Coast tour continued in the southern Sierra Nevada. We had been engaged by Sequoia Parks Conservancy (SPC), the nonprofit friends group for Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks, to help them tell the story of, and to continue raising recovery funds for, the KNP Complex Fire that had raged through the Parks and their Sequoia Groves in 2021.
The KNP Complex Fire storytelling project was actually the second project we’d had with Sequoia Parks Conservancy. The first was creating the brand and website for the Giant Sequoia Lands Coalition, whose members include the National Park Service, USDA Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, US Geological Survey, Tule River Indian Tribe, State of California, University of California Berkeley, and Tulare County, along with nonprofit partners, Save the Redwoods League, Giant Sequoia Monument Association, and Sequoia Parks Conservancy.
So on Thursday, July 7 [2022], Patrick and I picked up our rental car—an alarmingly fuel inefficient Toyota Four Runner—in downtown San Francisco, crossed the Bay Bridge, and continued down the Central Valley toward Sequoia National Park.
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In the summer of 2022, I was on the road for Bold Bison for thirty-five days, with the vast majority on the West Coast. Combining multiple projects and meetings into one long trip was a way to be able to be onsite with our clients as inexpensively as possible. In addition, I was able to revisit a few National Park units, both on official business and on my downtime. Any unit I visited would have to be a revisit of a Park I’d already been to with Sean so that we didn’t get misaligned. Still coming out of the pandemic, having a good long time on the road was good for my mental health, although I was disappointed that Sean wasn’t able to join for at least part of the adventure.
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A grave personal injustice was done to the American citizens and resident aliens of Japanese ancestry who, without individual review or any probative evidence against them, were excluded, removed and detained by the United States during World War II.
Personal Justice Denied: Report of the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians
As the afternoon of September 18 progressed, Sean and I drove over from Petroglyph Point at Lava Beds National Monument to nearby Tule Lake National Monument, one of the newest in the system. In 2008, George W. Bush had established WWII Valor in the Pacific National Monument, which was subsequently abolished by Congress in March 2019. Its three sites each became their own park units: Pearl Harbor National Memorial, Aleutian Islands World War II National Monument, and Tule Lake National Monument.
Tule Lake National Monument preserves and interprets Tule Lake Segregation Center, the largest and most controversial of the ten internment camps in which Japanese Americans were imprisoned during World War II.
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In the afternoon of Wednesday, September 18, Sean and I drove just northeast from the main unit of Lava Beds National Monument to visit the tiny Petroglyph Section, separated from the bulk of the Monument by both Tule Lake National Wildlife Refuge and private farmland. For the succeeding hour and a half, we contemplated, I hope respectfully, the Modoc people and their ancestors.
(more…)The Modoc people once lived on both sides of what is now the California-Oregon border, in villages on and near Tule, Lower Klamath, and Clear Lakes. Like the ancient people who first inhabited this area more than 11,000 years ago, they took advantage of abundant waterfowl and game, edible and medicinal plants, and an easily accessible water supply. They moved about the region freely with the seasons, until the coming of whites in 1826 when the pattern of Modoc life began to change. The Modoc, a fiercely independent people, began to clash with some of the newcomers that laid claim to Modoc grounds for their own uses, and the seeds were sown for one of the most tragic of the Indian Wars: the Modoc War of 1872-73.
National Park Service
Lava Beds National Monument. A place containing the wonders and the terrors of both nature and human nature all within its boundaries.
– Sean M. Santos
Sean wrote the above on Instagram after we concluded our visit to Lava Beds National Monument and nearby Tule Lake National Monument on Wednesday, September 18. As we were headed back to our night’s lodging, he also observed, “Everyone who finds themselves in this part of the country should come and visit this place.”
Lava Beds National Monument was established in 1925 to protect over 46,000 acres of the north flank of Medicine Lake Volcano, a massive and low shield volcano in the southern Cascades, not far northeast of Mount Shasta. Although relatively small, the Monument boasts three lava flows, multiple cinder cones and other volcanic features, and almost 700 lava tube caves, the highest concentration in North America. At around 4,000 feet in the eastern foothills of the Cascades in northern California, the vast sagebrush sea washes right up to the Monument’s tortured volcanic landscape. The Monument is bounded on the north by Tule Lake National Wildlife Refuge and on the west, south, and east by Modoc National Forest with some private property to the northeast toward the town of Tule Lake, California. It contains over 28,000 acres of federally protected wilderness.
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On Monday, September 16, we woke into a world that could hardly have been more different than the warm and sunny afternoon we’d enjoyed the day before. Over the next few days, as our trip shifted northward from California into Oregon, the weather also shifted, from summer to what felt like winter. It altered the trajectory of our trip, and it added a flavor of adventure that was reminiscent of the sudden cold snap in our during our trip to the Dakotas five years earlier.
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On Sunday, September 15, we spent a classic National Park day in the wild heart of Lassen Volcanic National Park. I love a day when we can rise from our tent and go see some amazingly lovely sights propelled by nothing but our own legs. On the docket for our big hike day in Lassen was an 11.6 mile loop over creeks, around lakes, and into the Park’s designated wilderness.
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Sean and I had wrapped up our auto tour of the Lassen Volcanic National Park Highway by about ten to three on Saturday, September 14. We decided to spend the rest of the day exploring the area around Butte Lake in the northeast corner of the Park, an area that was once a separate National Monument before it was incorporated into the National Park.
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Sean and I arrived at the Kohm Yah-mah-nee Visitor Center at about a quarter after eleven on the morning of Saturday, September 14. The LEED-certified platinum building only opened in 2008 and was Lassen Volcanic National Park’s first formal visitor center. Our intention was to check out the visitor center and then drive the Park Highway all the way to the northwest entrance at Manzanita Lake, stopping at the interpreted sites along the way.
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Lassen Volcanic National Park protects over 106,000 acres at the southern end of the Cascade Range in northern California, including Lassen Peak. Lassen Peak, southernmost in a string of legendary volcanoes (Shasta, Hood, St. Helens, Rainier, Baker) in a range that stretches north to British Columbia, is quiet today, but it was in the midst of an eruption just a century ago. In 1907, the year after passage of the Antiquities Act gave him the power, President Theodore Roosevelt declared two National Monuments in the Cascade Range east of Redding, California: Lassen Peak National Monument and Cinder Cone National Monument. Seven years later, in May 1914, long dormant Lassen Peak began to erupt (after an estimated 27,000 years of inactivity). The following year, in May 1915, the mountain exploded, sending a column of ash and steam 30,000 feet into the air and partially collapsing in on itself with flows of mud, ash, and pumice traveling some twenty-five miles from the crater. Major steam eruptions continued into 1921, with some 400 total eruptions between 1914 and 1921. In August 1916 with the eruption very much ongoing, President Woodrow Wilson signed legislation combining the National Monuments and expanding them into Lassen Volcanic National Park.
Lassen Volcanic National Park had long been among the Parks I’d been most excited to visit in this whole journey. In fact, more often than not, I’d cited it as the Park I was most excited to visit. Now just past noon on Friday, September 13, having finished packing up our campsite on the beach, we were on our way there.
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Friday, September 13 was a travel day. It was time to strike camp and continue on from Redwood National Park to Lassen Volcanic National Park. But first, we had time for one more morning adventure at Redwood: Fern Canyon, located at the northern end of Davison Road, just a couple miles from the campground. Like the campground, Fern Canyon is in Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park, part of the patchwork of co-managed state and federal lands that comprises Redwood National and State Parks.
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After having spent the previous day exploring distributed Redwood National and State Parks sites by car, we intended to make Thursday, September 12 the day of our big hike at Redwood. Our destination was the heart of the Redwood Creek area, traveling into the middle of the largest contiguous section of the National Park. From the trailhead, Tall Trees Grove is an 8.3-mile one-way hike, which would make for a long, almost seventeen mile day hike. We doubted we’d make it that far, but we’d make it some portion of that distance. We thought that after the hike we’d head down to Arcata and check out the hot tub cafe that was recommended to us by Ang at the Chicago REI and by our friend Aimee.
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We finished our walk at Lady Bird Johnson Grove at about 1:30pm on September 11. Since we were already partway up Holter Ridge on Bald Hills Road, we decided to continue up to a couple of overlooks that Aimee had recommended before deciding where to spend the remainder of our afternoon.
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We slept well, and I awoke around 7am in our tent at Gold Bluffs Beach in Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park. It was September 11, and we had a full day of exploring Redwood National Park ahead of us. It was the third September 11 anniversary that we’d spent in the National Parks after Theodore Roosevelt in 2014 and Bryce Canyon in 2016, and it always felt appropriate.
After our long drive up from San Francisco the day before, we decided not to do our big hike in the Park on this first of two full days. Instead we decided to get the lay of the land and a better sense of how the patchwork of state and federal lands interconnected with private ranches and forests and small communities in the area.
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Redwood National and State Parks protect over 138,000 acres of far northern California coast, old growth Redwood groves, second growth coastal forest, and watersheds large and small, including the mouth of the Klamath River. Interest in protecting the fantastic groves began in earnest with the creation of the Save the Redwoods League in 1918 (only two years after the creation of the Park Service). In a pattern that mirrors the creation of Indiana Dunes National Park, first National Park Service director, Stephen Mather, was involved in some of the early protection efforts, but corporate lumber interests blocked creation of a National Park. Also like Indiana Dunes, the state stepped in, creating four California State Parks in the late 1920s and early 1930s to protect the trees: Jedediah Smith State Park, Del Norte Redwoods State Park, Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park, and (a bit further south) Humboldt Redwoods State Park. Again like Indiana Dunes, federal protection would not come until the 1960s when Redwood National Park was established by Congress in partnership with the Johnson administration. Ten years later, in 1978, 48,000 acres were added to Redwood National Park to protect the watershed of Redwood Creek before it entered the Park. Unlike Indiana Dunes, in 1994, the administrative functions of the National Park and the three northernmost state parks were combined.
Journeying from San Francisco to Redwood National Park was our adventure for Tuesday, September 10. It’s a long drive (some five and a half hours) even going the most direct route. We intended though, to take the opportunity to drive up the California coast on Highway 1. This would at least double the driving time. But here the journey was absolutely the destination.
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It was the middle of Monday afternoon, September 9, and Sean and I had finished our trip to Alcatraz Island. With the rest of the afternoon in front of us, we decided to walk over and have a look at San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park. The Park, established in 1988, celebrates San Francisco’s history as a major port city, as well as seafaring traditions along the entire West Coast.
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Perhaps this is what our national parks hold for us: stories, of who we have been and who we might become—a reminder that as human beings our histories harbor both darkness and light. To live in the United States of America and tell only one story, from one point of view, diminishes all of us.
– Terry Tempest Williams, The Hour of Land
Monday, September 9 was our trip to Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay. The twenty-two acre island, now part of Golden Gate National Recreation Area, was once a rounded hill in the valley that would become San Francisco Bay after sea levels rose at the end of the last ice age. During the Gold Rush in the middle of the nineteenth century, the island held a lighthouse and a military fort. Later, the fort was converted to a military prison with a cellhouse at the top of the island completed in 1912. In 1934, the Federal Department of Corrections took control of the island and turned it into the nation’s first and most notorious maximum security prison. It served that function until 1963 when it was shut down by the Kennedy Administration. The island languished for over six years until it was occupied by Native American rights activists in November 1969. The occupation lasted nineteen months. The following year, the National Park Service purchased the island to add it to the newly established Golden Gate National Recreation Area. Shortly after taking ownership of the island, the Park Service began offering tours of the facilities in what had been intended to be a short term use while the agency decided what to do with Alcatraz. The tours proved to be so popular that they have continued for some forty-five years with annual visitation now topping 1.4 million tourists.
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On Friday, September 6, Sean and I began what was our longest trip since our honeymoon in 2015. The night before, we had quietly toasted at home my final day as Director of Communications at Openlands. After our trip, I’d be starting a new adventure as the founder of Bold Bison Communications and Consulting. We had a lot of packing to do, so we celebrated with a couple drinks and some delivery Brazilian food for dinner. We were both behind on our packing since he’d had to spend a portion of the previous week in Philadelphia for work and I’d been wrapping things at my former employer.
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For a long time, I’d known that I wanted to spend my 40th birthday at Guadalupe Mountains National Park. So I’d always be able to answer the question, “Which Parks are you going to do next?” with a nod to a distant trip to Guadalupe Mountains. Then it became the next Park, and then that trip came and went. Afterward, we weren’t sure where exactly we would focus for the next big trip, but a grand trip that had been percolating in my mind soon became the clear frontrunner. In early 2019 we began planning a trip with great bookend cities and some iconic Parks: flying into Portland, doing the three Parks that surround northern California’s Mount Shasta, and flying home from San Francisco. Redwood National Park just sounded magical. Crater Lake National Park is one of the iconic early Parks. And Lassen Volcanic has long been one of the Parks in the system I’ve been most excited about.
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Just before 3pm on July 4, Sean and I departed Mist Falls and began the hike down Paradise Valley. The Falls marked the farthest into the heart of the Sierra Nevada that we would reach on this trip. The following day we would continue on to the third part of our California trip: three nights in San Diego and Andrew and Yesi’s wedding.
For our Fourth of July day hike in Kings Canyon National Park, Sean and I chose the popular trail to Mist Falls on the South Fork of the Kings River. From the parking area at Roads End, the trail gains about 800 feet of elevation in just under four miles, with most of the elevation gain at the end.
General Grant National Park was established in 1890 to protect 154 acres of the General Grant Grove of Giant Sequoias. Then, fifty years later, General Grant National Park was transformed into Kings Canyon National Park, 461,901 acres of mostly wilderness. The push to protect a greater portion of the Sierra Nevada as a wilderness Park was led in large part by Franklin Roosevelt’s legendary Secretary of the Interior, Harold Ickes. The lands that would become Kings Canyon National Park were held by the Forest Service. In the 1930s, advocacy organizations like the Sierra Club and the National Parks Association were becoming increasingly concerned that development in the Parks was destroying their wilderness qualities. They felt that the lands in question may be better off managed as wilderness by the Forest Service rather than developed for visitors by the Park Service. This led to Ickes’ lobbying the organizations for support in the creation of a new National Park, the reverse of how these things usually happened. As the 1930s drew to a close, FDR’s enthusiasm for the new Park grew after Ickes shared with the president a book of images of the Kings Canyon region by famed photographer Ansel Adams. By early 1940, Ickes and Roosevelt had swayed Congress, and the president signed the establishing legislation for the Park on March 1. In 1965, Lyndon Johnson signed legislation that further expanded the Park to its present boundaries.
At a little after 1pm on July 3, Sean and I reached the southern edge of the plateau on which Sequoia National Park’s Giant Forest sits. We were at the junction of Trail of the Sequoias and High Sierra Trail. In front of us to the south was the gorge of the Middle Fork of the Kaweah River, some 3,700 feet below. Beyond were the ridges and peaks of the southern Sierra Nevada.
Between the heavy pine and silver fir zones towers the Big Tree (Sequoia[dendron] gigantea), the king of all the conifers in the world, “the noblest of the noble race” … It extends, a widely interrupted belt, from a very small grove on the middle fork of the American River to the head of Deer Creek, a distance of about 260 miles, its northern limit being near the thirty-ninth parallel, the southern a little below the thirty-sixth. The elevation of the belt above the sea varies from about 5000 to 8000 feet … Southward the giants become more and more irrepressibly jubilant, heaving their massive crowns into the sky from every ridge and slope, waving onward in graceful compliance with the complicated topography of the region. The finest of the Kaweah section of the belt is on the broad ridge between Marble Creek and the middle fork, and is called the Giant Forest. It extends from the granite headlands, overlooking the hot San Joaquin plains, to within a few miles of the cool glacial fountains of the summit peaks … and is included in the Sequoia National Park.
– John Muir, The Yosemite, 1912
It was not yet 10:30am as we turned from the throng at the base of the General Sherman Tree and started into the Giant Forest on the popular, paved Congress Trail. I had a general sense that we would ultimately end up at the Giant Forest Museum (where at 6:30pm, the shuttle would return us to Three Rivers) by way of Moro Rock. But our exact route through the grove was yet to be determined.
Sequoia National Park was established on September 25, 1890 as the second National Park in the system. Its original primary function was to protect a number of groves of Giant Sequoias in the southern Sierra Nevada from logging. One grove of the famed trees had already been protected in 1864 when Yosemite Valley and Mariposa Grove were given to the state of California for permanent protection. On October 1, 1890, several days after Sequoia National Park was created, another grove of Giant Sequoias was protected as General Grant National Park (which in 1940 would grow to become Kings Canyon National Park). General Grant National Park protected the grove around the General Grant Tree, thought to be the largest in the world until 1931 when Sequoia National Park’s Sherman Tree was discovered to be larger. On that same October day in 1890, hundreds of thousands of acres around Yosemite Valley were also protected as Yosemite National Park, although the Valley and Mariposa Grove wouldn’t officially join the National Park until 1906.
All told, a flurry of legislation in early autumn 1890 began a process that would eventually set aside over 1,615,000 acres of the Sierra Nevada as National Parks. Over 404,000 of those acres were Sequoia National Park.
Our ten days in California began with three nights in Los Angeles visiting Charlie and Kevin, who had just moved there from Chicago and were still settling into their apartment in Marina del Rey. Sean and I were excited to see them in their new life.
In late May 2017, my cousin Andrew, who had been our fellow adventurer in Death Valley National Park, proposed to his girlfriend, Yesenia. This happy development ensured a fifth return to California for Sean and me in barely two years. At first, we’d assumed that this trip would be separate from any National Park adventures, but then our Chicago friends Charlie and Kevin announced in late 2017 that they were moving to Los Angeles in early 2018. As the wedding plans came together, Andrew and Yesi chose July 6 for their nuptials in San Diego. And as we began to put together a trip that would include some time with Charlie and Kevin in LA and the wedding celebration in San Diego, Sean pointed to the two National Parks in southern California that remained unvisited on the map that hangs in our home office. “Which are those? Can we visit them when we’re in California for Andrew’s wedding?”
Our final morning at Death Valley National Park dawned with the sun pushing away the shadows from this vast place. It was Tuesday morning, February 28, and we’d have to start back to San Diego by noon at the latest. The following afternoon, Sean and I would fly home to Chicago.
The previous night as we found our campsite, everything was a rich black. In the morning as we looked out of our tents into the sunrise, we found the foothills of the Cottonwood mountains, where our camp was nestled, gloriously lit up. As were the quickly departing clouds. Although other parts of the valley had felt the drop of rain overnight, our tiny corner of it hadn’t.
Mosaic Canyon follows a fault almost two miles into Tucki Mountain. Actually, the canyon continues farther into the mountain, but at 1.8 miles, an insurmountable fifty-foot dry fall marks the end of a really great hike. Mosaic Canyon is a testament to the power of water written in beautiful stone.
Andrew, Sean, and I arrived at the parking area for Mosaic Canyon at about a quarter to four on February 27. We had traveled some eighty miles from our campsite on Harry Wade Road far near the southern end of Death Valley. Now in the foothills of Tucki Mountain above Stovepipe Wells, we were ready for our final adventure of our final full day in Death Valley National Park.
Badwater Basin in Death Valley is 282 feet below sea level, making it the lowest point on North America and among the lowest on the planet. The basin is covered in a crust of salt, ninety-five percent of which is table salt (sodium chloride). With nowhere lower to go, the Amargosa River ends its one-hundred eighty-five-mile journey here. Runoff from the eastern side of the Panamint Range and the western side of the Amargosa Range also ends up here. Once, Death Valley was filled by Lake Manley, eighty miles long and six-hundred feet deep. But the lake slowly dried up after the last Ice Age, leaving a bed of salt replenished by salts and minerals carried by water trapped here before evaporating.
After our twilight drive down Death Valley the previous evening, we were ready to spend Monday, February 27 making our way slowly back up the valley to the vicinity of Stovepipe Wells. The plan for the day was to take our time exploring some canyons and visiting Badwater Basin. We’d walked down to the Amargosa River after breakfast. Now, having struck our camp along Harry Wade Road, Sean, Andrew, and I were back in the Jeep headed to Room Canyon not far to the north.
Room Canyon, hidden in the foothills of the Black Mountains south of Mormon Point, features sheer reddish walls opening to a large room (for which the canyon is named) beneath a dry fall. The room is a 1.3-mile hike from Badwater Road. Side canyons add some distance, making exploring Room Canyon a 3.6-mile total out-and-back hike from the road.
By 5pm on Sunday, February 26, Sean, Andrew, and I were back in the Jeep and driving south through the northern part of Death Valley. The task at hand: finding a place to rest our heads for the night. The immensity of Death Valley was more apparent for us on this drive than it had been throughout the rest of our time in the Park. It was fifty-seven miles from Ubehebe Crater to the Park Headquarters at Furnace Creek. And our intention was to continue south well beyond Furnace Creek.
After saying goodbye to the Racetrack on Sunday, February 26, Andrew, Sean, and I climbed into the Jeep for the return drive to our campsite in Hidden Valley. After breakfast, we’d make the drive all the way back to central Death Valley, with a stopover at the Ubehebe Crater complex of maar, or steam, volcanoes.
So here’s the thing about North America: we haven’t been here that long. We really haven’t. Likely Native Americans have been here longer than history and science have traditionally thought. The thirteen-thousand-year-old bones found at Channel Islands National Park hint at that. But in particular, we who descend from peoples who didn’t cross the Bering Land Bridge have been on this continent hardly any time at all. And so there are still mysteries here. There are still things we don’t understand about how this place we call home works. How just the right barometric pressure and just the right wind velocity and just the right thin skein of ice or frost on just a flat enough surface like a dried lake can cause solid rock to skid across the land and leave a trail like a snail, a long footprint like a snake that twists and spirals and doubles back on itself. Because there are mysteries left on this continent.
And one of those mysteries is Racetrack Playa in Death Valley National Park, a mysterious that place exists in 2017 is a testament to the legacy of a century and a half of conservation in North America. And so we went, three Catholic boys as if to church, on the morning of Sunday, February 26, to a place full of magic.
After breaking camp in Panamint Valley, Andrew, Sean, and I drove to Death Valley proper, over a pass through the Cottonwood Mountains of the Panamint Range. It was 3pm on February 25 by the time we reached Stovepipe Wells in the shadow of Tucki Mountain. We’d been in Death Valley National Park for twenty-four hours already, but had yet to check-in, as it were, and inquire about backcountry camping or register as visitors.
We passed the campground, which, situated on the desert floor, sort of looked like an RV parking lot with tents. Seeing it, we were very glad to be camping in the backcountry. Already, the solitude it afforded had infected us and made us glad.
The desert was cold when I woke up and emerged from my tent into the pre-dawn glow at the edges of the Panamint Valley. It was just after 6am on Saturday, February 25, and the temperature must have been in the low forties at least.
On Thursday, February 23, Sean and I began our Death Valley National Park adventure by boarding a flight from Chicago O’Hare to San Diego. It had been a long week for me, with a major meeting that I had literally staged ending some three hours before our flight, and getting away to the desert to clear my head was just profoundly inviting.
At almost 3.4 million acres, Death Valley National Park is the largest National Park outside of Alaska and the fifth largest National Park overall. It encompasses entire mountain ranges and arid valleys at the western edge of the Great Basin, where the Mojave Desert transitions into the higher, colder Great Basin Desert. The Great Basin, hemmed in on the west by the Sierra Nevada, on the east by the Wasatch Range of the Rocky Mountains, and on the south by the Colorado Plateau, is defined by the inability of any of its streams or rivers to reach the sea. They all flow from mountains or springs to valleys where they vanish, just as the Amargosa River flows south through Nevada, makes a wide, northerly turn, and ends in the salt flats of Badwater Basin in Death Valley, California.
For all its justifiably famous desert, Death Valley National Park is a landscape of staggering topographical relief. From Badwater Basin, 282 feet below sea level and the lowest point in North America, it is less than twenty miles as the raven flies to Telescope Peak, at 11,043 feet the highest point in the Panamint Range and in the Park. The Panamints and their companion ranges in the Park, including the Black Mountains and Grapevine Mountains of the Amargosa Range, are some of the 160 north-south trending ranges, which, along with the ninety valleys in between, comprise the Basin and Range Province.
The rain shadow of the Sierra Nevada, the wind that sweeps off the slopes, the dry air that rises with each succeeding range and then is pushed into each valley by the wind, and the low elevation of Death Valley makes it the hottest and driest place in North America. The average temperature in July is 116 degrees. The record high is 134 degrees.
It was the early afternoon of Friday, August 12 as Sean and I made our way up the California coast north from Muir Woods National Monument and Golden Gate National Recreation Area to Point Reyes National Seashore. Established in 1962 to prevent impending development, the National Seashore protects over 71,000 acres of the California coast as a patchwork of federally-designated wilderness and “pastoral” lands used by ranchers. The Seashore comprises most of a huge, roughly triangular peninsula, Point Reyes, which sits on the eastern edge of the Pacific Plate, while the adjacent mainland is at the edge of the North American Plate. The two plates are separated where the peninsula connects to the mainland by the San Andreas Fault.
In August 2016, in the midst of our Centennial Year goal of eight National Parks, Sean and I unexpectedly visited three National Park Service units that were not National Parks.
After having spent ten days in late May in California, in August Sean and I spent another week in the state. It would ultimately be the second of three trips to California that we would make within nine months. The first trip’s goal was to visit our friend, Patrick, at the Getty and hit two National Parks: Yosemite and Channel Islands. While we were there, Sean mentioned that he’d likely be coming back in a few months as his firm rolled out a new software at its offices across the country. Back in May, I’d dismissed out of hand the idea of returning with him. But as the summer progressed, I found myself persuaded.
Our ferry would be leaving Santa Cruz Island at 4pm on Sunday, May 29, 2016, and all too soon it was time to board. And the next day we would return to Chicago, concluding a ten-day trip to California that had included visiting Patrick, going to Disneyland, and camping at Yosemite National Park.
It was about 2:45pm on on Sunday, May 29, and we had about 45 minutes to an hour left on Santa Cruz Island before Patrick, Sean, and I would have to board the ferry that would take us back across the Santa Barbara Channel to Ventura. So we decided to stay close to the beach at Scorpion Anchorage from which passengers were being ferried in dinghies to the actual ferry because the pier had been damaged in a storm.
We explored the rocky shoreline east toward Scorpion Rock.
Back at Scorpion Ranch on the afternoon of May 29, 2016, Sean and Patrick and I went in search of more little foxes like those we’d seen in the morning before we’d set off on our hike.
The Santa Cruz Island Fox is one of six subspecies endemic to the Channel Islands of southern California. Although they are descended from the Gray Fox on the mainland, over thousands of years of isolation on the islands, the foxes have grown much smaller. They measure only about two feet from nose to tail, about the size of a house cat, and they weigh only three to six pounds. The six subspecies also differ from each other in terms of tail length, muzzle shape, and coloration.
It was the afternoon of May 29, 2016, and our hike on the eastern end of Santa Cruz Island continued. Sean, Patrick, and I had already hiked from Scorpion Canyon out to the Potato Harbor Overlook. Now after picnicking there, we continued on our five-mile loop hike that would lead us to the top of Cavern Point and then back to Scorpion Canyon via a different route. Along the way we were afforded great views from the island’s three hundred foot high cliffs against the backdrop of a persistent marine layer over the Santa Barbara Channel.
After our first encounter with the Santa Cruz Island Fox (on May 29, 2016), Patrick, Sean, and I set off on a hike to the cliffs above Potato Harbor. We would combine this hike with a return past Cavern Point, creating a pleasant, five-mile loop hike on the eastern edge of Santa Cruz Island, where the undulating landscape is slowly recovering from over a century of intensive ranching, including acres in crops and pastureland.
The plant species of eastern Santa Cruz Island are a mixture of common southern California coastal species, endemic species found only on Santa Cruz Island or some combination of the Channel Islands, common wild invasive species from the mainland, and purposefully cultivated invasive species leftover from the island’s ranching history The animal species tend toward the native, since the wild hogs and sheep and other domesticated animals have been removed. The removal of these farm animals has allowed the island flora to begin to recover after a century of grazing.
Channel Islands National Park was established in 1980 by President Jimmy Carter. The National Park upgraded and expanded the earlier Channel Islands National Monument established in 1938 by President Franklin Roosevelt. The Park protects five of the eight islands in the California Archipelago off the coast of southern California: Anacapa and Santa Barbara (which comprised the original National Monument), Santa Cruz, Santa Rosa, and San Miguel. The Channel Islands, which were never connected to the mainland and are separated from the North American coast by deep underwater trenches, are called the American Galapagos because of their wealth of endemic species (at least 145 species of plants and animals found nowhere else on the planet).
During the last Ice Age, when sea levels were much lower, the four northernmost islands (San Miguel, Santa Rosa, Santa Cruz, and Anacapa) were connected as one huge island south of what is now the city of Santa Barbara. At that time, the distance from the mainland was much shorter, allowing mammals as big as mammoths and as small as mice to cross to the island. Birds, currents, and winds carried seeds to the island. After sea levels rose with the melting of the huge ice sheets, many of the species on the islands were cut off from both the mainland and the other islands, evolving into distinct species and subspecies.
Our friend Patrick’s year in Los Angeles on a Getty Fellowship was the ideal opportunity to visit Channel Islands National Park, particularly since the ferry dock was less than an hour from his apartment and (even more importantly) he was keen to join us for a day trip. Our voyage across the Santa Barbara Channel would be the conclusion of a larger eleven-day trip visiting Patrick, Disneyland, and Yosemite National Park.
Logistically, we knew that we wanted to avoid either Disneyland or Yosemite on weekends, and going over to one of the Channel Islands on a Saturday or Sunday worked best for Patrick. As planning for the larger trip solidified, the Sunday of Memorial Day weekend, our final full day in California, became the best option.
The only remaining question was which of the Islands we would visit.
On Saturday, May 28, we broke camp at Hodgdon Meadow Campground after four nights in Yosemite National Park. It was time to return to Patrick’s apartment in Los Angeles, and then on to other adventures in Channel Islands National Park the next day. Saying goodbye to Yosemite for the second time, I knew it would not be the last time. But likely our next visit will be with our kids someday.