“Fortunately, the task of preparing this volume has been carried on by those who have had the feeling that a piece of work must be done, but who also have had a purpose to make it reveal beauty and exude the historical atmosphere of the region with which it is concerned.”
—Santa Barbara: A Guide to the Channel City and Its Environs (1941)
The organic curves of chaparral-cloaked Condor National Forest.
I’m growing like a seedRain’s been falling on me
— KT Tunstall, Feel It All
“I’m wondering if we won’t see August thunderstorms.”
I wrote that in June, a freak premonition.
The feeling came after two days of uncommon rain showers, which had followed the unrelenting foggy gloom and weep of a spring that never quite sprung and an exceptionally wet winter.
Though the calendar read summer, something seemed to suggest the showers were not yet over as we headed into what was typically the driest time of year.
I hadn’t thought of July. It was August for some peculiar reason. Not September.
And in August it rained.
The rain fell like we had not seen in many decades, like some people had never seen.
The summer rain was extraordinary!
Larry runs the green grass in Sespe Wilderness, an uncommon sight in summer. (September 2023)
In downtown Santa Barbara 0.59″ fell in August of 2023. That does not seem like much, but usually no rain at all comes in August or only a heavy misting from marine layer off the sea.
Not in forty years — not since the incredible 1.55″ unloaded during the El Nino year of 1982/3 — has more rain fallen downtown for the month.
In 1935 0.70″ was recorded downtown; the only other season on record dating back to 1899 to surpass 2023.
San Marcos Pass station recorded nearly a full inch of rain; an all-time record dating back to 1965, at least.
The historical record shows the following for August beginning in 1965, but with apparently no measurable rain coming until 1983:
1983/84 .48″
1990/91 .36
1996/97 .34
2005/06 .12
2006/07 .03
2008/09 .11
2020/21 .12
2022/23 .97
Spring greens oddly getting greener in fall. (October 2023)
Water still held openly in small tanks in October.
Tell-tale sign. A summer-grown cactus pad born of the August downpour, green and plump and smooth with the banked moisture. (October 2023)
Ventura County backcountry got soaked last August. Rainfall was heavy and widespread.
Lake Piru station measured in at 4.21″ and 3.16″ fell clear back in Lockwood Valley, deep in the mountains’ rain shadow.
In October, dispatches from other parts of the state told of an unseasonal desert bloom and an ephemeral lake filling Badwater Basin in Death Valley.
Los Angeles Times : Death Valley gleams with water, wildflowers and color
Following the rains of August came the flush of fall.
Summer turned slightly to spring again rather than drying further into fall. The burst of water remade Condor National Forest in seldom seen ways, the change subtle but significant.
The summer’s green grass and blooming flowers and especially the flow of water appeared all the more fantastical after many dry years of extreme and exceptional drought, among the most stricken in the state and for the longest time.
And yet I wonder if anybody noticed. So we tack a note to the board here now, that a moment be remembered.
Late-season blooms in December tell of the rains of August.
A howling coyote and one at the den barking. They didn’t seem to sense the presence of a human right off, but were suddenly startled to see or smell me and that’s when the one began barking.
The howler happened to be facing the full Cold Moon of December 26, 2023, which was rising over the silhouetted Santa Ynez Mountains just between Arlington Peak and White Mountain. This presented the common folk lore impression of a wild dog howling at the full moon.
It appears to be a pregnant female, yet also with a bad limp.
Last year I saw coyotes in a different den, but not too far away.
Looking right, a view of the moonrise at 5:28 pm from same place.
Related Post:
Asperitas clouds over Santa Barbara seen from our home on November 15, 2023.
October 2023
Gov. Gavin Newsom signed two laws Tuesday intended to compel California’s public university systems to make progress in their review and return of Native American remains and artifacts.
Decades-old state and federal legislation, known as repatriation laws, require government entities to return these items to tribes. Those artifacts could include prayer sticks or wolves’ skins that have been used for ceremonies.
* * *
December 2023
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California is pressing universities to repatriate thousands of Native American remains and artifacts
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How two campuses are succeeding
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When the state auditor reviewed the UC’s progress, UCLA stood out.
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“We don’t do anything special at UCLA that isn’t supposed to be done legally at other UCs and Cal States,” said Michael Chavez, who started as UCLA’s archaeological collections manager and repatriation coordinator this year.
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Chavez credits the university’s 2020 audit results to the impact of his predecessor, former coordinator Dr. Wendy Teeter.
>>
“[She] didn’t allow any obstacles to get in her way in the pursuit of repatriation,” Chavez said.
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Since retiring from UCLA last year, Teeter now works with the Santa Ynez Band of Chumash Indians as an archaeologist where she reviews development projects and mediates between the developer and the tribe.
..
* * *
James Terry of New York accumulated a large collection of artifacts from the Santa Barbara area between 1875 and 1887. Most of the artifacts came from the Channel Islands. Terry was the first curator of anthropology at the American Museum of Natural History between 1891-1894, and the museum purchased his collection in 1891 (Nelson 1936). The purchase of large collections and subsequent employment of the collectors became a common practice.”
–Chester King, Overview of the History of American Indians in the Santa Monica Mountains (Page 65) Academia.edu
What does this look like?
It looks like three stones stacked by human hands to me.
Who? Why? When?
The rocks did not fall from the wall or ceiling of the cave that I could tell. There is no trace of a break or fracture in the cave or some such occurrence that may have sent the rocks tumbling and falling into place.
Yet, even if they had fallen naturally, it’s impossible to believe they landed stacked so elegantly.
The rocks could have been set deeper into the stone hollow and thus farther into the dry shelter. But they are nonetheless well under the lip of the cave mouth and so sheltered fairly well.
The cave is found on the mountain in a deep canyon, on a relatively steep slope above a section of a creek that only runs seasonally, but that leads into a perennial stream just a short distance away. The photo is taken looking at a sharp angle up into the cave.
To reach this place requires a strenuous hike into Condor National Forest without aid of a trail anywhere and over some of the most rugged terrain I’ve hiked in the county.
The cave is impossible to see from any distance away due to the angle of its opening and a shroud of bushy chaparral.
California Indians visited nearby places in old times and Americans more recently have grown marijuana plants in the canyon.
I don’t have a single reason to suspect that this is the work of guerilla weed growers. That does not make sense to me, for various reasons, not the least of which is the proximity of the cave to decent growing grounds, which are too far away.
I am inclined to think this is a much older artifact than something possibly left by weed growers or Americans of recent times.
The stones look like a possible deadfall gravity trap designed to catch small game, but it strikes me as an odd place to set one up.
The Chumash of old were known to have crafted such traps sometimes baiting them with an acorn (Harrington 1942).
Or maybe the stones were used to hold and store something out of dew and rain and off the ground, to keep it dry and well-aired and so preserved from rot. This possibility seems more likely to me than a trap.
What else might this be?
I don’t think those rocks ended up there on their own.
This is an artifact. An artifact of a different kind than usual.
And I wonder how long it’s been there, who left it and what it was used for.
A plastic bin to hold plastic bags washed ashore along the Gaviota Coast.
“Our research found 6-to-1 plastic to plankton by weight in 1999. We went back last year [2008] and found 46-to-1 plastic to plankton – the weight had gone up, the volume had gone up, the number of pieces had gone up. Every decade, it’s getting close to 10 times worse.”
–Charles Moore on the ratio of plastic to plankton he found in the great Pacific garbage patch, as quoted in Earth Island Journal
Fifteen years ago I published a brief in a glossy print surfing magazine about plastic pollution in the ocean entitled, A Sea Of Debris.
In 1999, the ratio of plastic to plankton found in Pacific waters off the southern California coast had measured 5:2.
What must the ratio be today?
Gaviota Coast
A Sea of Debris (2008)
In 2005, on an atoll deep in the Pacific Ocean, a researcher found a small fragment of plastic from a WWII-era plane inside the stomach of a dead albatross.
For decades the fragment bobbed in ocean currents and tumbled about on desolate beaches. Eventually a bird mistook it for food.
At this moment tons of plastic trash spoil the world’s oceans. The accumulation between California and Hawaii alone is so immense it’s been given a name: The Eastern Pacific Garbage Patch. It’s purportedly the single largest dump on the planet. And it continues to grow.
Beginning about 500 nautical miles off the coast of California, encircled by several major oceanic currents, the water swirls in a massive slow-moving eddy called the North Pacific subtropical gyre.
A natural phenomenon turn pollution trap where debris circulates for decades and covers hundreds of thousands of square miles.
Litter blown offshore and carried in river run off is drawn here by the surrounding currents. And much of it is plastic. It’s forever.
Braemar
The environmental impact is incalculable. Countless seabirds, mammals, fish, and other creatures perish from ingesting bits of debris or getting tangled in it.
Yet, the plastic bottles, cigarette lighters, or even odd billiard ball are merely the most visible traces. Plastic breaks down through a process of photodegradation. It eventually becomes dust, but never disappears entirely.
A pioneer in research on the matter from Long Beach, CA, Charles Moore first began studying the problem ten years ago [1999].
A blog entry from his expedition earlier this year describes “an endless stream of delicate, white snowflakes, like plastic powder coating the ocean’s surface.”
The result is a poisonous mix of seawater with plastic outnumbering plankton in some areas.
Flotsam from the great Pacific garbage patch occasionally inundates atolls within the recently created Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument northwest of Hawaii. Deposits several feet high form along certain shorelines.
Being that the nature reserve is protected by our nation’s strongest environmental laws, the federal government has been compelled to act.
However, without a concerted multi-national effort and grassroots support, it will prove hard to remedy what has grown into a global blight of epic proportions.
Trout sculpture, Chase Palm Park
Waterfalls
Caves and Rocks
Sunsets, Sunrise and Moons
Fishing
Surfing
History
Jack Elliott's Santa Barbara Adventure 