“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)
Kiddin’ around on La Cumbre Peak, the warm apricot glow of that slanted winter light.
“And it was one of those days in the high pines when the sun and sweet breeze get into your underwear.”
—Don DeLillo, Underworld (1997)
Trial by Torrent
El Niño has continued to strengthen through summer and warnings of a super El Niño now continue into fall.
Heavy rains are expected, maybe even record amounts like we’ve never in our lives seen around here.
Governor Newsom recently declared a state of emergency.
Governor Newsom proclaims state of emergency to bolster statewide El Niño preparedness, protect California
SACRAMENTO – As a historic El Niño storm season develops, Governor Newsom is proclaiming a state of emergency today, mobilizing state resources ahead of potential winter storms and other impacts.
The emerging El Niño event is already breaking records, and forecasters expect it to continue to strengthen, potentially becoming the strongest in recorded history.
The Forest Service has a track record of forcibly prohibiting foot access into public lands when it rains and trails wash out.
What would Dick Smith think?
David Stillman up the creek without a trail, Dick Smith Wilderness.
The Ranger
And with dust in throat I crave
Only knowledge will I save
To the game you stay a slaveRover, wanderer
Nomad, vagabond
Call me what you will—Metallica, Wherever I Roam
Stillman never let lack of a maintained trail stop him from hiking the public lands. He couldn’t care less about a footpath or if it washed out.
He is not alone in this sentiment, and that’s why we mention him. This is not uncommon practice among many hearty and stoic Americans, including senior citizens.
If a broken trail was to stand between the man and the forest, then the trail be damned.
Take a looksee at his weblog:
Stillman: Devil’s Heart Peak via New Route: Coronary Couloir, Class III
Often times, the less trace of trail to be found, the more attractive and better the hike.
Sweat, blood and blisters, dues paid.
To the game he stayed a slave.
“You got the sickness, too, huh?” he once quipped out afield together when on a 22-mile day hike up, over and down Pine Mountain in Ventura.
He was speaking to that insatiable throbbing compulsion deep inside that drives men forth for no discernible reason, as Mallory once explained.
Alpine starts at 2 or 3 in the morning and hiking hours in the dark by headlamp before sunrise and after sunset are not uncommon.
A steadfast insistence on deep immersion in the visceral thick of the bush.
Some people take bigger bites out of the apple than others.
Some people prefer the road less traveled or no road at all.
Some people are not risk-averse.
Maybe it’s better to allow it, because the Forest Service cannot possibly stop it.
Perhaps public servants would do better to work with the people whose land it is and whom demand to be there, rather than working against them, and telling them to leave.
I think Dick Smith in his heart would have identified with this sort of passion, surely.
I have no doubts, but I’ll allow that maybe I’m wrong.
And the Earth becomes my throne
I adapt to the unknown
Under wandering stars I’ve grown
By myself but not alone
I ask no one
And my ties are severed clean
The less I have, the more I gain
Off the beaten path I reign—Metallica
Somewhere Danny Hillman is complaining about toxic masculinity.
Dick Smith On Access
“Despite his many positive attributes, Dick Smith is described as being rather stubborn in his beliefs and controversial in his actions.
He was known for intentionally removing private fences so that the public could have trail access.”
—Bryan Conant, Matilija and Dick Smith Wilderness map (2013)
“All right, maybe he was something of a crank — he’d be the first to admit it.”
—T.C. Boyle, A Friend of the Earth (2000)
We respect and admire the steadfast man of conviction who sticks to principle in the clutch, whether we agree with him or not.
To be controversial is to be consequential. To be consequential is to matter.
Sometimes decorum serves as a bulwark others hide behind.
Sometimes the flame of righteous dissent is dampened by the strictures of social etiquette.
As Laurel Thatcher Ulrich observed in 1976, “Well-behaved women seldom make history.”
They named a wilderness after Smith. He must have been doing something right, and not much wrong.
Clint Elliott, Jack’s father, aged 67 scrambling up Cold Springs Creek, just below Tangerine Falls, after the Montecito Debris Flow (2020) with Carlos Andrés Neda García.
“That night it rained. But this was no ordinary shower or even a downpour, this was an El Niño event, evil harbinger of the apocalyptic weather to come, . . .”
—T. C. Boyle, A Friend of the Earth (2000)
Simple Questions
If a trail need not be necessary to hike through the forest, then why does it matter if it washes out?
Hiking a boulder-chute of a creek like upper Cold Springs in the Santa Ynez Mountains is not illegal.
If it is not illegal to walk the public lands without a trail on any other given day, then on what reasonable basis can it honestly be deemed illegal to hike when a trail simply washes out after a rainstorm?
We believe these sorts of forest closures are unconstitutional.
Carlos Andrés Neda García, Grand Capucin, Mont Blanc, France
Jack’s lion standoff in the Santa Ynez Mountains. (video)
“Finally I asked Dick point blank, ‘What do I do if you drop dead while we are out here in the middle of nowhere?’
‘Just leave me,’ he replied.”
—Jan Hamber, as quoted by Ray Ford, Dick Smith was Conscience of Santa Barbara Backcountry, Noozhawk.com
The Nature of Nature
To Smith rugged wildlands were inviting.
You know, that hackneyed quote about the mountains calling and the man must go.
The mountain’s strenuous challenges were a grownup-kid-kind-of-fun. Like Muir in a tree in a wind storm.
The possibility of getting hurt was never held up as a good reason not to go.
Are you kidding me?
Smith accepted the inherent risk in nature, no matter the consequence.
The nature of nature is dynamic and dangerous.
That’s the way we like it, ese.
“Life’s a risk, carnal.”
—Paco Aguilar, Blood In Blood Out
A scrum of tadpoles in a metamorphic growth race against the sun and evaporation.
Ford on Smith
Ray Ford once authored a piece about Dick Smith in which Ford described sitting on the mountain’s crest behind Santa Barbara, gazing into the backcountry riprap of the Coastal Ranges, his spirits buoyed by how “the land reaches out like a promise.”
“This was Dick Smith’s kind of country,” Ford wrote. “To him it was not forbidding, . . .”
Ford wrote admiringly of how Smith found in that harsh land “a heightening of one’s own senses in the face of wilderness challenges.”
Ford once sung the praises of a rugged individualist in Smith whom grinned in the face of hardship and discomfort, eyes sparkling with electric life.
That is the essence of adventure, for which some people live, and for which some might rather risk injury or death rather than go without.
Why not let them go?
A place mentioned in some of Dick Smith’s writings.
Keeping Tabs
“Dick knew politics but left political reporting to the newsroom.
When he did write, it was about the sea, the shore and the mountains.
That meant careful investigative reporting on the U.S. Forest Service.
He had contacts there and loved to expose the gamesmanship that went on to the detriment of the public.”
—Barney Brantingham
Ded Ted
Middle of Nowhere
Ford quotes the late Barney Brantingham, a local journalist and co-worker of Smith’s, telling a story about a strenuous, if not brutal, backcountry hike led by Smith.
Guess what? There was no trail.
But it was even better than that. It was a bloody bushwhack.
“We ended up hiking half the night, off-trail, up some brush-choked, god-forbidding side canyon.
Dick had no idea where we were, but he didn’t let me know it. Instead, he’d just keep urging me on a little further, getting my imagination worked up about what might be around the next bend.
Before we knew it we were not only hopelessly lost, but too far from anything we could call camp to bed down before dark, so we stopped right there, out in the middle of nowhere, which was exactly where Dick seemed to want to be anyway.
Dick loved it. You could see it in his eyes and the things he said.
You knew there wasn’t anyplace he’d rather be right then, despite the aching muscles, the scratched arms and legs, and the intense thirst.”
—Barney Brantingham, as quote by Ray Ford, Noozhawk
Readers may note that that now is two different people in the same single article that referenced Smith in his element in the “middle of nowhere.”
The general populace may not know just how very inviting “some brush-choked, god-forbidding side canyon” can be to some people.
Ford further elaborates about Smith’s extensive backcountry explorations, many of which were physically trying and made without well-maintained trails, if any path at all whatever.
An outcrop known as the Dick Smith Caves. There is no trail leading there. Somehow, he made it, and back even.
More Bullmoose, Less Titmouse
We look to history as a frame of reference, to provide context within which to better understand where we are, by knowing where we’ve been, and for guidance on where we’re headed and where we might should go.
Smith stands as a blazing beacon lighting the way.
What he would have thought or said we can only now guess.
But what we do know for sure is that Smith did not shrink from the harshness of the Santa Barbara backcountry because it could be dangerous or even kill him.
He met life out there head on.
“Just leave me,” he replied.
I take that comment as a serious answer stated flatly with a straight face, not said in jest with a grin.
Sounds Ed Abbey-ish. They buried Ed hidden out in the desert somewhere in an illicit grave.
They spread Dick’s ashes in the local backcountry across the top of the Sierra Madre Mountains.
Doubtless neither man liked a forest closure because it rained, a trail washed out here and a tree fell there.
Life Outside
“Dad was not so much Dick Smith to me, but Dad — the man who showed me how to do so many things: the Dad who had me pulling nails and straightening them at age six; the Dad that let me use all of his tools, both hand and power, when I was eight; the Dad who let me sail out of Santa Barbara Harbor by myself as a ten-year-old.”
—Joel Smith, California Nature Art Museum: Dick Smith and His Backcountry Wilderness
Do you think dad would have allowed son a hike in yonder wood?
Or would he have said it was too dangerous, stay out?
What would Dick Smith think?
Related Posts:
Dick Smith Calling a Condor, Piru (1970)
When the Rains Fall, Will USFS Close Our Forest: The Coming El Niño
Language of Forest Closure: Assault on an Ancient Right
Hiking is Not a Crime, Let Forest Be Thy Medicine
Hiking is Not a Crime; Bull Moose and Titmouse
As dead as it looks, that stump is still very much alive, although the tree may have been cut down decades ago.
The old sycamore stump sprout has been razed yet again.
A maintenance worker apparently snipped it off when clearing seasonal grasses along the verge. The grass and the sprout were cut at the same time.
It’s unclear why the tree keeps getting whacked. There doesn’t appear to be any reason of significance when standing on the scene.
It doesn’t block foot traffic on the adjacent sidewalk and never would.
It doesn’t block the view of cars driving by were it allowed to grow into a tree again.
Although, perhaps, in one hundred years or more it might begin to encroach on the bicycle lane along the road, when its trunk finally became swollen with age.
That distant possibility hardly seems reasonable cause to justify the continued lopping.
The sprout did not last nearly as long this time, as it did in its last effort at a taller life.
The freshly clipped sprouts with but one small leaf remaining, and a previous sprout of several inches in diameter that had been lopped off the last time.
As seen in the photo above, the last time the tree had reached two or three inches in diameter before being decapitated.
Repeated whacking has only slowed the tree’s visible growth, but not killed it.
A tree may live on long after its central core or heart wood above ground has rotted out naturally and left a cavernous void or has been purposely removed altogether by human hands. That columnar wood is not really its heart.
Common perception may hold that a tree consists mostly of what is seen above soil line, and that may be true in volume, but what exists below ground is really the heart of the matter.
Thus, the girth and height of a tree can be deceptive as a measure of age.
A tree may be far older than what its trunk may suggest. A dead looking stump is not always dead. Counting tree rings does not always provide an accurate measure of age.
And so the latest thin sycamore sprout, looking similar to a young sapling, is in fact merely the freshest growth of a rather old tree.
In a town that first won recognition back in 1980 from the Arbor Day Foundation as being a Tree City, just four years after the program was initiated, its ironic to see this iconic landmark repeatedly chopped down to a nub.
Wouldn’t it be nice if the old sycamore was allowed to grow again to its full potential?
Powered by an existing long established and possibly still extensive root system, and apparently tapped into its twin neighbor sycamore through connected roots and or a symbiotic fungal network, the tree would probably grow rapidly.
Related Post:
A friend captured this snapshot while sitting in camp creekside waiting for me to show up.
We had left town at different times, arrived at the trailhead apart, and met up later in the afternoon.
I arrived just in time to miss out.
An unfortunate bit of timing.
I have never seen a bald eagle in these parts.
I kept eyes peeled during the remainder of our stay, but, alas, it was not to be.
I did not spy yellow talon nor white feather of the great raptor anywhere near or far.
One day, maybe.
Related Posts
Stillman and the Condor Feather
Fight with a Condor: Experience of a Forest Ranger in Santa Barbara County (1902)
“Transmit the message
To the receiver
Hope for an answer someday”
—Talking Heads, Life During Wartime
Political Theatre
“Monkeywrenching can also be seen as a sophisticated political tactic that dramatizes ecological issues and places them before the public when they otherwise would be ignored in the media.”
—Dave Foreman, founder of Earth First!, as quoted by Alston Chase, In a Dark Wood: The Fight Over Forests and the Rising Tyranny of Ecology (1995)
Who’s crazier?
The mud-streaked naked hippie running through the woods with a clown mask on?
Or
The armed federal agent in paramilitary gear leading a vicious K-9 chasing after to arrest her for hillwalking?
Santa Barbara backcountry bathtub, four-feet deep and chilly under the hot sun.
El Niño Rising & Precipitation Accumulation Intensifying
El Niño appears to be forming this year.
That does not mean we’ll experience a winter of above normal rainfall, necessarily. But the chance for it does seem more likely than usual at the moment.
In addition, whether or not rainfall totals for the entire season measure in above normal, we may experience torrential cloudbursts in short periods of time, with downpours that plunge with force and rush over the land in ways we’ve rarely if ever seen.
Singular events of significant precipitation accumulation are more likely in California with climate change, and could result in torrents of runoff damaging roads and trails and other humanmade developments.
Hell’s Half Acre, Santa Barbara backcountry.
Trial By Raindrop
Shouldn’t the Forest Service manage these wetter, more intense weather events in ways that accord with common daily behavior as seen across the nation?
Humans are not risk averse beings.
We take precautions like wearing seatbelts, but our lives in practice are not hemmed in by an “abundance of caution,” that ivory tower theoretical abstraction.
“In the United States, motor vehicle crashes are a leading cause of death,” the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention tells us.
Driving carries significant risk. So what? Most everybody drives anyway.
And so this begs a question. When the rains fall, will the Forest Service close our public lands?
Will Forest Supervisor, Kimberly Winter, close Los Padres National Forest and throw us out of our own backcountry by force, at gunpoint?
Will she prohibit hillwalking in 30% of Santa Barbara County that is national forest?
Will a woman treat us like convicted rapists for merely walking? Oh, the irony.
That Kimberly Winter may once more close the forest is not an unreasonable assumption. The question is not unwarranted.
Ms. Winter closed the forest before, citing “storm damage” and justifying the prohibition based on an expansive interpretation of public health law, contrary to the Constitution as per case law precedent, supposedly “to provide for public health and safety.”
The Forest Service now sees fit to burnish the resume of her predecessor, Christopher J. Stubbs, with reference to his prior role overseeing the closure of Los Padres National Forest in 2023.
“At Los Padres, Stubbs built key partnerships on a 2-million acre, urban-coastal National Forest and led his staff through severe flooding and storm damage during the winter of 2022-2023.”
Mr. Stubbs lead subordinates that toed the party line in pursuit of a paycheck, in a disservice to the common folk, as if that’s something to boast about or admire.
Who among them stood on principle, in defense of the Constitution, and resigned in protest?
Where were all the No Kings protesters?
Ms. Winter is a doctor of thought, a philosopher, of sorts. She holds a PhD from the University of Georgia.
Would that she thinks deeply when the rains fall heavily, and designs a plan of sound management that accommodates common recreation afoot out yonder.
Surely hiking is no more dangerous than driving.
They’re our bodies. Shouldn’t hiking be our choice?
Condor National Forest beckons.
Interlude
“. . .wandering the hills with no discernible purpose because he was a man and that’s what men did.”
—Eminent local novelist, T. C. Boyle, San Miguel
Off-trail in Santa Barbara County, deep within the hinterlands.
A day’s worth of hiking just to reach the staging ground for the next day’s adventure, further into the woods, into the unknown, to see sights for the first time.
Hiking, scrambling, crawling at times, fighting brambles of dense chaparral raking and scratching skin, dribbling droplets of blood, pouring sweat, face coated in dust and grit and duff, quenching thirst infrequently with warm water, rationing because only so much can be carried, and there’s no guarantee of finding more in the field; nibling nuts and dried fruit, chawing jerked beef, swallowing salt tabs and B-vitamins and caffeine pills, skittering across stone slopes, traversing steep and loose hillsides uneasily, skirting ledges, and downclimbing dry pour-over waterfalls, never knowing if the haphazard route will go or if mid-way through a reversal will be mandatory, to retrace the route entirely, back from whence we came, all the way back up in brutal defeat, because the indifferent mountain offers no other recourse, and the sun is slipping lower, ever lower.
Not enticing for most people, but requisite for some.
Meat and potatoes for the human mind. Salve for the soul.
That is the promise of public lands, “accessible by the simplest means—feet and legs and heart.”
Speaking of heart. . .
As my friend, David “Crash” Stillman, once quipped, somewhere off-trail together on the south slope of Haddock Peak out in the back of beyond, “you got the sickness, too.”
Yes. It’s an incurable affliction.
It’s sort of like hunger. It can be satiated, but only temporarily. Soon more food is needed or else you get hangry and fidgety.
My case is not nearly as severe. It’s only a mild compulsion.
Stillman’s is pathological; 21 miles in 22 hours, out of bounds, through a riverbed, up and down a pathless mountainside, to stand but briefly atop Devil’s Heart Peak, all alone in a desolate land.
Why?
God only knows.
There is no rational answer, as George Mallory once suggested of climbing Everest.
It’s something in the DNA of mankind, an indelible mark seared into the psyche by the hot iron of evolution.
“If you cannot understand that there is something in man which responds to the challenge of this mountain and goes out to meet it, that the struggle is the struggle of life itself upward and forever upward, then you won’t see why we go.
What we get from this adventure is just sheer joy. And joy is, after all, the end of life.
We do not live to eat and make money. We eat and make money to be able to live.
That is what life means and what life is for.”
—George Mallory
The “pursuit of happiness,” as Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence.
That’s “the foundation of liberty,” John Locke wrote in 1689.
Santa Barbara County coast. Stay salty!
Guerilla Gauchos
“This was psychological warfare.
When the catskinners arrived at Bald Mountain, they freaked out as the four men suddenly appeared, looking like giant Hobbits, and announcing that they planned a nonviolent protest to stop the construction. …
This set the stage.
And the next day, when eco-commandos returned in cowboy costume, Earth First!’s guerrilla theatre was born.”
—Alston Chase, In a Dark Wood
Remember one lesson of the Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest in the 1980s.
Demonstrate the absurd by being absurd. Political theatre, the forest a stage.
When they draw a red line, tap dance all over it.
Make them enforce their crazy laws. Make them own it. Document it, project it, and use it against them.
“Road workers and Earth Firsters! were really having at each other now—arguing, spitting, and cursing—in front of furiously scribbling reporters and whirring video cameras.
. . .deputies arrived and arrested Roselle and his friends, the cameras continued to roll.
The story made the evening news. Stations around the country showed this same footage, over and over.
Each time it played, the incident looked bigger.
On the small screen the crowd seemed large, and viewers couldn’t tell that this whole carefully planned incident had been orchestrated by four unshaven guys in cowboy hats.
“. . .rather than crossbows and six-shooters, their weapon would be television.
As Alinsky advised protesters of any kind, have fun doing it.
“Rule 6: If your people aren’t having a ball doing it, there is something very wrong with the tactic.”
—Saul Alinsky, Rules For Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals (1971)
“. . .what Foreman called ‘nonviolent direct intervention—with wit,'” Chase writes, quoting Foreman.
“That is, guerilla theatre and creative monkeywrenching. . .
Ed Abbey, who lived near Foreman in Tucson, became a kindly stepfather to the Earth Firsters!, reveling in the fact that their lives imitated his art.”
To arrive at this emerald gem one must first pass a No Trespassing sign, before then passing another sign declaring that the land behind it is forever protected as a preserve.
A Most Potent Weapon
“Nobody knows where or when guerilla theatre started.
A kind of subversive drama, it may have originated with traveling road shows during the Middle Ages.
Some Earth First!ers claim their use of it was inspired by the early Spanish ‘mudhead cantinas,’ in which peasants would put on plays to mock the nobility.
The idea was to make fun of authority, undermining its mystique with satire.
But the modern version married this idea with television.”
Today the average bloke in the street has more power than ever with the littlest thing.
A sleek handheld device more powerful than computing machines that once filled buildings the size of small homes.
Today, with cell phones in pocket, we’re all cinematographers on the spot.
With the Internet, we’re all broadcasters and distributors in real time.
Leverage the power.
Power to the peasants.
Figueroa Mountain
Los Padres Lunatics
“Humor is essential to a successful tactician, for the most potent weapons known to mankind are satire and ridicule.”
—Saul Alinsky, Rules For Radicals
Who is crazier?
The naked hippie running through the woods with a gingerbread mask on, catch me if you can, scrawled across his bare back?
Or
The armed federal agent chasing after to arrest him for walking the public lands?
Related Posts
Language of Forest Closure: Assault on an Ancient Right
Hiking is Not a Crime, Let Forest Be Thy Medicine
Hiking is Not a Crime; Bull Moose and Titmouse
Hiking is Not a Crime; Hiker’s Precheck Forest Entry Pass
Hiking is Not a Crime; Done Dirty By Diktat
Reference
“In May-July 2026, El Niño is likely to emerge (61% chance) and persist through at least the end of 2026.
In November 2026- January 2027, there are nearly equal chances (25%) of a very strong, strong, or moderate strength El Niño.
Stronger events do not always mean bigger weather and climate impacts. Stronger events can make it more likely that certain impacts could occur.
—NOAA, ENSO Evolution Status, April, 2026
“. . .most recent computer projections suggest that as the world warms, California should get wetter, not drier, in the winter, . . .”
—New York Times, Science Linking Drought to Global Warming Remains Matter of Dispute (2014)
“A study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences concluded that the probabilities of increased amounts of precipitation falling during a single event (also known as precipitation accumulation) will be higher with global warming.”
—NOAA, Global warming precipitation accumulation increases above the current-climate cutoff scale (2017)
“. . .there will be a robust future intensification of winter precipitation, . . .It will accelerate well past what we have seen in historic data.”
“. . .there has been an observed increase in wintertime precipitation in California due to ongoing greenhouse gas emissions32,33, accompanied by an increase in extreme precipitation34,35. Conversely, other seasons, notably spring, are expected to become drier36, signaling an intensification of the wet-dry seasonal cycle37, more frequent dry spells and floods38, and an increase in summertime drought in California39.”
—Nature Portfolio Journal, Robust future intensification of winter precipitation over the United States (2024)
Santa Ynez River once hosted the largest steelhead run in California south of San Francisco.
“National Mall site approved for memorial to fallen journalists
The site, which has a direct view of the Capitol, was chosen to evoke journalists’ role as government watchdogs.”
—Justin Jouvenal, Washington Post (2023)
“The moral duty of the free writer is to begin his work at home: to be a critic of his own community, his own country, his own government, his own culture. The more freedom the writer possesses the greater the moral obligation to play the role of critic.”
—Edward Abbey, A Writer’s Credo, One Life at a Time, Please (1988)
Recap
In 2023, after a series of torrential atmospheric rivers dumped historic rainfall, Forest Supervisor, Christopher J. Stubbs, issued a diktat closing Los Padres National Forest.
The closure prohibited entry into 30% of Santa Barbara County.
Mr. Stubbs threatened the common walker of public lands like sexual predators, with jail terms and fines no less severe than those meted out to rapists in Santa Barbara County, if we entered to forest.
The Forest Service backed the order with armed agents leading dogs trained for domestic urban combat.
As veteran long-time local hillwalker Dan McCaslin at Noozhawk observed at the time, a rare voice of measured opposition questioning the closure:
“Federal law enforcement officers and their K-9 partners are actively patrolling.”
Iron-fisted prohibition with a threat of government gun violence.
Done with a smile and a pat on the back, for our safety.
The rigid politics of paternalism.
Santa Ynez Mountains, Channel Islands National Park on the horizon.
The story’s told
With facts and lies
You own the world
So never mind
Mr. Stubbs justified the closure of Los Padres National Forest based on an assertion that rainfall had damaged the forest.
And because the forest was damaged, it was supposedly a threat to public health.
Both claims were obviously preposterous.
He never explained what exactly was so threatening to the nation that 340+ million Americans should be collectively stripped of their ancient right to free movement by his signature alone.
The circumstances were extraordinary and so required extraordinary action.
“Ponch and Jean” on patrol, future citizen scientists, someday activists.
“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”
Chris Stubbs admitted up front to acting in ignorance, unaware what had happened throughout the ~1,100 square miles of wildlands in Santa Barbara County he had closed.
That was another reason why the forest must be closed, he told us, because he didn’t know.
The same land that by its very nature the people desire and expect and demand to be left untrammeled, rough and potentially dangerous, even deadly.
The Forest Service recognizes this obvious fact:
“Los Padres National Forest spans some of the most ruggedly beautiful landscapes to be found anywhere in California.”
Resorting to semantics in defense of truth and common sense, Merriam-Webster defines the word rugged as:
1 : having a rough uneven surface : jagged
rugged mountains
3 a : presenting a severe test of ability, stamina, or resolution
a rugged climb
“Find your next adventure,” the Forest Service says, but they don’t appear to truly mean it.
Actions speak louder than words.
Mr. Stubbs holds a post-graduate degree Master of Science in Forestry, yet nevertheless presented an argument divorced from scientific reality.
His academic field of concentration within that discipline is “Outdoor Recreation Planning.”
Yet, his order appeared knee-jerk and reactionary; a blind, blanket closure that was far out of line with American outdoor tradition and common behavior.
In unleashing the police state and threatening to let slip dogs of war, Mr. Stubbs brazenly violated the people’s civil rights.
Free movement is a right traced back to the Old World and long recognized and upheld by various American courts at all levels, including the Supreme Court.
Mr. Stubbs manipulated language in service to these ends.
And journalists like Ray Ford, another local veteran hillwalker writing for Noozhawk, aided and abetted Mr. Stubbs in this assault on a fundamental American right.
Santa Ynez Mountains
This was your heart
This swarm of flies
This was once your mouth
This bowl of lies
You serve them well
I’m not surprised
You’re of their kin
You’re of their kind—Leonard Cohen, Nevermind
Case In Point
Local reporters served as meek lapdogs rather than fierce watchdogs, and repeated and amplified the bogus narrative of closure.
These reporters behaved not as skeptical and inquisitive journalists, speaking truth to power and asking pointed questions of the ruling class on behalf of common folk, but instead as unquestioning stenographers.
“Over the last month, Los Padres received more than 100 percent of its annual rainfall along with extremely damaging wind events.”
“Over the last month, Los Padres received more than 100 percent of its annual rainfall along with extremely damaging wind events.”
Other writers also misrepresented the matter, echoing Mr. Stubbs.
They presented their stories in terms that conflated and confused the forest and the government agency charged with managing it.
And they based these stories on a false premise, framed by anthropocentric, fickle cultural notions of human aesthetics and perceived beauty.
Through this warped lens they projected a distorted view, as they told us rain had damaged the forest.
Everyone is familiar with the old saying, beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
The editor-in-chief of Backpacker Magazine, Adam Roy, repeated the bogus narrative in an article titled, “Storm Damage Closes California’s Los Padres National Forest for Two Months.”
Mr. Roy wrote that rainfall “resulted in substantial damage to both the forest and the forest’s infrastructure.”
Santa Ynez Mountains
On Culture, Damage and Beauty
In traditional Japanese culture, people have a phrase describing appreciation of imperfection and transience in the world, which is often applied to nature: wabi-sabi.
In this Japanese aesthetic philosophy, sabi translates into English as rust or tarnish, while wabi conveys a sense of the calm acceptance and embrace of life’s imperfections.
Santa Barbara Backcountry
Ray Ford at Noozhawk leveraged his platform in a disservice to innocent hikers.
He went out of his way to author an apologia mansplaining to us proles the intent of the Forest Service in defense of the agency’s raw exercise of federal power.
He acknowledged the closure was rooted in ignorance, that the heart of the matter had yet to be assessed, thus echoing what Mr. Stubbs had already confessed from the get-go to justify his diktat.
“60-day Los Padres National Forest closure is designed to keep the public safe and provide time for damage assessments.”
—Ray Ford, Noozhawk
And then came the distortion of reality through manipulation of language in service to political ends.
The Forest Service claimed that nature had damaged nature, and in turn Mr. Ford and others toed the line, gaslighting the public.
In a breathless story bearing an overwrought title, Mr. Ford wrote:
“Recent Storms Wreak Havoc on Santa Barbara Backcountry”
“. . .recent storm events…may have caused more damage in the Santa Barbara backcountry and other rural areas than anyone realizes.
“…the type of damage they’ve never seen in their careers on the forest.”
In an amusing passage, Mr. Ford saw fit to quote Andrew Madsen, Los Padres National National Forest spokesman, speaking pure gibberish:
“We simply don’t even know what we don’t know at this point.”
—Andrew Madsen
We’d like to point out to the mealymouthed Mr. Madsen that we never know what we don’t know, and that ignorance is not a sound basis from which to craft national policy. (We recall watching the news conference of Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, 24 years ago.)
That was the flimsy, asinine basis upon which they threw us out of our own public lands.
For our own health, they told us with a smile.
Los Padres Forest Association, whose ostensible purpose is providing access to the forest, turned on a dime at the drop of Stubbs’ hat and backed the prohibition, calling it “wise.”
San Rafael Mountains, Santa Barbara County
“That’s all I ask of the author. To be a hero, appoint himself a moral leader, wanted or not.
I believe words count, that writing matters, that poems , essays, novels – in the long run – make a difference.
If they do not, then in the words of my exemplar Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, the writer’s work is of no more importance than the barking village dogs of the night.
The hack writer, the temporizer, the toady, and the sycophant, the journalistic courtier (and what is a courtier but a male courtesan?), all of those in the word trade who simply go with the flow, who never oppose the rich and powerful, are no better in my view than Solzhenitsyn’s village dogs.
The dogs bark; the caravan moves on.”
—Edward Abbey, A Writer’s Credo
On the trail to Ben Lomond summit in Trossachs National Park, Scotland, sunsetting at ten o’clock at night, looking toward Jura, an island in the Inner Hebrides where George Orwell wrote 1984.
Orwell On Language
A defining feature of Orwell’s 1984 is an exploration of the manipulation of language in service to political ends and the massaging of public thought through speech.
What he called Newspeak was the advent of a new language created by the regime to advance its agenda.
Some of the vocabulary he created in 1949 appears prescient in describing the actions of people in 2023.
The Newspeak word bellyfeel describes the uncritical, unquestioning acceptance of party dogma by subservient followers whom toed the line:
“Only a person thoroughly grounded in Ingsoc could appreciate the full force of the word bellyfeel, which implied a blind, enthusiastic, and casual acceptance difficult to imagine today.”
Blackwhite describes the turning of language on its head by true believers:
“Applied to a Party member, it means a loyal willingness to say that black is white when Party discipline demands this.”
Duckspeak describes the thoughtless expression and promotion of party line, ducks quacking like the village dogs barking:
“Ultimately it was hoped to make articulate speech issue from the larynx without involving the higher brain centres at all.”
The character Syme, a Newspeak linguist, explains the purpose of the language to the protagonist of the novel, Winston, whom works at the Ministry of Truth:
Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?
. . .
Every concept that can ever be needed will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten. . .
The process will still be continuing long after you and I are dead.
Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller.”
Threads of Similarity
Analogies are imperfect, and while it’s often said that history repeats, it’s more accurate to say that it rhymes.
This is about considering possible degrees of likeness, not perfect comparisons.
Orwell’s thinking was informed and influenced by the horror of the twentieth century’s worst monsters in Stalin and Hitler.
Our point here is certainly not to suggest Mr. Stubbs or the Forest Service at large or the happy-go-lucky stenographers are evil or malicious.
The point to consider is the thread of similarity running through space and time, connecting Orwell’s novel in 1949 to the Stubbs Diktat of 2023, and how the forest closure was reported through media outlets by certain writers.
Figueroa Mountain snow (2019).
Parlance of Our Times
They said rain damaged the forest; that nature damaged nature.
The Forest Service spoke of “punishing rain and wind across the Forest,” as if nature was some malevolent punitive force out there manhandling itself.
But damage is largely an anthropocentric notion.
In the Anthropocene epoch it is not surprising that humans would define the natural world in such hubristic self-centered parlance.
But it’s a distortion.
And a dereliction of duty by journalists, whom served the most powerful and entrenched forces in society, to the detriment of the smallest and least influential.
Reality
That something happened in the mountains during a storm that they have never in their wee short lives seen or they think is ugly or they do not like having to physically deal with or that upset them emotionally, does not mean such natural change is damage.
The Forest Service and the stenographers and apologists cannot honestly or accurately reference damage in the forest as a reasonable justification to criminalize entry.
Nature did not damage nature.
Rainfall and wind are natural phenomenon that cause natural change.
Nature, and the universe at large, are indifferent to humanity’s myopic and self-centered notions of damage.
An oak tree ripped apart by wind; runoff from precipitation furrowing the earth; rocks tumbling; mountainsides sliding; high stream and river flows jumping existing temporal banks to form new watercourses; such natural phenomena formed Earth as we know it and love it.
The boulder field found in Rocky Nook Park in Santa Barbara, from which the park took its name, is an example of such natural change resulting from an ancient debris flow.
“These boulders are composed of sandstone from the Santa Ynez Mountains and we believe they record a catastrophic debris flow that occurred sometime in the recent geologic past.”
—Edward A. Keller, professor of geological sciences and environmental studies, University of California, Santa Barbara
These forces of natural change form new habitat and precipitate the birth of new life and serve to redistribute and recycle natural components, from the top of the highest mountain to the deepest sea.
The sea floor is then raised to the mountain top and the process continues.
A mountain or a glacier is said to calve off in the same vein that a cow giving birth to new life is said to be calving.
Natural events of consequential change, cataclysmic alterations of the land, cannot properly be described as damage.
These are part and parcel of the whole, and organic.
Travesty
Rain damaged artificial, human-made developments within Los Padres National Forest.
The Forest Service did actually acknowledge this fact in their press release, which mentioned “serious impacts to administrative and recreation facilities.“
Things like roads and trails and BBQ picnic areas and campgrounds.
However, that infrastructure was degraded or destroyed altogether only limits use and makes access more difficult.
It does not threaten public health at large by any reasonable metric.
Reasonable, as defined relative to everyday common practice across the nation by recreationists.
Thus, pointing to infrastructure that is not serviceable and suggesting the entire forest is damaged, and therefore dangerous and so unusable, is a misrepresentation of reality.
It’s an assault on truth and our intelligence.
It portrays a false image and advances the bogus premise that we can’t use the forest without having all roads and all trails useable, which is obvious nonsense.
It is not illegal to walk national forest or wilderness lands without a road or trail.
Yet, Ray Ford at Noozhawk would have us believe otherwise.
In a thoughtless, sloppy passage in utter servility, Mr. Ford wrote:
“Damage along Sunset Valley Road makes access to the wilderness trailheads impossible.”
One of many remarkable things during the forest closure of 2023 was the blunted, dim reportage from local media outlets.
The obsequious reports published by many journalists were poor imitations of real, honest journalism.
On more than one occasion we’ve personally crossed paths on foot with hikers far beyond seasonally locked gates, around Figueroa Mountain and Sunset Valley, accessing public lands by hoofing it, the old fashioned way, like Native Americans and American pioneers of old.
Men and women alike.
Good people of no particular exceptional fitness or ability.
Decent common folks, carrying on healthy, decent common lives by ordinary, common means and harming nobody.
Feet and legs and heart.
“What does accessibility mean?
Is there any spot on earth that men have not proved accessible by the simplest means—feet and legs and heart? …
A venturesome minority will always be eager to set off on their own, and no obstacles should be placed in their path; let them take risks, for Godsake, let them get lost, sunburnt, stranded, drowned, eaten by bears, buried alive under avalanches—that is the right and privilege of any free American.”
—Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire (1968)
An emerald gem in the Santa Barbara backcountry.
Simple Questions
Is it too much to ask that our beneficent overlords in government exercise critical thought and sober restraint when formulating federal, state and local policy?
That knee-jerk power grabs stripping us of civil rights, while flying in the face of common practice by outdoor recreationists nation-wide, be avoided?
That journalists act like journalists and question authorities, rather than serve as force multipliers with bullhorns regurgitating the party line?
They are our bodies. It’s our choice.
Or are the people mere play things whose lives can be toyed with at will by those in power, like pawns on a board?
“You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.
And what I mean by that; it’s an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before.”
A criminal in the Santa Ynez Mountains.
“Against the grain
That’s where I’ll stay
Swimming upstream
I maintain against the grainHere labeled as a lunatic sequestered and content
There ignored and defeated by the government
There’s an oriented public who’s magnetic force does pull
But away from the potential of the individual—Bad Religion, Against the Grain (1990)
Precedent
The American legal system is built upon precedent, not reason and logic.
One unjust law advanced by misguided legislators, one unjust regulation issued by ham-handed bureaucrats, one unjust judgment handed down by a corrupt black robed jurist, can precipitate another, and yet more, all pointing to the first to justify the latest.
Brick by brick the people can be surrounded while not even realizing it, common liberties whittled away, the sphere of permissible activities narrowed and reduced.
If when they come for one we do not stand up and speak out, then they will find it easier to come for others.
It’s inconspicuous, because it’s done with a smile and good intentions, and so insidious.
If we are not vigilant and do not demand due process, then we may be stripped of rights under the guise of promoting the common good.
Liberty is a chain only as strong as its weakest link.
Each generation is a link connecting one with the next.
One weak link and the chain may break.
Once it breaks it can be difficult to repair, if repair is even possible at that point.
This may be one of the most critical lessons of history.
Sespe River mural, Fillmore, Ventura County.
Defining Danger Down
“Fascism, like many species of authoritarianism, relies on panic, and on the related belief that extraordinary measures must be deployed in extraordinary times, that emergencies must be met with unity and — most important — with submission and conformity.…The principle at work here is defining danger down.…The rules and laws, and the political assumptions supporting them, are all based on some notion of safety.…Defining danger down consists mainly in elevating the importance of hypothetical evils over real evils.…In order to prevent these hypothetical evils, we are instructed that we must accept real and immediate evils, …”…—Kevin D. Williamson, The Smallest Minority: Independent Thinking in the Age of Mob Politics (2019)…
The Forest Service and its employees are not fascists.
They aren’t malicious agents either.
However, the Stubbs Diktat was an authoritarian act, no doubt, by definition.
The Forest Service defined danger down when closing Los Padres National Forest.
We were told that it was for public safety, to protect our health, in response to extraordinary events of exceptional danger.
Christopher J. Stubbs used the hypothetical threat of harm from broken trails and washed out roads to justify the immediate real harm of suspending a fundamental civil right.
Free movement is a right repeatedly recognized throughout American history as the essence of civil liberty.
Whiptail lizard.
Trampling Our Ancient Civil Right to Free Movement
“There is a powerful fundamental right hiding in plain sight: the fundamental right to free movement.
This right goes beyond the consistently acknowledged — though infrequently applied — fundamental right to interstate travel.
The true scope of the Constitution’s protection of movement through substantive due process safeguards local, interstate, and international travel.
Though overlooked today, the fundamental right to free movement has deep roots in history and tradition, and in the decisions of numerous state and federal courts, including the Supreme Court.
This Article is the first to examine freedom of movement using the history and tradition test for unenumerated fundamental rights.
This Article begins by tracing the right to free movement from the Magna Carta, through Blackstone’s Commentaries, colonial America, early state constitutions, and the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment.
As this analysis shows, repressive governments have routinely sought to limit movement across and within boundaries.
But the English and U.S. legal traditions are marked by repeated affirmations of the right — there is strong and persistent historical support for a fundamental right to free movement.
. . .
Given its firm foundation and expansive reach, this is a right that should be applied regularly — to anti-gender-affirming care or anti-abortion laws targeting travel, to quarantine restrictions locking down a community, and to any of the wide variety of other restrictions limiting free movement.— The Forgotten Fundamental Right to Free Movement, Noah Smith-Drelich, Northwestern University Law Review (2025)
Shouldn’t the suspension of this civil right if ever justified, in pursuit of our healthful happiness in body and mind, but not in violation of the rights of others, necessarily require the law be narrowly tailored and specific?
Should the federal government be allowed to suspend this long-standing right based on a vague, undefined claim of a threat to public health which it cannot identify?
In the context of American jurisprudence the idea that we can be stripped of this liberty because a road or a trail washed out is patently absurd.
This is America, dammit!
Land of the free and home of the brave.
Related Posts:
Hiking is Not a Crime, Let Forest Be Thy Medicine
Hiking is Not a Crime; Bull Moose and Titmouse
