Hiking is Not A Crime, Let Forest Be Thy Medicine

Posted on February 4, 2023 by Jack Elliott

Ranger: Howdy, sir. Sorry, the forest is closed.
Hiker: Why?
Ranger: Well, there’s been some slides and wash outs and rockfalls and trees fallen over and we heard tell of a big rut. 
Hiker: Oh. So you mean it’s a forest. You’ve closed the forest because it’s a forest. 

Over 1,000 scientific studies. That’s a lot the Forest Service is arguing against when they tell us the forest is a threat to our health and safety.

The Forest Service put forth the standard of public health and used it to take from the people their right to walk the public lands.

The forest closures and the criminalization of walking seem to be getting stricter and happening with increasing frequency.

As Danny Mac over at Noozhawk has informed us youngsters of more recent vintage:

“I’ve been tramping around back there since 1971, and my experience is that USFS tends to close it down more often and in a more ‘total’ fashion over the decades. 

Well, now we are going to hold the Forest Service to their own stated standard and use it to take back our right to walk our public lands. Because they are wrong.

The Forest Service made the unbelievable claim that the forest is a threat to our health.

How will they make the wilderness areas safe again so that we are permitted to enter?

The question is rhetorical and as asinine as the closure.

Of course, designated wilderness and national forest areas, to a lesser extent, are to be left largely untouched and “untrammeled” and allowed to remain as rugged as the earth can muster, as per the law.

The premise of the forest closure conflicts with the fundamental underpinnings of the wilderness and national forest reserve system itself, as defined by law.

This is an extraordinary confusion in policy that undermines the legitimacy of the Forest Service and erodes trust.

They cannot close the forest because it’s a forest and expect thinking, self-respecting folks to listen.

The naturally rugged character of the land is not a sensible basis on which to exclude people. For the love of Gaia it’s the bloody reason people go there! Good grief.

The land is supposed to be raw, sharp and loose and we hope there’s lots of water. 

The Forest Service tells us public health is their concern. But we see in practice that public health is a misused, meaningless phrase. It no longer carries any weight.

The shepherd has cried wolf too often and we no longer believe him.

Public health was the same phrase officials used to outlaw opening an umbrella on the beach during the pandemic.

The Forest Service closed down campgrounds during the pandemic, too, under the guise of protecting public health. The closure was issued despite the fact that campsites are well-spaced, outside in open air, campers can maintain social distancing protocols better than in the city and wear masks as easily.

In other words, camping fit in rather neatly with the health protocols being issued by the domain experts in the health sciences.

Yet, the Forest Service citing public health ignored it all and closed the entire place down anyway.

The elasticity of the phrase “public health” is only limited by the imagination of the officials in power, who can stretch it at will on any given day to cover any whim they wish without need of reason.

And they act without reason. They close beaches and campgrounds and the entire forest based on demonstrable nonsense and contrary to their own stated standards.

And here we bear witness once more to this outrageous behavior.

On the basis of the vague, abstract generality of public health, without citing any actual special threat whatsoever because none truly exists, the Forest Service issued a knee-jerk, reactionary blanket closure of all 2700 square miles of Condor National Forest.

The closure is an astounding abuse of power.

To your health, they said, and gave us a policy harmful to public health.

No wonder trust in government remains near historic lows.

Spending time in the forest makes people healthier and happier. That statement is a fact deeply rooted in reems worth of scientific data. The evidence is voluminous and compelling. 

Telling people the forest is a threat to their health and safety is utter nonsense.

But it’s even worse.

Pushing the false narrative is especially egregious in its tone-deaf insensitivity in these tender times following the pandemic and lock-downs and shut-ins. When now Americans are reporting record lows in mental health. 

Forest Service employees are supposed to be the experts in their respective field, but they appear insensitive and oblivious to all scholarly studies directly related to their domain.

The people are paying attention. The people are paying the price.

Would that the Forest Service heed the mountain of scientific evidence and not ban the people from their own land which serves their critical needs.

For sake of public health. 

Ecopsychology: How Immersion in Nature Benefits Your Health

A growing body of research points to the beneficial effects that exposure to the natural world has on health, reducing stress and promoting healing. Now, policymakers, employers, and healthcare providers are increasingly considering the human need for nature in how they plan and operate.

“Now it’s approaching and about to pass 1,000 studies, and they point in one direction: Nature is not only nice to have, but it’s a have-to-have for physical health and cognitive functioning.”

—Richard Louv author of Last Child In the Woods

—Yale School Of the Environment

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Bald Eagle, Gaviota Coast

Posted on February 3, 2023 by Jack Elliott
 

The swell measured 26.9 feet at 17 seconds on January 5, the largest in the 18 year history of Harvest Buoy. 

“The swell on Jan. 5 and 6, by far, could be considered historic,” Waterfront Director Mike Wiltshire said, as quoted by Noozhawk.

The rain fell continuously for hours, for days, like we hadn’t seen in years, in decades. The creeks turned to torrents of chocolate. 

The Pacific Ocean swallowed it all. It churned and heaved dark and dirty, thick and sloppy with sediment and driftwood.

Visibility out there in the water appeared to be absolutely nonexistent, at best.

And yet, there soaring over the seashore ahead of me was this raptor with a fish in its talons. The fish looked rather large.

A second later I realized the bird had a white tail or did it? I hardly believed my eyes. 

I have a photo from 1985 showing me standing right below where the fish eagle was circling on this afternoon. I’m looking toward to the top of the point, the old long-removed beachside cabin shack visible on the lee of the point.

I ran down the beach, a mad fanatic high-stepping across the tops of cobblestones as the bird flew away from me. I had to confirm what I thought I had just seen.

The bird was all wrapped up in this place and my history there and I had to see if it was a bald eagle, but the chance was slipping away.

The bird tried to alight in a tree growing atop the coastal bluff deep inside the cove, but with the fish in its talons it could not manage it and came soaring back toward me.

I fumbled around in my pocket and had just enough time to snatch a few poor quality snapshots. A fleeting glimpse on the afternoon of January 7, 2023. This is the first bald eagle I have ever seen along Gaviota in all the time I have spent there.

Related Post On This Blog:

Gaviota Coast Galavants: The Wildest Wilderness

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Hiking Is Not A Crime

Posted on January 26, 2023 by Jack Elliott

Santa Barbara Women’s March Expands Beyond Abortion

Hundreds join 7th annual rally marking what would have been 50th anniversary of Roe v. Wade ruling, but speakers emphasize issues are ‘bigger than Roe’

—Noozhawk

They gathered and marched in Santa Barbara in support of the freedom of choice and personal sovereignty in matters of health and well-being.

One leading lady who spoke cited numerous specific examples to illuminate a larger general point about “an attempt to control us collectively.”

Set aside the specific details of the march here in town and consider the general underlying principle as it may relate to the current 60-day closure of the people’s forest.

Who owns your person?

Days earlier the ruling class had closed Condor National Forest, formerly known on this blog as Los Padres.

For no good reason Forest Service administrators stripped us of our right to walk in our public lands, as if it were merely a privilege all along permitted only at the landlord’s whim.

A special closure, they said. To your health, they alleged.

Christopher J. Stubbs, Forest Supervisor, threatened the common walker with obscene fines and jail time equivalent to that meted out to violent sexual predators.

That’s nothing to smile about, sir.

Proclaimed Mr. Stubbs to 330 million Americans:

A violation of this prohibition is punishable by a fine of not more than $5,000 for an individual or $10,000 for an organization, or imprisonment for not more than six months, or both. 16 U.S.C. § 551 and 18 U.S.C. §§ 3559, 3571, and 3581.

It is to the ignominious shame of Christopher J. Stubbs that his name is so prominently and forever attached to this repugnant historical document.

Six months imprisonment is what they give rapists in Santa Barbara County.

Former UCSB Student Receives 6-Month Sentence for Rape

–Daily Nexus

For sexual assault they’ll let you out in half that time.

Brock Turner released from jail after serving 3 months for sexual assault

–CNN

Lord Stubbs, brilliant and benevolent ruler of Los Padres shire, always concerned about the health of his lowly subjects, declared all 2700 square miles of the forest much too dangerous a place for the peasants to venture.

Otherwise, without the Lord’s prescient warning, the dumbasses wouldn’t know. The clueless fools can’t be trusted. Trust?

To further guarantee peasant health and safety, Lord Stubbs, ever gracious, promised to confine them in one of his many jail cells if they are found by the Lord’s men “going into” the dangerous untrammeled forest.

Nonsense!

We know that what our leaders are telling us is ludicrous.

If we were sitting around a campfire in the woods like ordinary folks what would we say?

Well, we would call it bullshit. Because we are honest, reasonable and plain spoken people. And we know it’s not true.

We believe, for it is plain to see, that our leaders are not acting truthfully. We’d like to give them the benefit of the doubt regarding smarts.

However, we must also mention along with the possibility of intentional deceit, there is the chance that instead they are just woefully ignorant, actually believe the nonsense they are telling us, and so are haplessly incompetent.

We know the forest is not a threat to our health and safety.

On the contrary, the forest is to the benefit of our well-being, as the science continues to show, one study after another, year after year, country after country.

The forest administrators have an arbitrary, bogus edict. It’s based on whim and word. That is all. There is nothing reasonable about it. Nothing.

We have the science. We have the data. We have the facts. We own the truth on this issue.

But so too, and perhaps most importantly, can we see this simple truth with our own eyes outside, out there, as conscious, sentient, intelligent human beings. And we know it intuitively, viscerally.

The forest is not a threat to our health. The forest is a tremendously healthful place to spend time.

Reasonable men and women cannot in good conscience pretend otherwise and we will not pretend otherwise.

We will not go along to get along.

They cannot tell us that what we see and what we experience does not exist without losing credibility and undermining trust. Trust.

We are not fools.

All that any government ever has is the people’s trust in institutions and leaders and so their allegiance, and coercive force backed by violence. That is it.

When trust is lost so too is legitimacy and people stop listening.

Yet, never mind the rank dishonesty of our leaders and the draconian punishments they threaten us with should we not abide. Set that aside for just a moment and consider the larger principle at issue.

What we know most of all, most assuredly, most emphatically, is that it’s our body and it’s our choice.

To walk the public lands or not is our choice!

Related Post On This Blog:

Foreclosure

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Grinding Stone Revealed

Posted on January 20, 2023 by Jack Elliott

This is how it happens. I wrote of how things turn up in the forest like a stray coin on a city street. (Potsherd Ponder) And this is how it happens. A casual discovery.

We make our rounds checking seasonal change. I take the kids and we look for turtles and newts and we stop to notice creek flows, clarity and water levels and the blowout of creek mouths into ocean.  

Rocky Nook Park features prominently on the itinerary. The other day we stopped to check the creek after recent rains, as we’ve done there for years, in the same spot, and by way of the same short scamper down the rocky bank into the creek bottom.

But this time, lo and behold, a boulder turned up I’ve never seen before in all those years, which appears to be an artifact of some sort. 

The stone seems to have been prepared to some degree, as a flat surface, upon which the darker oval was then ground out forming a shallow dish. The bottom of the dish is remarkably smooth and not rumpled in the slightest.

The dark stained surface is similar to the surface of the bowl I found on the beach: Chumash Stone Bowl. The stain of the bowl was much more prominent when wet.

At the same place on the beach as the bowl, in the wash of high tide surf, another boulder has a shallow, round grinding slick that is also colored by dark staining. It looks remarkably similar to this one here in Mission Creek.

These things turn up. Along my thin and crooked way afoot in the wild places of Santa Barbara County, for some odd reason or maybe for no reason at all.

And then the question becomes, what does a person do? 

December 20, 2022

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The Plunder and Peddle

Posted on November 30, 2022 by Jack Elliott

“Pocketing potsherds is erasure. It is the worst of colonization, the taking of the land. If you believe the stealing has ended, it has not.”

–Craig Childs Why Potsherds Matter

On this, the last day of Native American Heritage Month.

I don’t understand why people do what they do. Why they hunt things like this to peddle for so little money. So little money. Surely driven by avarice and in no way needful. 

Several years ago I stood on the mountain locked in a thousand yard stare gazing intently at a particular geological feature.

I returned another day and by another route, hiking and scrambling over steep and loose, rugged and rocky terrain, a strenuous walk without a trail. There were no tracks but that of a bear.

I saw no recent sign of people at this place, although in years past marijuana growers had put the remote and hard to access south facing site to their advantage. I found three different old grow sites. 

A wildfire had swept the mountain not long before I hiked and so the earth was stripped naked of its many forms of cover.

I walked over to the boulder that had captured my attention from far.

I stepped slowly around the monolith looking at the ground and the sides of the giant stone. I did not see anything remarkable.

Using the blackened skeleton of a scorched bay tree I hoisted myself atop the boulder. I took several steps and there they were, well-weathered and faint, but unmistakable in their form and placement: cupules. Sacred markings bored into the stone by human hands.

I spent hours sitting about and wandering around this place. It is perhaps the most extraordinary place I have seen in the Santa Ynez Mountains for its natural character and long views alone, never mind the landed artifact of the cupule boulder. The geography of the site alone is mesmerizing.

Then of a sudden other small stones of importance I had walked past began showing themselves.

This place was speckled in lithic scatter and other small artifacts. Projectile points of various designs and drills and beads and blades and a pestle. All of it laying bare to sun for perhaps the first time in hundreds of years.

A nest found in a bush but right smack on the ground, along a steep ridgeline, while walking to the place.

I returned to this place another day.

I loved to spend time there for its prehistoric presence and the natural ambiance and phenomenal view.

I’d walk there in different weather and different seasons to see what life was like in the forest there throughout the year.

I walked on warm, still summer days under spotless blue skies and on chilly, wet winter days of cold gloom and low ceilings within heavy cloud cover.

The fire had cleared the way for a steep route, which was a pleasure to hike. And so I did, repeatedly, because I knew the chaparral was growing back and it would not be long before the site vanished under the bush and trees.

I marveled how I was the only human around in this densely populated region that apparently had any interest in explorations of the freshly revealed forest. And to just walk, walk the rounded hills.

The Grouch of the Woods was astonished at this lack of interest on the part of his fellow humans, yet also very much pleased by their absence, obviously.

The mountains were steep and irregular and boney and jagged in places with exposed bedrock.

Yet, by and large, these slopes were mounds of bare soil, well-weathered and shaped into smooth, organic and curvilinear forms from the wind and the rain working with gravity to bring it all down, like groomed hills at a ski resort and heaving ocean swells.

Hillwalking here was steep work, but easy in the fire-scorched terrain and the smooth lines of the curvaceous mountains very much reminded me of the grass hills of Scotland.

Then one day on my return I found tracks to this sacred place. Some other humans had finally shown interest. Good for them. 

Then, on yet another day, I noticed the soil in places had been disturbed and it was plainly evident that a body had been digging. 

Artifacts that I had left at this place were suddenly gone on my next visit, obviously lifted.

An arrowhead I had picked up and set in a small pock mark concavity on the side of one of the boulders disappeared. The traps laid had been tripped.

While I cannot fault a person for taking an arrowhead laying on the surface in plain site, digging is another matter. Not just a difference between physical acts of removal, but in the letter of the law and intent.

I became agitated and defensive. I had come to feel a particular personal attachment to this place. To have found it myself, without being told by somebody else and let in on the secret. That meant something to me. 

I made the snap decision to collect every flake of stone I could find. I did not know then and nor do I know now if that was the proper decision.

I left a single pile of those chippings in plain view for anybody to find.

But only I know the layout of the site as first found, and where exactly lie the specific areas that the people whom left these traces of their presence worked so diligently.

I have it all recorded in words and drawings and I will not share this information.

I collected those things and set them aside so that a plunderer might not have it so easy. I did not want to return again to find it all dug out.

Sure, the pirates may be able to surmise where best to dig, but, I reasoned, at least they don’t really know where. It is not as obvious as one might think.

Several days ago I experienced an odd chain of events.

I never use eBay. I don’t even look at eBay.

I do not buy Native American artifacts. The purchase of something like that does nothing for me. 

I enjoy finding artifacts, indeed, I must confess. But it’s a casual pursuit, when I’m out there, but not always. I don’t make special trips. I have a long-standing and profound interest and I’m just observant by nature, and lucky. And I always walk with chin to chest.

I sure as hell am not going to patronize the business of plunder by buying items.

I struggle to make sense of our shared history and my place in it going forward. A part of this blog is about that, my open journal of sorts.

For some unknown reason in the cosmos I was on eBay and stumbled across this auction for what was listed as a rare Chumash artifact.

Oddly enough the item apparently had just been listed. What brought me to eBay that day I do not know. It’s remarkably odd.

I read the description and cursed out loud in astonishment. 

This person had listed for sale an artifact they said had been found “ensconced” in the Santa Ynez Mountains above Santa Barbara after a recent wildfire.

I could not help but believe that they had dug it up at the cupule boulder site. Of course, it is well within the realm of possibility it came from elsewhere on the mountain, but the description matches as well as it possibly could without being any more explicit in detail.

The listing was originally posted as a six day auction, but lasted only about one day or so before it was mysteriously terminated, without a bid or final sale price listed.

Here below is the listing:

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