Farewell To The Rock, Gibraltar Party Place

Posted on April 7, 2020 by Jack Elliott

El Roca Grande circa 1909 overlooking the Santa Barbara littoral, Pacific Ocean and Santa Cruz Island in the distance. Note the metal poles and cable handrail.

“In the 1970s this was The Place. Well, if you were a teenager on a Saturday night it was. Located on Gibraltar Road about two miles past Mountain Drive there was a large place to pull off the road to park, party and enjoy the lights of the city below.”

—Neal Graffy, Santa Barbara Then and Now

“There was a time when courtesy and winning ways went out of style, when it was good to be bad, when you cultivated decadence like a taste. We were all dangerous then. We wore torn-up leather jackets, slouched around with toothpicks in our mouths, sniffed glue and ether and what somebody claimed was cocaine. When we wheeled our parent’s whining station wagon out into the street we left a patch of rubber half a block long. We drank gin and grape juice, Tango, Thunderbird, and Bali Hai. We were nineteen.”

—T.C. Boyle, Greasy Lake

“Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well-preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming ‘Wow! What a Ride!'”

—Hunter S. Thompson, The Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman, 1955-1967

Party, Graffy writes, a local historian. That comes off far too innocent. There’s a lot packed in that small word.

Boyle nailed it, a local writer. I see him walking his dreadlocked dog by my office window.

Far more was enjoyed up yonder at The Rock than mere city lights, and maybe all those fantastical lights weren’t from the city anyway.

El Roca Grande

Farewell to The Rock.  Somebody will be living there now.

For decades a dirt pullout on Gibraltar Road, the outcrop of sandstone bedrock wrapping the bend in the road, and the long views up and down the coast, along the south face of the Santa Ynez Mountains overlooking the Pacific Ocean, formed a singular attraction known as The Rock.

Here the local intoxicati and psychonauts loitered day and night to take flight. They never left the ground. But boy did they fly high!

Numerous illicit drugs and controlled substances and brain depleting chemicals and vast quantities of alcohol of various kinds fueled savage pursuits of addled depravity worthy of a rambling mutter of approval from the late Hunter S. Thompson.

The bennies, the ludes, the coke, the weed, the ether, the nitrous, the acid, the mushrooms, the mescaline, the XTC, the crack, the crank, and aerosol cans of computer cleaner lifted from high school classrooms.

Animalistic loveless sex in the darkened bushes and silly warm young love in cramped cars with feet out the window.

Warm Santa Ana winds in summer with shirts off at midnight.

The Ratch fell off The Rock. My good friend since fourth grade at Monte Vista, he stumbled over the edge and fell to the road below and broke his leg and had to hobble around Santa Barbara High in a big cast.

Cheech: “Wow, man. That’s some heavy shit.
(Extended pause)
Hey man. . . Am I driving okay?”

Chong: (Slowly looks around through car window)
“I think we’re parked, man.”

—Up In Smoke (1978)

Note the old steps carved into El Roca Grande.

Remnants of the old handrail on El Roca Grande.

Then there were the earlier generations and heroic tales of sheer stupidity from the 1960s and 1970s related first-hand by the family and friends that survived them, and could remember.

A metal pipe once jutted from a knob of sandstone historically known as “El Roca Grande” that protrudes from the mountainside just below Gibraltar Road.

“This was a must-see stop reached by a trail leading up from Mountain Drive and connecting to La Cumbre Trail,” Graffy writes of El Roca Grande.

See related previous post: Trail Up Mt. La Cumbre (1914).

Today’s Gibraltar Road, he notes, was built during the 1930s and was originally known as “Depression Drive.”

Back in the day hikers and equestrians would walk up a series of steps carved into El Roca Grande, along a metal pole and cable setup as seen on the old postcard image above.

Today the remnants of this metal handrail remain.

El Roca Grande noted here, which sits just below Gibraltar Road. The new house still under construction sits stop the larger sandstone outcrop which is just above Gibraltar Road.

For shits and giggles in the 1960s and 1970s the boys would scramble over the sandstone outcrop of El Roca Grande, grab a piece of the old pipe, and dangle over the steep chaparral slope below.

Performing the white-knuckled stunt was a hell of a thrill.

If you were really brave or stupid or a little of both you did it at night.

But nothing compared to “hanging the pipe” in the dark on three hits of acid.

I tell you, I can’t for the life of me imagine why they closed this place down.

Probably the same reasons they closed Goddard: Goddard Campground: The Lost Jewel of West Camino Cielo. I know a guy that was run over on West Camino Cielo back in the day one night by Goddard while lying in the road out of his mind on hallucinogens. He lived to tell his tale, but his face was never the same.

This is classic Santa Barbara.

“When Santa Barbara was first incorporated, back in 1850, of the first 32 business licenses issued by city fathers, 30 were for dealers in spirituous liquors,” Walker A. Tompkins wrote in It Happened In Old Santa Barbara (1976).

These days, Santa Barbara County may be the cannabis capital of California.

Ventura County Star: Santa Barbara County leads California in the number of permits to legally grow marijuana

LA Times: The World’s Largest Pot Farms, and How Santa Barbara Opened the Door

“Santa Barbara County’s famed wine region — with its giant live oaks and destination tasting rooms — and the quiet beach town of Carpinteria have become the unlikely capital of California’s legal pot market.

During the statewide lockdown order declared by Governor Newsom amid the novel coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic, which shuttered most businesses, recreational weed shops were declared “essential businesses” and remained open slinging smoke and various other cannabis-derived intoxicants.

Because getting high in Santa Barbara has always been essential, from the beginning.

After decades of generational use, the authorities placed cement barricades along the dirt shoulder of Gibraltar Road to bar access to the big dirt pullout at The Rock, where everybody parked.

And that was it. They killed it. Dead. Done. In one fell swoop. The end of an era.

Somebody bought the land above the road, where we once stood on top of the big outcrop we called The Rock.

Somebody built a house.

Somebody’s front yard now is where it all happened back then.

Farewell to The Rock.

Standing on the old dirt pullout, now barricaded by cement walls, looking back at what we called The Rock.

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The Privateer; Subcontractor, Dept. of Unauthorized Forestry

Posted on April 4, 2020 by Jack Elliott

In September of 2016, under cover of broad daylight, assisted by her two trusty partners in crime, whom also served as convenient sweet little innocent distractions to any suspecting walkers in the area, Jackie Willowtree smuggled in and planted the contraband.

“It often tends to be, uh–well the whole concept of legality doesn’t matter much. It’s the intention. As long as you know what you’re doing.”

–So advises Tony Santoro on his pilfered scooter in his Guide to Illegal Tree Planting, as delivered in his profanity-laced classic New York City Italian-American accent.

There’s this gal. It’d be unfair and incorrect to say she hates people, but she doesn’t tend to like them. And that’s different than saying she dislikes them and nowhere near close to saying she hates them. Whatever the particular case may be, she’d rather avoid them, those people, all of those people.

She might like to volunteer with some of the local forest and wilderness organizations and associations that work to maintain open and usable trails or work to restore and revitalize natural habitats.

But these groups tend to be as much of a social club as they are work parties out to actually work. She’d like to work, to lend a hand and help improve and protect the backcountry and wildlife, but she’s not looking to socialize.

Then there is the rigmarole of safety requirements and legal obligations. She is not donning a hard hat like a New York City construction worker only to clip twigs and branches along a flat trail.

So she went out on her own. An unofficial undocumented botanical subcontractor for the Department of Unauthorized Forestry.

As a keen spectator in the stands of America overlooking the public arena and watching the ruling class, political and business alike, she well knew it’s easier to ask for forgiveness afterward than permission beforehand.

And then if caught and interrogated, to claim poor memory. “I don’t recall.”

She imagined, with amusement, the bureaucratic tangle of laws and regulations and rules and policies and protocols the official in charge of the nature preserve would sputter on about having to abide by and fulfill.

She found it impossible to believe she would ever receive a prompt, “Yes! Marvelous idea. Go right ahead and plant that tree.”

Her experiences in such pursuits strongly suggested such quick and easy approval would never occur.

And that’s to say nothing of the personal preferences of the official in charge whom, as kind and upright as they must be, may not appreciate the suggestion of some lone unassociated stranger horning in on their turf or who may have specific opinions of their own about what type of tree should be planted and where, if anything should be planted at all.

Never mind it all. Just plant the damn tree! she thought. A real rebel. Risking nothing.

Jackie Willowtree. Out to, gasp, plant a tree.

She imagined, once more with amusement, being busted for planting a tree, being interrogated and lectured for such a transgression. The teacher’s voice from Charlie Brown.

She imagined the tree ripped from the ground by officials like spray-paint graffiti wiped from a building.

The willow cutting growing strong in July of 2019.

She walked a section of the dry Santa Ynez River in the spring of 2016, where in her younger years a quiet swimming hole once pooled, but which was now choked with sediment and cattails.

What was once a long open gravel beach just a few years ago was now bristling with young willow trees that had sprouted and grown tall during the current record drought and low water levels, the river never running swift enough to clear out its bed.

Here she scanned the thin, tall trees for the straightest, best shaped and healthiest specimens.

She selected a 20 foot sprout and cut the top off and trimmed the large six foot scion, removing the lowermost branches to create a tree-shaped cutting.

She placed the cutting in a bucket of rain water for several weeks, changing the water as necessary until a thick mat of pink and red roots formed.

She planted the huge sprout in a pot where it grew for several months through summer to establish a robust and dense root ball.

Then on a fine late summer day she hauled the rooted clone to the spring at San Marcos Potrero on the North Side.

She dug a hole and sunk it in the ground beside the small puddle that was still, despite the drought, being filled by the reliable little trickle of ground water that poured from the rusted pipe.

Four years later the tree remains, standing much larger and fuller now with a big green bushy head of leaves and a fattened, crazed trunk. The tree casts a cool afternoon shadow over the puddled spring water wherein the frogs swim and where from the mammals and birds drink.

Here at the spring where before no tree stood in what had been a bare naked exposed and shadowless, sun-scorched hot spot.

Now, a green new future grows.

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March is For Morels

Posted on April 1, 2020 by Jack Elliott

March 2020. “Some of the false morels are dangerously poisonous,” Aurora warns.

Morels may be the most elusive mushrooms in Santa Barbara County.

“Morels can be extremely difficult to see,” David Aurora writes in All That The Rain Promises And More.

Indeed. They’re probably the most camouflaged and well-hidden mushroom around this neck of the woods other than those found underground. The morel’s neutral and earthy hues combined with its intricate prismatic combed form can, at times, make it impossible to discern from the surrounding forest litter.

I find it amusing how easily and thoroughly these little mushrooms can deceive the most intelligent brains on the planet in Homo sapiens. We’re not as smart as we’d like to think.

Morels do not glow white amid the dark colors of the shadowed forest like hericiums or bright golden yellow like chanterelles. To mention just two much more easily spotted mushrooms.

Moreover, as Aurora notes, morel mycelia “tend to be short-lived, so new ‘patches’ must be found every year.” Mycelia are the vegetative portion of the fungus from which bloom the mushrooms we call morels.

While that is not exactly true, that new patches must be found each and every year, it nevertheless appears to be the case in Santa Barbara County that morels only bloom again from the same patch of ground for two or perhaps three seasons at best before disappearing in latter years never to be seen again.

This stands in contrast to other mushrooms which may be picked in the exact same place for many years and sometimes for decades.

“These factors combine to make morel hunting especially challenging and competitive,” Aurora writes.

Aurora writes in jest about the “demorelizing experience of tramping through the forest for hours, weeks, months, or even years without finding a single one. Only by being skunked repeatedly can you savor the sweetness of ultimate success!”

Or as Nixon advised, “. . .because the greatness comes not when things go always good for you, but the greatness comes and you are really tested, when you take some knocks, some disappointments, when sadness comes, because only if you have been in the deepest valley, can you ever know how magnificent it is to be on the highest mountain.”

March 2020

The first morel I ever found in my life was growing deep in the Santa Barbara backcountry, as mentioned in this previous post nine years ago: Nira to Upper Oso: An Early San Rafael Experience

I was a teenager and had been out on the trail for several days when, while trudging up a rain-swollen upper Sisquoc River after hard rain the day before that had forced us to take shelter inside the old South Fork Sisquoc cabin, I glanced over and spied the conical combed cap sticking up out from a jumble of flotsam in the river bed.

Well over a decade would pass before I spotted another morel.

The second mushroom I saw while walking back from surfing a point break along Gaviota Coast, while talking with a friend; the dude featured riding one hell of a tube in this previous post: Gabe Surfing Sandbar, Hurricane Marie 8-27-14

We were talking and I glanced to my side for no particular reason and there the morel stood growing from a clump of ice plant. I haven’t talked to him in a long time. I wonder if he remembers.

Another two decades, give or take, would pass before I found more morels.

March 2019

“Mushroom hunting can teach us a lot about the larger world,” Andrew Weil writes in Aurora’s book. “A common experience of mushroom hunters is not being able to see a particular mushroom when they first try to collect it. It’s not a question of visual acuity, but pattern recognition.”

He goes on to tell a short story about a woman that once spent hours searching the forest for morels. After failing to see any sign of a morel, she dropped to her knees and began sifting through the leaf litter. Just as she was about to admit failure and give up, she saw a single morel. Then, a moment later, she look about and discovered that she was surrounded by hundreds of the them.

“A useful lesson can be drawn from this,” Weil writes. “Our brain acts as a filter, screening out what it doesn’t consider significant. . .The larger principle is that what we experience is determined by what we are able to perceive.”

After several decades of mushroom hunting there are still times when out in the woods I look and search and see no mushrooms anywhere. And then just as I am about to give up suddenly a mushroom seems to appear out of thin air. Then suddenly I find a bunch right before me I had somehow not been able to perceive.

Such experiences may make a forest gadabout wonder just how much else apart from mushrooms they may be overlooking and missing when out there in the woods and how much richer their personal experiences may be if’n they could just see what it is they are actually looking at.

I explored this idea of perception an understanding in greater detail in a previous post: Wild Oyster Mushrooms and Reading the Nuances of Nature.

Weil writes that these sorts of experiences leads him to believe we should accept or at least consider other people’s experiences we may otherwise find fantastic, like telepathy or precognition.

“Otherwise we could live in a forest full of morels and never see them.”

March 2019

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Figueroa Mtn Freedom: Violating the COVID-19 Lockdown Order

Posted on March 28, 2020 by Jack Elliott

A vernal pool on Figueroa Mountain. A male and female mallard were seen in the pool. March 27, 2020

I find it difficult to live in a society governed without reason.

My mind operates logically. I am irascible by nature. I am not submissive. I am free thinking and independent. I do not subscribe to dogma nor doxy. I’m off the reservation. I’m wild and free in spirit and mind. My vision is not blinkered. I am obnoxious and loud mouthed with my opinions and points of view and I do not hedge against this trait nor offer apologies. If confronted, I can be rather confrontational. I fire from the hip. My fuse is short. And, as a student of history, I am deeply suspicious of authority and organized power.

What I see transpiring in my hometown of Santa Barbara, the Gilded State within which I live, and these United States at large is a daily irritant that festers with each new headline.

On March 19, Governor Newsom declared a statewide lockdown order that compels by force citizens to remain home. Citizens are only legally allowed to leave home for “essential purposes” such as work, purchasing food or medicine or for healthcare purposes.

Newsom’s dictate is backed by the threat of a fine and jail time. This is a law with teeth, not merely a suggestive guideline.

People are now being arrested in other states for violating these statutory lockdown orders and for being outdoors.

The Chicago mayor stated this in no uncertain terms.

Lightfoot added that spending long periods of time outdoors, anywhere, is not allowed.

And neither is going into closed spaces, like playgrounds.

“You cannot go on long bike rides. Playgrounds are shut down. You must abide by the order. Outside, is for a brief respite, not for 5Ks.”

https://chicago.cbslocal.com/2020/03/25/beck-lightfoot-on-stay-at-home-order-citations-to-be-issued-parks-could-be-shut-down/

Chicago threatens fines, arrests for coronavirus crackdown violators

https://nypost.com/2020/03/26/chicago-threatens-fines-arrests-for-coronavirus-crackdown-violators/

The ruling class tells us to stay home and socially distance and isolate ourselves to prevent our own infection and to prevent ourselves from infecting other people. To “bend the curve” and lessen the ballooning infection rate, they tells us.

Then the same officials threaten to incarcerate us and force us at gunpoint into closed and confined areas with other people, thereby violating their own distancing protocol at the same time prisons are releasing convicts to avoid such conditions for fear of an outbreak.

This is madness!

Headlines:

Checkpoints set up on Kauai, 2 arrests on Oahu as police enforce stay-at-home order

https://www.hawaiinewsnow.com/2020/03/26/kauai-police-begin-islandwide-checkpoints-lockdown-compliance/

Coronavirus behind bars: Prisoners being freed to slow spread in ‘virus vectors’

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/coronavirus-behind-bars-prisoners-being-freed-slow-spread-virus-vectors-n1169881

The smooth weathered slopes of chaparral carpeted hills along Sunset Valley.

In Santa Barbara the ruling class has told us that the local recreational marijuana stores are “essential business.” And so they remain open catering to potheads. Because getting high in Santa Barbara is “essential.”

A MESSAGE REGARDING
COVID-19

At Coastal, we are vigilantly monitoring events related to the novel coronavirus outbreak COVID-19. At this time, Coastal will remain open for both medical and recreational customers for normal business hours. . .

Coastal Cannabis Dispensary

These stores operate out of closed and confined spaces–buildings–where it is not possible to maintain the stated six foot “social distancing” protocol and where vectors of disease are set out for patrons to freely handle and set to their faces to smell.

I do not have a problem with adults being allowed to legally purchase weed from documented licensed vendors. I do not care if people want to smoke flowers or the derivatives there from.

But at the same time, the backcountry campgrounds like Davy Brown have been cordoned off and closed and are actively patrolled by goons from the abusive and overreaching moneygrubbing Parks Management Company, as I myself have recently witnessed.

(Previous Posts: Parks Management Company’s Red Rock Racket, Parks Management Company’s Red Rock Racket Continues)

This despite the fact that the campsites are well spaced and it is easy and possible with no extra effort to camp in each site and maintain a far greater distance than the six foot protocol.

Stoners are legally allowed to walk around inside a building and carry on transactions with clerks face to face, exchanging forms of payment and presenting identification and each touching what the other touched, and patrons breathing on and sniffing the same product containers at the display cases.

This is utterly senseless.

Yesterday, the family Elliott spent the afternoon on Figueroa Mountain in gross and flagrant violation of Governor Newsom’s stay at home lockdown dictate. And we were happy to do it.

To take our children to the mountains to play is now illegal and punishable with a $1000 fine and six months in jail, as per the Governor.

(EDIT 3-30-2020 8:08 AM. To clarify, I am taking a strict constructionist interpretation of the Governor’s order. Yes, indeed, the lockdown dictate permits limited outdoor recreation. But as per the Governor these activities are only allowed within your “local neighborhoods.” We have been instructed that “Californians can walk, run, hike and bike in their local neighborhoods as long as they continue to practice social distancing of 6 feet.” I do not interpret that to mean the entire county. https://covid19.ca.gov/stay-home-except-for-essential-needs/#top)

We’re all outlaws now. We will not submit to this madness!

Do not misunderstand. We take the novel coronavirus deadly seriously.

We are highly educated people. We are well read. We follow closely the minutiae of current events on the national and world stage. We have susceptible seniors and old folks in our family like most everybody else. We have family members on the front lines working in the hospitals right now. We do not take this threat lightly!

We removed our children from school before the government finally decided to close them down. We began to self isolate and stopped interacting with friends and family and the public at large before the government decided to issue the various dictates and protocols regarding “social distancing” and home lockdown. In our essential business, which remains open, we formulated specific protocols to limit interaction between employees and clients before any of our professional peers in the county, so far as we know.

In point of fact, we have as a family and as a business been ahead of the curve with respect to self isolation and distancing and proper protective measures.

Santa Barbara County is mostly rural. This is a demonstrable fact. Large swaths of the county are unpopulated if not unpeopled and much of the land here is designated National Forest and Wilderness. Within just a couple of minutes from my doorstep I enter the forest.

Santa Barbara County is not a densely populated metropolis. Yet, the same rigid one-size fits all lockdown dictate applies as much to citizens here as it does to those living in the middle of Los Angeles city proper.

This is senseless.

The Dude will not abide!

To paraphrase Kipling: If you can keep your head when all about you men are losing theirs and blaming it on you. If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, but make allowance for their doubting too. Well then, you’ll be a man my son!

In Desert Solitaire, Edward Abbey wrote of the wilderness as a refuge from abusive government:

“The wilderness should be preserved for political reasons. We may need it someday not only as a refuge from excessive industrialism but also as a refuge from authoritarian government, from political oppression. Grand Canyon, Big Bend, Yellowstone and the High Sierra may be required to function as bases of guerrilla warfare against tyranny. What reason have we Americans to think our own society will necessarily escape the world-wide drift toward the totalitarian organization of men and institutions?”

UPDATE April 5, 2020: Please see my remarks in the comments for further information and opinion.

Figueroa Mtn Freedom: Violating the COVID-19 Lockdown Order

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Jack’s Custom Deluxe Super Premium Los Padres Liniment

Posted on March 9, 2020 by Jack Elliott

Cottonwood trees showing fall color along the Santa Ynez River in Santa Barbara County.

“Well the summertime has gone,” Van Morrison sings. “And the leaves are gently turning.” And come fall season in Santa Barbara County the black cottonwood trees drop leaves and grow buds.

The sappy buds develop and swell in size through winter and as spring approaches a super sticky amber resin oozes from cracks in the bud scale.

The tarry goo has a strong, heady fragrance somewhat similar to the best flowers. The natural fragrance is reminiscent of perfume sometimes.

Over the years I’ve noticed a slight variance in the fragrance of the bud resin of different trees growing in different areas of the county and maybe it’s also to do with the vagaries of weather from season to season or subspecies differentiation.

Depending on how black cottonwood balm is prepared the fragrance varies as well.

A stand of black cottonwood trees budded out and dripping resin casts its sweet scent wafting in the wind for some distance.

I have fond memories of sitting in the sea on a surfboard in winter along Gaviota and smelling the black cottonwood fragrance filling the air from the windblown beachside trees.

Black cottonwood bud oozing resin.

Black cottonwood buds are brown, as seen here, while Fremontii cottonwood buds are green. 

Black cottonwood balm has taken on legendary status in the Elliott home. The bud resin is a remarkable natural remedy.

Each winter I carefully and judiciously harvest buds, which I use to infuse organic avocado oil.

After some time steeping I strain the oil and blend it with beeswax to make an exceptional medicinal moisturizer our family uses in a variety of ways.

I’ve said of it in jest, Jack Elliott’s Custom Deluxe Super Premium Los Padres Liniment.

Or, you know, just cottonwood for short.

I harvest my buds from the Los Padres National Forest and use top shelf ingredients.

The cottonwood, as we call it, is a three ingredient handcrafted product made of local matter.

I use avocado oil because it’s rich in vitamins A, D and E and omega-3 fatty acids, which all benefit the skin in ways that complement the black cottonwood.

Avocado oil promotes skin regeneration and the healing of minor wounds and may help reduce itching and inflammation.

Avocado oil serves as a good vehicle to carry the active ingredients in black cottonwood deeper into the body, because it penetrates the skin more deeply than many other oils.

The oil also absorbs quickly and without a lasting greasy feeling.

Fresh super tacky cottonwood bud resin.

What fingers look like after two hours of harvesting. 

We here in the Elliott household rub this luxurious liniment onto insect bites and stings, minor scrapes, scratches and cuts, dry skin of various causes, burns from fire, heat and sun, poison oak rashes and other issues of dermatitis and most anything else to do with skin.

Black cottonwood soothes minor pain, discomfort and stinging associated with skin injuries and minor wounds and has been used in various forms for thousands of years.

The tree is in the willow family, Salicaceae, and like willows it contains salacin, the basis of salicylic acid from which aspirin as originally named by Bayer was derived.

Salicylates have been derived from the willow tree bark. The Sumerians were noted to have used remedies derived from the willow tree for pain management as far back as 4000 years ago. Hippocrates used it for managing pain and fever. He even utilized tea brewed from it for pain management during childbirth.

In a 1763 clinical trial, the first of its kind, Reverend Edward Stone studied the effects of willow bark powder for treating fever. About a 100 years later the effects of the willow bark powder were studied for acute rheumatism.

In 1828, Professor Johann Buchner used salicin, the Latin word for willow. Henri Leroux used it to treat rheumatism after isolating it in a crystalline form in 1829. In the 1800s, the Heyden Chemical Company was the first to mass produce salicylic acid commercially. It was not until 1899 when a modified version by the name of acetylsalicylic acid was registered and marketed by Bayer under the trade name aspirin.

National Center for Biotechnology Information, U.S. National Library of Medicine

But wait! There’s more.

Black cottonwood is also thought to promote the healing process by stimulating tissue regeneration, acting as a vasodilator or an agent that dilates blood vessels and an antimicrobial antiseptic to keep wounds from getting infected. Reference Michael Moore’s “Medicinal Plants of the Pacific Northwest.”

What more do we need?

When I was stung by a stingray I used the cottonwood to dull pain and heal the wound in the days after the initial excruciating and debilitating explosion of pain had subsided.

When in the past my small wounds reddened and festered the cottonwood put an end to it.

The balm does away with the stinging and soreness of skin scratched by wild roses or blackberry brambles or brush when hiking.

Sometimes within seconds the stinging vanishes.

That I can tell you from personal experience.

Unlike so many other artificially derived and synthesized over the counter products that reek of an unpleasant medicinal odor, black cottonwood fragrance is remarkably pleasant and soothing, even a might addicting to huff so fine is its perfume fragrance.

I smell it up whenever I apply it.

Sometimes I open the jar just for a whiff.

Black cottonwood buds blended in avocado oil and steeped for an extended period of time. This jar sat in a darkened cabinet for 22 months. The oil takes on an amber hue from the cottonwood. The longer it’s steeped the darker it gets.

In short, black cottonwood balm soothes minor pain, prevents infection, promotes healing and moisturizes the skin.

I no longer use store-bought topical antibiotic agents or moisturizers and I take the balm on trips away from home.

I find it remarkable that no mention of the early Chumash having used black cottonwood for similar purposes can be found in Jan Timbrook’s book, “Chumash Ethnobotany.”

That is one of two items missing from that encyclopedic work, which has been a personal favorite of mine since its publication.

And I’m not saying Timbrook left anything out.

There is apparently no reference to the Chumash having used black cottonwood for pain relief and healing in the sources available.

For how well the black cottonwood works, I’m surprised to find no mention of its use.

Final product.

One notable problem with harvesting black cottonwood buds is that the twig end dies when the bud is removed.

The twigs do not sprout again.

Pinching off a bud does not result in two or more new shoots sprouting from the broken twig end; it results in a dead twig.

I can tell you this from personal experience through careful observation of particular trees over the course of years.

Therefore when harvesting it is imperative to take just a little from here and there and from various places.

And to take from numerous different trees over some space in order to reduce the harm done to each tree and avoid stunting growth or possibly killing entire branches, limbs or perhaps in time the whole tree if young enough.

Related Post On This Blog

Black Cottonwood Wildcraft

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