Jack Elliott's Santa Barbara Adventure

Clouds over the Santa Ynez Mountains, December 14, 2024. Akin to the asperitas clouds of November, 2023. 

“Rumours circulate about entry points which might give access to unseen spaces. Secrets are jealously guarded, closely shared. The subculture has its subcultures. Just as certain climbers prefer granite to gritstone, and certain cavers prefer wet systems to dry ones, so explorers have their specialisms.”

—Robert Macfarlane, Underland: A Deep Time Journey

Play it close to the vest. You know the rules.

An underground economy serves as a primary path by which the location of sought after places in Condor National Forest are disclosed; the seldom visited sites and the sensitive and exceptional places unlisted in guidebooks and on webpages.

This unmentioned economy of direction bound by etiquette serves effectively as a community governor to screen for proper individual character and to regulate the flow of people.

A petroglyph in the wilderness of Condor National Forest. It’s well-worn and barely visible, but a dandy!

Consider an analogy with surfing.

Surfers wait years, sometimes decades, for a particular break to come to life working properly, to its fullest potential manifestation in power and form. 

The best surfers catch the best waves at the best breaks.

Thus, the most efficient use is made of a highly valuable, fiercely demanded, scarce and fleeting resource.

The worst surfer probably should not get the best wave. Their lack of experience and lesser skills typically ensure that they don’t get that wave.

The best surf typically is the hardest to catch and ride.

And so a beginner does not even bother to expect, and generally will not for good reason attempt, to paddle out to the main peak at an aggressively surfed break and compete in the lineup against salty and seasoned muscled veterans and cranky diehard watermen.

Of course, this may be obvious, like a beginning driver not venturing onto a racetrack; we’re drawing on an extreme example here in order to clarify the general point.

There exists a natural pecking order.

The behavior of beginners is tempered by a realistic understanding of their own limitations, as Inspector Harry Callahan once suggested was wise.

And brought to heel by a healthy respect for those more advanced and skilled surfers who’ve already paid dues and put in hours of work or who are fortunate enough to be natural talents.

In their most primal form of dispensation, waves are allocated by the aggressive use of force; sheer physicality, accented with the occasional stink-eyed glare and pride-wilting vicious ridicule. What’s called localism. It’s the Serengeti at sea.

More or less, that’s how the economy of swell functions.

Once recognized by other surfers as sufficiently skilled, a person might be allowed into a more advanced sphere of operation within the water or boldly take their own place if good enough, and participate in a more meaningful way and at a higher level at a particular break.

Yet, even surfers of lesser skill may at times be allowed into a coveted lineup unharried, after first having proven their understanding and serious respect for etiquette.

Players in this maritime game are well aware that everybody is most certainly not equally entitled to an equal share of the best waves.

Nobody is assured of getting anything, but wet. And all the players know it.

The distribution of this fiercely demanded, fickle commodity to its insatiable consumers is self-regulated in this manner. There are no particular laws, no officials and no formal enforcement. 

No authority or arbiter exists to determine or mete out fairness or equality in the lineup and guarantee access. It’s self-governed by the people that visit the places most. 

This code of conduct, these unwritten rules, have grown up through the decades organically, from one generation to another, veteran to grommet, father to son, from within, bottom up; a rich cultural shroud bound together through ages with threads of many different hues and from many different individual fibers.

You cannot buy an inexpensive book delivered to your doorstep or read a website while at home in your pajamas to get shoehorned in on the cheap and easy.

Access is earned.

sand filled

Discreet word-of-mouth selects for character.

Directions are not freely handed out to anybody upon request. Word-of-mouth reserved for a select few leaves no cairns in print to later be followed by anybody and everybody.

People sharing details to sensitive places generally do so to other likeminded folks, whom they have reason to trust are respectful partners in preservation.

Yet, at least as importantly, word-of-mouth tempers flow, too.

Private, fleeting conversations distribute people across the land at any one point in time farther and wider, in ways more intermittent and less concentrated, than otherwise happens with guidebooks and websites, where published pages and internet links are readily spread like contagions shared virally and it’s all permanent, for anybody to see, forevermore.

National parks grappling with high volume as Instagram tourism booms — ABC News

For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind: it hath no stalk: the bud shall yield no meal: if so be it yield, the strangers shall swallow it up.

— Hosea 8:7, King James Version

Published information in books and on webpages serves as crowd force multipliers that can overrun small, singular places with a constant flow of many people.

The wind sown, the whirlwind reaped.

And so it is that this unmentioned underground economy characteristic of backcountry subculture serves its constituents well and admirably, while also helping to preserve the treasures of our national heritage.