Jack Elliott's Santa Barbara Adventure

Humboldt lily seed pod.

“Adults follow paths. Children explore. Adults are content to walk the same way, hundreds of times, or thousands; perhaps it never occurs to adults to step off the paths, to creep beneath the rhododendrons, to find the spaces between fences.”

—Robert Macfarlane, The Old Ways

Some level of maturity is required to enjoy a long trail walk through a forest without venturing so much as a single step anywhere off the path, “immediately adjacent” to it.

To walk the line requires discipline and self-restraint. 

Who will remain separated? To only ever peek at from afar, like some kind of museum exhibit, never up close and personal. To ignore visceral yearnings. To never wander off the twelve-inch wide path.

Adults can appreciate or at least abide by such restraint in service to a greater cause. 

Children want none of it. Some adults don’t either, actually. 

Immediately upon lower Arroyo Quemado Trail.

A fleeting moment of excitement struck one morning at the thought.

I’d take the kids for a hike where they had never been, within their own larger backyard in our county.

The thrill of novelty and seeing a new place for the first time. Very good! 

The good thought withered on the vine with the realization of how ludicrous the idea was, really. A wind past the teeth, head shaking sort of silly.

I couldn’t possibly expect my three children to remain on the twelve-inch wide path like subjects in a maze.

I would not want to enforce the rigid structure of an exclosure anyway, not here in this big forested canyon, where it clearly appears senseless and unnecessary.

And so we didn’t bother with the clipped and curtailed, the diminished experience that is the Baron Ranch corridor.

Calochortus fimbriatus. Guerrilla contraband imagery.

“The only area of the Ranch open to the public is the designated trail. Public access is prohibited in other areas of the Ranch. These areas, including areas immediately adjacent to the trail, are used for native plant restoration, wildlife conservation, and agriculture.”

—County of Santa Barbara

That’s the County’s own super serious bolded emphasis, not added. 

The County is adamant! Just short of yelling in full capitals.

Their white-knuckled ardency is also seen in the oversized and numerous scowling signs along lower Arroyo Quemado Trail yelling DO NOT ENTER.

County employees prohibit stepping anywhere off trail in Baron Ranch under the guise of protecting nature.

Their exclosure of the people is based on nonsense, though, is it not?

Years pass and no restorative work whatsoever goes on anywhere along most of the nine miles of trails in Baron Ranch. 

And most of the forest at the so-called ranch will never be touched in this regard in any manner at all anyway, right?

The place is huge, much of which is no different than the surrounding national forest. 

The canyon is large and multi-forked, reaching from the Pacific seashore to the crest of the Santa Ynez Mountains.

Surely there’s room among the 1,083 acres of Baron Ranch to step off the trail now and again without unduly threatening something.

Are walking and conservation mutually exclusive?

Are we really supposed to believe we pose so significant a threat to canyon biology that freehiking cannot be accommodated?

That requires the willing suspension of disbelief.

Baron Ranch sign, entrance gate in background.

Is this not amusing if not alarming? 

The County acts with immoderate and disproportionate influence on local ecological dynamics, radically altering the land, reconfiguring coastal geography and watersheds, forest composition and the historical arrangement of plants and animals and fouling the air.

This is not to comment one way or the other in favor or opposition to these civil affairs surrounding Tajiguas dump. 

But to juxtapose the County’s bold and deep reaching actions on the Gaviota Coast with its treatment of walkers as if we are a problem, like some sort of barely tolerable existential threat.

Irony rings in the air. You can actually hear it when standing in Baron Ranch reading the sign suggesting visitors remain quieter, and not to upset the acoustic ambiance.

At the same time, one may hear the beeping of reversing bulldozers wafting over from Tajiguas dump next canyon over. The dump is the reason the County took ownership of Baron Ranch.

Good thing my children aren’t running around anywhere off the twelve-inch corridor hollering and having fun.

Could you imagine?

Plastic in County-made mulch at Baron Ranch, as seen here nearby the sensitive habitat sign.

Some of the larger plastic found in the mulch, collected in mere seconds from in and around native plantings in restoration work done in Baron Ranch. 

“Excuse me? You can’t be serious, man. You cannot be serious!”

–John McEnroe

If the condescension is not enough, the outrageous part may be seen in how the County of Santa Barbara is responsible for the spreading of microplastic trash in Baron Ranch. And in places all over elsewhere across the coastal littoral, which drains to the ocean, downhill and downstream of everything.

The County of Santa Barbara makes this microtrash mulch, which they sweet sell as “natural” and “ideal” and even suggest is “organic.”

The mulch is loaded with pieces of plastic.  It’s speckled with even smaller bits the closer one looks. 

What would a microscopic analysis of County mulch reveal? 

The City of Santa Barbara is a booster of the microtrash mulch program, offering rebates as encouragement.

This has gone on for years.

And so we ask the employees of both the County of Santa Barbara and the City of Santa Barbara, if they want to be bold and super serious about conservation, tell us:

How much microplastic trash has been spread county-wide in this manner?

The domain experts treat us like fools. Then they expect to be trusted and respected when they demand allegiance to their rules of exclosure.

Ventura County forest sign.