Castle Rock was a landmark, a tourist attraction, and a film location. This fifty-foot-tall spire of rock towered above the beach just east of Topanga, a sentinel carved from the cliffs by wave action. Before it was dynamited in 1945 and the remnants bulldozed in the 1970s, this rock formation starred with Charlie Chaplin, posed with Marilyn Monroe, and appeared in some of the earliest films ever shot on the beach in California. Join TNT for a look at this forgotten rock star. Cover Art & Design by Urs Baur
Can you feel it? There’s a restlessness in the air that tells of summer waning: the days are beginning to shorten. There are different birds in the garden, as the first of the southward bound arrive—hummingbirds and warblers. At the beach, shorebirds and waders absent during breeding season are beginning to reappear. They include the beautiful charcoal and white Heermann’s gulls, which breed in Baja California, and a host that includes sanderlings, willets, godwits, curlews. Some have short journeys, others are arriving from their Arctic breeding grounds, flying in the dark between sunset and sunrise.
The new generation of owls and coyotes are getting ready to strike out on their own. All of that midnight conversation involves the adults providing encouragement, and their children complaining bitterly that hunting is hard, and couldn’t you please bring me a gopher, Mom?
The annual migration of the tarantulas is also beginning. Their quest for a mate can sometimes lead these enormous but gentle spiders into places they don’t belong, like the kitchen or the garage. It is easy and merciful to gently scoop them up with the aid of a piece of stiff paper and a large bowl, and set them back outdoors to continue their journey.
This year’s orb-weaver spider crop is abundant, and while they do not grow nearly as large as the tarantulas do, their webs can easily stretch from one side of the driveway or front door or gate to the other: a sticky trap for the hapless first person out of the house in the morning. It’s a good idea to look before leaping, unless one wishes to perform that traditional late summer Topanga ceremonial ritual: the eek-is-there-a-spider-in-my-hair? dance.
Humans face late summer changes, too. The unofficial end of summer is Labor Day, Monday September 7, but children are already back to school, and canyon college students have packed their bags and headed to their destinations motivated by their own migratory imperative.
After a summer of oppressive heat—lethal heat in Europe and the East Coast—the shorter and hopefully cooler days of autumn will be a welcome change.
The 2026 Fall General Election is right around the corner and nerves are already stretched to the breaking point. County elections officials will begin mailing ballots for the November 3 General Election by October 5, 2026—less than two months away. Now would be a great time to register to vote or update any changes such as a new address.
The Topanga Film Festival is coming up fast. This year’s event is scheduled for September 4-6. We’ll have all the details in our next issue, and tickets are already on sale, https://topangafilminstitute.org/
The first new major museum in Los Angeles’s Exposition Park in years opens its doors on September 22. The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art was founded by filmmaker George Lucas and his wife Mellody Hobson. The 300,000-square-foot space was designed by Ma Yansong of Chinese architecture firm MAD Architects and it houses an impressive collection—more than 40,000 works of art and “cinematic artifacts,” including illustrations, comics, murals, paintings, photography, film and video: https://lucasmuseum.org/LosAngeles.
The Lucas Museum has been criticized as a costly vanity project, and pop culture is not every art critic’s cup of tea, but the new museum is worth celebrating. In an era when billionaires spend hundreds of millions to try to buy elections, it’s nice to see one buying art instead of politicians, and sharing it with the public, instead of hoarding it.
Unfortunately, because certain politicians are so easily swayed by billionaires, the Trump administration is currently trying to dismantle the California’s Coastal Zone Management Program under the Coastal Zone Management Act (CZMA)—key legislation that protects the California coast from oil drilling and overdevelopment, and also protects the environmental resources in all areas within the Coastal Zone, including Topanga. Learn more at www.gov.ca.gov. Written comments may also be submitted by email to czma.california-evaluation@noaa.gov.
The window for comments is closing fast—August 22—and many residents of the coastal zone (including TNT’s editor) are only now finding out about this issue, but it’s an important one, with the potential to impact everyone and everything in the Coastal Zone.
Stay safe, be well.
