FALLING APART SINCE 1929
The coast highway isn’t just a disaster waiting to happen, it’s a series of disasters that repeat over and over again. The people who built the local stretch of the coast route in the 1920s were in a hurry...
Building Pacific Coast Highway
Bands played, flags waves, dignitaries gave speeches from a bunting-festooned platform, and hundreds of motorists lined up at Sycamore Cove at the western edge of the Topanga Malibu Sequit Rancho for the grand opening of Theodore Roosevelt Highway. It...
THE COASTWATCHERS Chapter Twenty-One
School brought changes. I missed Kitty terribly. We had made so many plans together about what we would do and what classes we would take when we were junior high school students, and here I was without her. Kitty...
Hello Topanga Days 2024!
Get ready for the 49th Topanga Days Festival—three amazing days of music, food, artisans and activities, this Memorial Day weekend, May 25, 26 and 27, 10 am-7 pm, at the Topanga Community Center. We have all the details on...
The Open Ocean: Life at Sea
The open ocean is a strange place, always shifting, always changing. It begins where coastal waters end, and it covers most of the planet—300 million cubic miles of it. The scientific name for the open ocean is “pelagic,” which...
I Love You Mom
Happy Mother’s Day! May is the month to celebrate the mothers, grandmothers, aunts, older sisters, mother figures, and female mentors who have been a positive influence on our lives. Thank you for everything you do—we wouldn’t be the people...
The Hotel Arcadia
It loomed above the beach like Count Dracula’s beach residence: stark, turreted, treeless, and not exactly inviting, but Dracula wasn’t written yet when the imposing Hotel Arcadia opened its doors in Santa Monica on January 24, 1887. Celebrated for...
THE COASTWATCHERS Chapter Twenty
Just when the summer weather was ideal, the water at its warmest, the waves perfect walls of smooth green glass rolling gently to the shore, it was time to go back to school. Jessie and I would be starting...
PINNIPED PARTY! California Sea Lions
They are fast and powerful swimmers and divers who love to hang out with their friends at the beach. When things are good, it’s a life of surf, sun, and sushi, but things aren’t alway easy for the Zalophus...
California’s Other Lions
When things are good, the California sea lion lives the ultimate beach lifestyle of surf, sun, and sushi, but sometimes this gregarious, vociferous, and intelligent marine mammal needs a helping hand from the humans who cause most of this...
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