The Fantasy of Sylvia Park
The coin is a little bigger than a quarter. It isn’t decorative, but it has a nice weight to it, and the words stamped on it remain clearly legible, even though this token was struck a hundred years ago....
Chapparal Yucca
We saw the white fire of the yucca, Lighting the mountains— And still along the trail Spring’s flowers lingered for summer. —Madeleine Ruthven, “Yerba Buena,” Londelius Came to the Mountains, 1934 In late spring and early summer, thousands of...
A Day at the Beach
“A little sea-bathing would set me up forever,” pronounces Mrs Bennet in Jane Austen’s 1813 novel Pride and Prejudice, expressing the desire to spend the summer at the newly fashionable seaside town of Brighton. The author wasn’t opposed to...
Life on the Edge: Endangered Species
The least Bell’s vireo, a small songbird most Angelinos have never seen or even heard of, has been in the news lately. This federally listed endangered species has found a refuge in a recently restored stretch of the LA...
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 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...
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...
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...
OVERBOARD! Yacht Harbor Mania
“Believe me my young friend, there is nothing—absolutely nothing – half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.” —Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows Grahame’s endearing Water Rat wasn’t the only one enamored with boats...
A Whale of a Tail
Every spring, California gray whales make a monumental pilgrimage from their winter breeding grounds in the warm lagoons of the Sea of Cortez to their summer feeding grounds in the Arctic. It’s a 12,000-mile round trip, one of the...
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