Recovering the Past: Mapping Los Angeles Landscape History
They are called the Chumash. The name refers to a group of related languages and dialects, but it has become the de facto title for the people who spoke them and who lived along the California coast from San...
Location is Everything
How the Santa Monica Mountains Helped Shape Film History A reader recently reached out for help finding the film location for an episode of the TV series Alfred Hitchcock Presents, filmed in 1955. The location he sought turned out...
Silent, Sleeky, Salamanders
“What kind of beast is your salamander?” asked the Prince. “It is hard to tell their kind, your Honor,” said Golg. “For they are too white-hot to look at. But they are most like small dragons. They speak to...
IMAGINE A WORLD…WITHOUT SMMNRA
The Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area is turning 45 on November 10, 2023. Almost all of the big western national parks were created from huge areas of undeveloped wilderness, but this living crazy-quilt of a park—spread across 153,250...
Parrots in Paradise
Almost every spring for the last eight years, mitered parakeets have nested in the old windbreak of eucalyptus trees that borders our garden. By the end of August, the young parrots and their parents have rejoined the local parrot...
La Costa Beach
La Costa Beach is almost entirely hidden behind the houses that locals have nicknamed “the Great Wall of Malibu.” Also hidden here, among the homes that line the coast and cover the hillsides, is a colorful chapter of local...
Coastal Eddy
The fog comes on little cat feet. It sits looking over harbor and city on silent haunches and then moves on. —Carl Sandburg Coastal Eddy isn’t a surfer, or a surf band from the 60s, but this West Coast...
The Naked Truth
Pirates Cove in Malibu is small and isolated—a crescent of white sand surrounded by forbiddingly steep cliffs. It faces the open ocean. This storied stretch of coast is said to have been named not for the “avast ye me...
What’s Bugging You?
Synanthropic Insects Are at Home in Our Homes It has fifteen pairs of improbably long legs, faceted eyes that can see the ultraviolet spectrum, and it’s a voracious hunter, pouncing upon its prey with amazing speed and subduing it...
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