By: Svetlana Babaeva

We’re thrilled to once again showcase the impressive work of a GIS student from Santa Monica College! This time, we spotlight the exceptional talents of Svetlana Babaeva, whose dedication and analytical skill shine through in her latest project. Svetlana has taken on one of the most urgent and complex issues facing Californians today: the dramatic and ongoing rise in rent across Los Angeles County. With a sharp geographic lens and a commitment to uncovering meaningful insights, she’s mapped and analyzed this crisis with clarity and purpose. In her own words …

Los Angeles, often seen as a land of opportunity and the embodiment of the “California Dream,” drew me in 2019 with its vibrant cultural energy. However, I soon encountered the city’s harsh reality: a crushing housing crisis that personally affected me and nearly a third of my neighbors who spend over half their income on rent.

Understanding the Housing Crisis Through GIS

After five years of observing this crisis and studying geography at Santa Monica College, I realized my personal struggle was part of a larger issue impacting over 60% of Los Angeles County residents. This led me to create Rent Pressure in Los Angeles, a story map using Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to pinpoint areas most affected by severe rent burdens. My spatial analysis highlighted central and downtown Los Angeles County as particularly vulnerable, prompting questions about the sustainability of living here. This project has significantly deepened my understanding of how geographic thinking and GIS can illuminate and address critical real-world issues beyond just housing. These patterns clearly warrant continued investigation within this area of study.

Acknowledgements

I am incredibly grateful to the Santa Monica College Geography Program for their exceptional guidance. Special thanks to Professor Jing Liu, whose five GIS courses and unwavering support were instrumental in developing this project and my forthcoming Geospatial Technology certificate. I also extend my sincere appreciation to Professor Robert O’Keefe for introducing me to critical geographic thinking, Professor Pete Morris for his insightful, multidisciplinary approach to California geography, and Professor William A. Selby for his inspiring presentations. Their combined contributions have provided an invaluable foundation and continue to inspire my geographic explorations.

Showcase Your Geographic Work on Rediscovering the Golden State: California Geography

Are you passionate about California’s landscapes, communities, or pressing challenges? Have you created maps, visualizations, research projects, or multimedia presentations that explore the geography of the Golden State? If so, we invite you to contribute to Rediscovering the Golden State: California Geography — an online platform dedicated to telling California’s story through a geographic lens.

We’re looking for student and faculty contributions that connect clearly to California — whether you’re examining climate change impacts, housing and rent patterns, water resources, wildfire dynamics, transportation systems, cultural diversity, immigration, or any number of issues shaped by place and space. Submissions can be analytical or creative, visual or written, but they must offer geographic insight into the state’s dynamic human or physical landscapes.

By sharing your work, you not only gain professional exposure but also help inform and inspire others to better understand California — its regions, its people, and the challenges it faces.

If you’re interested in being featured, or have a student whose work deserves a wider audience, we’d love to hear from you! Let’s rediscover the Golden State together, one geographic story at a time.

The post Rent Pressure in L.A first appeared on Rediscovering the Golden State.

At Rediscovering the Golden State: California Geography, one of our missions is to feature the impactful work of students who apply geographic thought and analysis to pressing California issues. We’re proud to present Jason Runnels, a dedicated student from Santa Monica College.

Jason has completed a significant project titled Wells, Crops, and Crisis: Exploring the Spatial Relationships Between Groundwater Depletion, Crops and Landcover in Tulare County, CA. This timely and insightful work delves into the critical issue of groundwater depletion in Tulare County, examining its spatial relationships with agricultural practices and land cover.

We encourage you to explore Jason’s work by following the link above. Additionally, please take a moment to read his bio (see below) and learn more about his motivations for addressing this critical issue.

A twenty-five-year resident of California, Jason Runnells, the creator behind this featured project, brings a deeply personal perspective to the state’s pressing water resource challenges. With roots in a multi-generational Colorado farming family, he possesses a lifelong appreciation for the intricate relationship between land and water in semi-arid environments. This foundational interest has culminated in a focused exploration of Tulare County’s groundwater issues, a critical component of California’s larger sustainability puzzle.

This project leverages the power of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to investigate the complex spatial interplay between shifting groundwater levels and established land use patterns. The resulting analysis provides valuable insights for the broader conversation surrounding water management and long-term environmental planning in the region.

Jason’s path to geography and GIS is as unique as his perspective. After a successful two-decade career in the music industry, a desire to more deeply understand the natural world led him back to academia. Under the mentorship of Professor Jing Liu at Santa Monica College, a passion for cartography and spatial analysis was ignited. This newfound dedication to geography has led to an internship as the GIS lead for The Canyon Alliance, where he is instrumental in developing geographic databases and tools to support local disaster preparedness efforts.

Upon graduating this spring with an associate degree in Geography, Jason will continue his studies at UCLA, pursuing a major in Geography/Environmental Studies and a minor in Geospatial Information Systems & Technologies. This project stands as a testament to his dedication and a promising glimpse into a future dedicated to applying the power of geography to real-world environmental challenges.

The post Wells, Crops, and Crisis first appeared on Rediscovering the Golden State.

We all require nutritious meals for our survival. So, the people who grow and harvest our food should be near the top of our list of workers who are rewarded for their labor, right? But that has become wishful thinking as profit margins continue to shrink and more family farms are threatened with bankruptcy each year. Agricultural innovations and revolutions continue to spread, leaving their footprints across California’s landscapes; but current trends too often leave small farmers struggling to pay the bills and keep food on their own tables, all while our popular culture celebrates the latest get-rich-quick millionaires and billionaires who may provide no essential goods or services. California has been the number one agricultural state in the nation for at least seven decades. Our state produces more varieties of farm products than any other state (including some crops that are only grown here commercially), totaling more than 50 billion dollars of income each year.

Disturbing questions and contradictory data ring out from the Golden State and spread to farming communities throughout the country. How are these paradoxical trends affecting life on the farms and our ability to provide healthy, affordable food to the people? What is the future of agriculture as small farms struggle to retain young people who might continue family traditions? Here, we will dive into these controversies and on to the farms to find some answers. We start with a small regenerative family farm and we end with the largest winery in the world, both just outside Turlock in the San Joaquin Valley, between Modesto and Merced. Our guide is Alison McNally, Associate Professor of Geography & Environmental Resources at Cal State University Stanislaus, and this trip is sponsored by the California Geographical Society.

This story is not intended to answer all the questions or solve the many perplexing problems encountered in California’s breadbasket. We have addressed some of them in previous stories on this website and in past publications. For instance, you are probably aware of the controversial debates about how, for decades, big ag has grown at the expense of smaller family farms in California and across much of the nation. Though movements such as farm-to-table encourage sustainable harvests from smaller local farms, many larger agribusinesses have also discovered the economic advantages of more sustainable and/or organic farming on much larger scales. I’ll leave it to you to navigate through the rabbit holes of research and mountains of case studies (such as from UC Davis) that weigh the pros and cons and long-term advantages and disadvantages of small- to large-scale farming. Here, we take you to experience both extremes.

We’re plowing right into the fields for some first-hand experiential learning, guided by the people who work on the farms every day. We start with a morning tour and informative customized hayride through Burroughs Family Farms and we end with an afternoon at E & J Gallo Ranch. There are some surprising connections to our previous story on this website since, on a clear day, you can see some Yosemite National Park high country when you look east from some of these farmlands. And remember the Merced River than runs through Yosemite Valley? It continues downhill to become a water source for Gallo Ranch, after upstream waters are released from Lake McClure to meander into the San Joaquin Valley. And like the previous story, I am using my personal field notes fortified with a bit of background research. All images are originals taken by me with no tampering or manipulation.

Burroughs Family Farms started about 130 years ago in the Berkeley Hills. As Berkeley grew, they paid Burroughs to move toward the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, where four dairies were established up to the 1970s.  (We are told that Jersey Island, located where the East Bay meets the Delta, was named after their cows.) When the California Department of Water Resources later bought them out, the family conducted a study, which finally landed Burroughs Family Farms just east of Turlock. They became reestablished as a high producing dairy farm, though their dairies have recently shut down within such a punishing market.

This is where we meet Rosie Burroughs. We launch into her world of regenerative practices that emphasize how healthy soils grow better-tasting, more nutritious foods. She immediately repeats a valuable lesson from the movie, Common Ground: “If you take care of the soil, the soil will take care of you.” And from Rosie and the next film she recommends, Symphony of the Soil, we learn that “we don’t grow plants, we grow soil and soil grows plants.” She emphasizes how healthy soils encourage infiltration of rainfall to become giant water-holding sponges that are also more pest-resistant. Such sustainable soil water banks increase productivity while requiring less irrigation, cutting the need for synthetic industrial chemicals that may increase yields in the short term, but poison the land and decrease the quality of yields in the long term.    

The Burroughs nurtured 20,000 acres for the three years necessary to convert it to organic farming and they’ve been designated organic for 20 years. Now, they grow almonds, beef, chicken, walnuts, and various other products on 12,000 acres. But too many of California’s small farmers have been forced to become price takers rather than price setters. Rosie tells the story of how big ag pushed them out of the dairy business by undercutting their prices and dominating the market. Another unexpected challenge appeared in the form of California’s Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA), enacted in 2014, designed to ensure the sustainable use of groundwater resources across the state. The one-size-fits-all act restricts use of protective ground cover due to perceived high transpiration rates. Rosie argues that their ground cover is actually cutting evaporation and protecting surfaces from erosion in the long run, as they use grazing sheep and other natural trimming techniques that return nutrients into the soil: “One of the ways they protect and enhance the soil, air and water is by growing cover crops. Continuous ground cover with alternative crops suppresses weeds, improves soil structure, sequesters carbon and attracts beneficial insects and native pollinators. For organic crop production, it also provides nitrogen in lieu of chemical fertilizers.”

Though they are busy shipping their fresh farm products around the country, Rosie and family were eager to share their expertise and passion for all-in-the-family sustainable regenerative farming, and we were eager to hear more; but we must move on.   

It’s time to make the short drive south toward Snelling, where we will learn from farmers who work in what seems to be worlds apart from the Burroughs family … until you look a little closer. This Gallo Ranch was purchased by the Gallo family in the 1970s. Alfalfa and apples have been replaced with rows of grapevines. Their three different acreages in this region (Livingston, Merced, and Turlock) are enormous compared to Burroughs Family Farm, as these landscapes and farming economies define volume-scale winemaking. Founded in 1933 by Ernest and Julio Gallo, their family-owned company became the world’s largest winery, recently raking in revenues of more than $5 billion/year with a total net worth more than $12 billion. 

Brent Sams is waiting for us. Brent has been working for Gallo as a viticulture research scientist since 2012. He earned his BA and MA in Geography and his Ph.D. in horticulture and has been researching to understand how fruit chemistry (and quality) changes over time and space. He has used field measurements to test fruit and light exposure, canopy temperature, and soil cores, sensors to measure electric conductivity and elevation mapping, and remote sensing from satellite, unmanned aerial aircraft, and commercial aircraft. It’s a high-tech GPS/GIS environment where updated yields/acre maps illustrate resources put in versus yield coming out. We noted how Gallo employs around 25-30 Ph.D. research scientists on farms scattered around California and beyond. Add paid environmental science internship opportunities. And since Gallo owns only 10-20% of its supply, Sams works with many other farmers who sell to Gallo. In addition to 100 different kinds of wines from around the world, they also sell juice and color concentrates.

We also met Gallo’s “smart” autonomous tractor. This $60,000 investment exemplifies (with an exclamation point) how farming is changing fast in California. Turn it on, put it into gear, and the rest is done remotely, sometimes throughout the night. It becomes obvious that, with fewer farmers and more scientists and automation, this is NOT your grandparents’ family farm.

Like Burroughs Family Farms, Gallo uses drip irrigation, but this ranch is also well situated with riparian rights and prior appropriation water from the nearby Merced River. They also plant and occasionally cut nitrogen-fixing ground cover, but they don’t rely on groundwater sources here. Water reigns king as each vine requires between 10-20 gallons/week, and even more during heatwaves. Pumps are only capable of pushing water through about ¼-mile of drip lines at a time. 

The calendar is also king on these farms. Pruning season peaks during cold and damp January and February and the harvest season runs through August, September, and October, but that has been changing throughout California. Brent provides evidence of the impacts of climate change. Harvest seasons have been getting earlier as grapes ripen faster in higher temperatures. Varieties that require cold nights and big swings in diurnal temperatures have been moving north. Recent extended extreme heat waves are also impacting harvests. So, you might appreciate how the orientation of these rows of grapevines can determine the difference between harvest successes and failures. Rows in California are usually oriented north-south to expose the plants and grapes to just the right balance of sunlight, temperature, and humidity as sun angles change throughout the day. (Hilly terrain, such as in the Napa-Sonoma region, often presents exceptional challenges to these industry norms.) The result is an orderly, repetitious, monoculture landscape that contrasts with the diversity imagined on traditional American family farms.

In contrast to some big ag stereotypes, Gallo has demonstrated it is in this for the long run; they’ve invested in a range of sustainable farming methods that regularly win awards and polish their public reputation. And why not be proud of it? Here are some brief excerpts from their website: “As a family-owned company, GALLO has kept sustainable practices as one of our core values since 1933. Our commitment to our founders’ vision has expanded to not only protecting​ our land for future generations, but also improving the quality of life of our employees, and enhancing the communities where we work and live.”

And from the Gallo Sustainability Impact Report, “At Gallo, we are leaders in sustainability through our enduring commitment to environmental, social, and economic practices so that future generations may flourish.”… “All of the Winery’s coastal vineyards participate in a unique land management plan started by the co-founders where for every acre of land planted in vineyard, one acre of property is set aside to help protect and enhance wildlife habitat. … E. & J. Gallo Winery has led the way in developing and refining new environmentally friendly practices such as minimizing the use of synthetic chemicals, fertilizers and pesticides, recycling and reusing processed water, creating new wetlands and protecting existing riparian habitats.” Perhaps Gallo has more in common with Burroughs Family Farms than we may have originally thought. 

Whether from a small family farm or big ag, much of our food and drink is produced in the Central Valley. These field experiences into the heart of the valley help us appreciate the work that goes into growing and harvesting what we take for granted, and in decoding the lasting imprints these people and their industries leave on our landscapes, economies, and cultures.

A big thanks goes to Professor Alison McNally for organizing and leading the field trip. Other leaders at Cal State University Stanislaus (such as Professor, Department Chair, and CGS President Peggy Hauselt and professor and former CGS President Jennifer Helzer) worked to make the conference such a success. I am forever indebted to the professionals in the California Geographical Society for championing more than three decades of action-packed scholarly conferences that have informed my teaching and writing, including so many stories on this website. This year, I am particularly grateful for receiving their prestigious Outstanding Educator Award for 2025. After four decades of research, teaching, writing, and putting my heart into such a rewarding profession, this unforgettable conference was icing on my career cake. Thanks to all!    

Here are additional sources for those interested in regenerative agriculture:

Sustainable Harvest International

Foodtank

Farmsteaders Documentary

Alison Mcnally also sent these sources recommended by Rosie:

Common Ground – https://commongroundfilm.org/ streaming on Amazon – a follow up to the film “Kiss the Ground”, Common Ground takes a look at regenerative agriculture and the importance of it as an alternative to conventional agriculture. Some of the footage was taken at Burroughs Family Farms.

TED talk featuring Dr. Jonathan Ludgren (founder and director of Ecdysis Foundation) (13 minutes): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=okgGmohpaJQ – 

Finally, another Alison recommendation: Jean-Martin Bauer, who has managed food programs and worked as a food security analyst for the United Nations World Food Programme around the globe, is the author of The New Breadline: Hunger and Hope in the Twenty-First Century.

THE END

The post Big Ag Vs. Small Regenerative Farming first appeared on Rediscovering the Golden State.

There are at least five main themes threading through these images and videos. First, the steep slopes, loose materials, and stripped ground cover leave landscapes vulnerable to any significant precipitation, especially heavy downpours. Such mud and debris flow threats will continue with every rain event until sometime in April, when our normal annual wet season usually ends. Then, there’s always next year. Second, note the haphazard and unpredictable burn patterns that determined which homes, neighborhoods, and businesses were destroyed and which survived the firestorms as they swept through. Third, many of you may have to strain to recognize what is left of some iconic SoCal landscapes and neighborhoods seen and celebrated in countless films, TV series, commercials, and videos over the decades. Fourth, note how the wildfires didn’t discriminate, ravaging diverse neighborhoods from rich to middle- and working-class. Finally, we will end with a few articles that summarizes how we built ourselves into this disaster-prone corner.

I am also sharing the following images to confirm that there is no reason to visit the devastation, since you are not likely to discover anything new that hasn’t already been displayed multiple times in the media. And there are at least five reasons (yes, another list!) to NOT go wandering into the Palisades or any other recently burned areas. First, PCH and other roads along that entire coastline and into the Santa Monica Mountains will be subject to closures at least through what remains of our rainy season. Second, even if you find an open road, the one-lane traffic gridlock is a frustrating waste of time. Third, you can’t turn off or even briefly stop without getting cited (at best) or arrested by an army of law enforcement officers. Fourth, these are toxic landscapes that pose a host of health hazards and dangers to visitors. Finally, cleanup and construction crews are working hard to rebuild essential infrastructures throughout Pacific Palisades and Altadena. The last obstacles they need are selfie crowds getting in their way and impeding their progress. So, as you view immediate post-fire images here and in the media, know that there is nothing more to see as the cleanup progresses.

The Mountain and Franklin Fires as Warnings

Two months before the mass destruction in LA County, the Mountain Fire erupted in nearby Ventura County. Strong Santa Ana winds (as predicted) also fanned this blaze that consumed nearly 20,000 acres and 243 homes and commercial structures. Just about one month later, the Franklin Fire ignited on Dec 9 and quickly grew to 4,000 acres as powerful Santa Ana winds (again, as predicted) funneled through the Malibu Canyon wind tunnel and toward the beach. In contrast to the Palisades and Eaton fires, it only destroyed or damaged 48 structures, including a few homes. For instance, Pepperdine students and staff were forced to shelter in place as the flames raced around them, but the campus survived. Heroic efforts by savvy firefighters helped to contain the damage, but it also helped that Malibu Canyon had burned just several years earlier. Researchers use the historical record to estimate that this area has burned in wildfires on an average of two times/decade (the entire Malibu coastline is impacted by even more frequent fires), which decreases potential fuel build ups. But such frequent fires also encourage the invasion of nonnative species that are more flammable, leading to even more frequent fires and accelerated wildfire growth. By most Decembers, our fire season has been snuffed out by winter rains. (Rains brought welcome relief months earlier in the previous two years.)  But this year’s long drought dragged, incredibly, into late January, through the middle of our rainy season. The stage was set for relentless Santa Ana winds that would take over from there. As finger pointing mounts about details and specific responses to these wildfires, here are a few facts to keep the debates honest.

Unraveling Some Misconceptions

First, these firestorms had nothing to do with water diversions from Northern Cal. The state had just experienced two consecutive banner wet years that finally broke our two-decades-long megadrought and then competed for the wettest on record. Nearly all of our reservoirs were recently filled and our state water projects overflowed with more water than we could distribute and use. Unfortunately, the several months of recent unprecedented drought that followed those storms dehydrated the biomass that accumulated during the previous two rainy years, providing abundant dry fuels for ignitions. Our state’s water diversion and storage projects were performing well, but were surrounded by dehydrating Mediterranean plant communities interspersed with encroaching human developments, all enduring prolonged and historic Santa Ana winds. Only the details were left to debate in this landscape made for disaster, where millions of Californians found themselves within an expanding wildland-urban interface.

As example, the one relatively small reservoir that served Pacific Palisades had been “taken out of service to “meet safe drinking water regulations,” the DWP said in a statement. A tear in the reservoir’s cover made the water supply subject to contamination, the Los Angeles Times reported, leading the agency to drain it in February.”  … (meaning last Feb.). This left three one-million-gallon tanks to serve the Palisades, which were more than adequate for providing safe drinking and irrigation water and for fighting multiple structure fires. They obviously weren’t enough for fighting the stampeding wave of flames. Many fire hydrants designed to battle structural fires and smaller brush fires were also inadequate for such a colossal bombardment. Such details will be the focus of investigations into how heroic firefighters could have had a better infrastructure to support their efforts as winds peaked over 70mph. Many scientists, engineers, and firefighters question whether ANY water infrastructure could have made much of a difference in this firestorm fanned by wicked winds that also hampered air assaults. This was also the case in the Altadena inferno, where fist-sized burning embers were being blown up to a mile ahead of the fire front. 

Finally, for those of you not familiar with SoCal, our wildfires that spread into neighborhoods did not (and usually don’t) erupt and spread from a “forest’, but from our coastal sage scrub, chaparral, and related plant communities that help define our Mediterranean climates and ecosystems; so, “forest” management is not relevant. We’ve heard suggestions that our plant communities should be destroyed to protect nearby developments, but that would require clearing at least half-mile strips surrounding every structure. This would represent habitat destruction on a massive scale, accelerate species extinctions in our unique California Floristic Province, and wipe out thousands of natives and endemics. And they would likely be replaced by invasive nonnative grasses and other highly flammable biomass that act as conduits for fires. Proposed “clearance” on such a grand scale would also result in more frequent and catastrophic floods and debris flows out of these disturbed, vulnerable landscapes during nearly every rain event. We’ve seen this movie and its sequels play out too often: the very plant communities that protect us by absorbing floodwaters and stabilizing our slopes, provide habitats for a dizzying array of plant and animal species, and represent open spaces where we can appreciate and study our natural history, can suddenly turn on us by sending their burning embers.

Our careless developments and dysfunctional relationships within these very ecosystems that we cherish have been debated for decades and these difficult debates will (and should) continue into the future. It took many decades to build ourselves into this worst-case scenario fire corner. For more objective analyses and some back-to-reality answers, check out the links that follow my aftermath images, at the end of this story. As you view the following images, please remember that they are what remains of thousands of families’ hard work over many decades … shattered lives, hopes, and dreams incinerated into ashes.

Before we skip inland over to Altadena and the Eaton Fire aftermath, here’s just one example of what was lost in the Palisades. Some folks who couldn’t afford to buy a house on the beach opted for a mobile home and also lost everything. This real estate description paints a pretty clear picture of life there in the before times:
16321 PCH
Pacific Palisades Bowl Mobile Home Estates
Roughly $500,000-$1 million
What’s special
BREATHTAKING DRAMATIC OCEAN VIEWS MARBLE BACKSPLASHES CUSTOM CABINETRY EXPANSIVE MASTER SUITE SEPARATE PANTRY ROOM QUARTZ COUNTERTOPS HIGH-END FINISHES
MOVE-IN READY! This stunning, new construction custom-designed, 2-story beach home is perfectly positioned across from the iconic Will Rogers Beach in Pacific Palisades, offering an unmatched combination of luxury, convenience, and coastal beauty. The home’s prime location provides breathtaking, dramatic ocean views from Malibu to Catalina Island, visible upon upper level. Entering, you’ll be enveloped by a bright, open ambiance that seamlessly merges indoor and outdoor living. Natural light floods the home, illuminating the carefully crafted details throughout. With 2 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms, this home boasts soaring 9-foot ceilings and elegant double-door entries that enhance its spacious, airy feel. The first floor offers a convenient bathroom, while upstairs, the expansive master suite awaits with a dual-entry bath alongside a second well-appointed bedroom. Every inch of this home has been thoughtfully curated with high-end finishes, including quartz countertops, marble backsplashes, and custom cabinetry with pull-out shelves in the chef’s kitchen. The kitchen is equipped with premium stainless steel appliances, a Shaw’s farm sink, a gas oven, vented exhaust fan, disposal, refrigerator, dishwasher, separate pantry room, and stackable washer and dryer. Additional features include central heating and a tankless water heater, enhancing both comfort and efficiency. Outside, imagine crafting your ideal outdoor retreat on a spacious 320-square-foot second-story deck, perfect for lounging and entertaining while soaking in the endless ocean views. Dedicated two parking spaces and guest parking available, and 24-hour private security patrol. Residents enjoy access to premium community amenities, including a large heated pool, hot tub, billiards room, and a recreational area. Positioned near Palisades Village and top-rated schools, this home combines luxury with practicality. Cross PCH via a nearby crosswalk for quick beach access, and enjoy low space rent of $970/month with rent control, plus the added financial benefits of no annual property taxes or HOA fees. Purchase includes city and coastal approved plans for custom built deck for convenience.

Eaton Fire (Altadena) Aftermath

Altadena is only about 25 miles (straight line distance) northeast of the Palisades, but most locals would tell you that they seem worlds apart. It can take about an hour (depending on traffic) to navigate from one to the other and you might feel that you’ve been transported hundreds of miles from a beach once you finally arrive in Altadena. Adjacent to Pasadena of Rose Bowl and Parade fame, Altadena is nestled on the edge of the San Gabriel Valley at the base of the San Gabriel Mountains. It looks up to the abrupt steep slopes (once covered by chaparral and woodlands) that tower all the way up to Mt. Wilson, all being lifted along a series of active faults. Cooling sea breezes often struggle to make it this far inland during hot summer days when the smog can get caught below the infamous inversion and jammed against the mountains. By contrast, during winter, this region can resemble a warm, sunny paradise when their spectacular snow-clad mountains point into crystal clear blue skies.

Compared to the Palisades, Altadena displays cultural diversity that is more representative of California. This is partly because the neighborhood known as Altadena Meadows was one of the few communities where black families were allowed to settle, back during the days when segregation was enforced and redlining ruled. Thousands of working- and middle- class families worked hard for decades to improve these neighborhoods, often hoping to pass their investments on to future generations. I learned about Altadena when I frequented Pasadena, enjoyed hikes into the local canyons, and developed a working relationship with the heroes of the Eaton Canyon Docents, led by Diane Lang. There at the renowned Eaton Canyon Natural Area and Nature Center, we trained docents to guide school groups and visitors eager to learn about the natural history of these treasured Mediterranean landscapes. We learned a lot of science while exploring the natural systems and cycles that rule our world and we soothed plenty of nature deficit disorders.

All of it has been lost. Surrounding slopes, the nature center, homes of some of the docents (including Diane’s house), much of Altadena and more of Altadena Meadows has burned to the ground. We always studied and understood how fire plays such an important role in these ecosystems and locals even recalled when another wildfire burst out of the mountains and burned the old nature center in October, 1993. But this fire was different, as it was fanned by the fiercest Santa Ana winds that blew burning embers a mile ahead of the front. Just as the Palisades Fire was destroying everything in its path all the way to the beach 25 miles away, this fire would not stop at the base of the mountains. It was blown ahead right into the city, destroying entire neighborhoods that most people thought were far removed from wildland fires. Within one tragic day and night, Altadena and Pacific Palisades were connected in ways that some could not have imagined. The two previous stories on this website summarized the conditions that led to these tragedies and why they exploded out of control. But perhaps the key word is control. Nature’s awesome power reminds us that we cannot separate ourselves; we are just parts and players within these natural systems and cycles.

In case you missed it, positive messages and messengers of hope are gradually rising out of the ashes in Altadena. Here’s one example of a local artist who is making a difference in Altadena Meadows. It includes some video from the air: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nYPmFS84SiA

This interview confirms how a reality check and building paradigm shift is necessary if we expect to develop more fire-resistant communities. (Thanks to Bill Patzert for sending it along.)

This is a very thorough summary of the corner we have built ourselves into, and our long LA fire history. Thanks again to Bill Patzert for sharing.

Here’s another LA Times article that sums up the problem and some potential solutions.

This Malibu Times article is dated, but leaves us with a rough fire history up to 2007.

If you’re in to geospatial imagery, check out these before and after NASA EARTHDATA images captured in January, 2025, by the MSI instrument aboard ESA’s Sentinel-2A platform.

This camera shows the advancing smoke and flames that eventually consume a Pacific Palisades neighborhood.

This video (it is a long journey) takes you up from PCH through Topanga Canyon in the aftermath to see what burned and what escaped the flames, illustrating why any substantial rain will produce destructive mud and debris flows. It was filmed on January 17th.

Here is a Pacific Palisades Aftermath Tour.

Let’s hope this will be THE END of our disaster stories for a while.

The post Cataclysmic Aftermath Landscapes first appeared on Rediscovering the Golden State.

Here is a deeper story that explains how this happened, but more importantly, why it’s happening now. I will guide you through the play-by-play, always emphasizing the science behind the scenes, so you can see that this catastrophe is not past tense, no matter how much later you are reading about it. To set the stage, make sure you wander through our previous website story about precipitation extremes to understand how we got here.

Two years of heavy rains + a record nine months of drought + epic windstorms + low humidity all along the wildland-urban interface = …

It started with two years of record rainfall (competing for the most rain ever recorded in the Los Angeles area during two consecutive years), which finally broke our more than two-decades-old megadrought. Rehydrated plant communities flourished. Ecosystems added tons of biomass. Grasslands, coastal sage scrub, chaparral, oak woodlands, riparian woodlands, and every other plant community joined the party. As usual, the rain stopped last spring to make way for summer’s drought, starving our Mediterranean ecosystems of water. Through the autumn months, as water content in our plants dwindled each day, the annual race was on to see which would come first: Santa Ana winds or the first rains. Substantial early rains typically douse the fire season until next year. But, as I mentioned in the previous story on this website, the storms didn’t even show up for this year’s competition. SoCal’s widespread rainfall totals since spring remained near or below ¼ inch by mid-January, the middle of our rainy season. (As example, LA Airport had recorded only 0.04 inches and Santa Monica was at 0.09 inches for the water year well into mid-January, making this compete for the driest stretch on record for the region.)

Next, add autumn’s dry winds. By mid-November, previous gentle offshore breezes occasionally turned to classic Santa Ana winds and red flag warnings, finally sweeping shallow marine layers out to sea. Relative humidity tanked. The Mountain Fire in Camarillo scorched more than 20,000 acres, 200 structures (including homes), and destroyed millions of dollars of agricultural products in early November. By December 9, it still hadn’t rained, encouraging the Franklin Fire to terrorize Malibu all the way to PCH during another gusty Santa Ana wind event. Sadly, these were just dress rehearsals for the big shows.

As January progressed, offshore wind episodes became more threatening as the great drying trend expanded across the entire state. By early January, the National Weather Service was warning of dangerous, life-threatening (and possibly historic) Santa Ana winds that would barrel into Southern California on Tuesday, the 7^th. Unfortunately, the forecasters nailed it. By Tuesday afternoon, the winds were howling until it seemed as if helicopters were hovering above our homes all night. I’ve written about these devil winds before on this website and in my book and I’ve experienced and researched scores of them over decades, but this was different.

We were caught in a wide, massive atmospheric wind tunnel midway between a low-pressure system dropping to our southeast and a strong high-pressure system trying to assert itself to our west. Upper- and lower-level support grew into an historic pressure gradient that forced cool, stable air masses toward the coast, where they would be warmed by compression. But there was another problem: the mountains were in the way. As the heavy air parcels were pushed up the opposite sides of the mountains, they eventually made it to the top, where they were free to cascade down the coastal slopes toward the ocean to become leeward waves. Widespread gusts were clocked at over 70 mph; a few made it over 90 mph. Meandering mountain waves, chaotic eddies, and violent rotary currents formed downwind of the mountains, spreading over developments, infrastructure, and millions of residents on the coastal plain. Though the powerful winds blew from the continent, wind directions would temporarily jerk one way and then the other without warning as the powerful eddies circulated by. Giant trees and power poles were toppled as power outages swept across Southern California. The big show began to resemble a terrifying scene in a science fiction movie, except you couldn’t write a script that could better prime a landscape for the ignitions that would follow.

My chronological photo essay below illustrates how a wildfire can quickly explode into a deadly monster, consuming everything in its path until it meets the ocean. This was the case as our beloved Pacific Palisades natural and human landscapes were destroyed within a few hours this week. Given the conditions I’ve just described, it should also be no surprise that another conflagration would race out of the foothills below the San Gabriel Mountains on the same day. The death and destruction barged into Altadena and Pasadena neighborhoods that seemed far removed from the dangers of what we might consider a wildland-urban interface. (The extend of such imaginary boundaries is being reevaluated.) The greatest surprise may be how heroic firefighters were finally able to stop such an out-of-control train inferno before it did even more damage.  

I’ve experienced and written about too many of these disasters over the years. The ominous red sky, the choking smoke, curious ashes fluttering down to resemble delicate snowflakes, butterfly wings, and rose petals: you may have read about them here or in my book. But I’m one of the lucky ones—so far—as these heartbreaking catastrophes become more common. Admit it or not, we all know what’s going on here. Our relationship with nature has gone seriously awry. We’re testing her and she’s winning and she always will. We’ve got to find better ways to increase our natural history and science literacy and reconnect to the real world or we’re all toast. Without such a paradigm shift, we will continue to feel the potential of the California Dream, and all that we love about our Golden State, slip away. And if you think you can simply escape to other states or countries with greener pastures, take a closer look at the chaos and dysfunction beyond our borders. Maybe if you stick around, you can play your role in righting our ship.

UCLA’s Park Williams and other researchers have teamed up to learn how much of these severe events might be connected to the bigger climate change puzzle. Click here for their most recent article.

Here’s another perspective (slightly compressed) from renowned climatologist Bill Patzert:
“…decades of ‘criminal’ zoning, totally irresponsible building codes, inadequate water storage to deal with fire apocalypses and not dealing with a power delivery system that ignites fires year after year, are the major culprits.” 
Patzert also emphasizes that “global warming is the greatest existential threat to the environment and our civilization, but what we are living through now is human carelessness and ignoring the natural climate forces of Southern California.” But his interview with the LA Times sums up this year: “During my career, I’ve never seen punishing Santa Ana events so overwhelm the normal winter rainy season.”

Regardless, here is where my sign-offs are getting a bit repetitive: keep your seatbelts fastened.

And now follow me as we watch the peculiar behavior of the horrific wildfire that terrorized the Pacific Palisades and changed our world.

If you want to experience the drama of escaping the Palisades firestorm and rushing to evacuate, check out Tracy’s series of photos and videos arranged in chronological order as escapees eventually make it down to PCH. The last images show an heroic officer using their hose to douse spot fires started by embers landing in their yard. Note how such a fire can advance with its burning embers through the sky faster than on the ground. (Please appreciate that these images are personal, raw, and unedited.)

Here is a time-lapse video showing the start of the Palisades Fire from another angle from 10:45am – 2:48pm. Thanks to NPS Ranger Susan Teele for sharing.

This time-lapse video shows a Mt. Wilson view of the Eaton Fire from January 7-8. Another thanks to NPS Ranger Susan Teele for sharing.

Notice how above-average precipitation quickly dwindles to far below average for this season as we move from Northern California to Southern California weather stations: https://ggweather.com/seasonal_rain.htm

This NY Times article supports Bill Patzert’s earlier comments.

Check out this NY Times Article: Researchers show how Santa Ana wind speed is the main variable that makes SoCal fires more destructive.

This research is from the International Journal of Wildland Fire: Climate and weather drivers in southern California Santa Ana Wind and non-Santa Wind fires

Santa Ana wind history and trends.

THE END??? All the stories on this website and in my California Sky Watcher book confirm what we’ve learned from experience: nature’s cycles never “end” and we’re just a part of them. Should it finally start raining in SoCal, the next chapters will likely feature catastrophic mud and debris flows that always follow these fires after they have stripped the covers off our hillsides. Stay tuned!

The Unimaginable Epilogue

Dominant upper-level high-pressure systems settled over the entire West Coast and generated exceptionally dry on-and-off offshore wind events across California for more than two weeks after the worst wildfires started. In Southern California, powerful Santa Ana winds howled through January 23, fanning numerous new fires just as crews tried to mop up some of the most destructive wildfires in California history. Relative humidity dropped into single digits throughout SoCal. But finally, for the first time since spring, weather forecasters were tracking a low-pressure system capable of delivering precipitation that promised to be the final blow to the fires by January 26. This little system wouldn’t direct any atmospheric rivers over the fire scars. We will have to wait to see if those will arrive during our other normally wet months of February and March. To learn more about the science and power of atmospheric rivers, you might check out my story about ARs on this website or read my feature article in the current edition of Weatherwise Magazine.          

Here are three videos shared by Karin from the Topanga Canyon Docents:

Topanga resident Elena Roche made a number of videos during the fire. You can see more on her YouTube site. Here, active fires were blocked just before they could burn through the community of Topanga and parts of Trippet Ranch. By this time, the fire fronts were spreading several miles around after ravaging the Pacific Palisades.

This video takes you up from PCH through Topanga Canyon in the aftermath to see what burned and what escaped the flames, and why any substantial rain will produce destructive mud and debris flows. It was filmed on January 17th.

Here are personal stories from the Topanga New Times published just before the first rain finally came.

The documentary Dry Times, made by Anurag Kumar and Alex Gregory, has, unfortunately, become more relevant as it captured California’s recurring predicaments during the megadrought that spanned more than two decades: Given recent events, this has become a haunting trailer. The Movie

The post Making Sense of our Apocalyptic Firestorms first appeared on Rediscovering the Golden State.

The development and use of affordable renewable energy and our increasingly more efficient use of resources is keeping tons of pollution out of our air, water, and soil, while saving Californians billions of dollars in the long run. Millions of people and entire ecosystems are healthier as California helps to lead the nation and the world toward a cleaner and more promising energy future. As the state’s per capita energy use and greenhouse gas production continues to decline, individuals, households, and businesses have discovered a treasure trove of long-term savings that can be routed to improve the quality of our living and working environments. But since the devil is often in the details, what are these sources of energy and how reliable are they?   

The Golden State is progressing toward a challenging goal of 100% “clean” electricity by 2045. But it is important to note that, by 2022, such “clean” sources (according to the California Energy Commission) included all renewables (39+%), large hydropower (≈11%), and what remains of nuclear (≈11%) in the state. Solar, wind, geothermal, biomass, and small hydropower are considered renewables. But there’s something missing here that I’ll call small solar power (often referred to as passive), though it isn’t small at all, since it’s working for us everywhere on every day and it is the source of almost all the energy that surrounds us. 

The energy industry often divides active solar into two categories: solar thermal and solar photovoltaic. The larger projects have generated tons of controversy. For instance, the Ivanpah solar thermal facility, with a price tag of more than $2 billion, was touted as the world’s largest. You can’t miss it if you are driving through the Mojave Desert along Interstate 15 just before crossing into Nevada. This is where once wild open desert has been covered with giant mirrors to focus intense sunlight toward 450-foot towers where high temperature steam turbines generate electricity. The electricity is sold to you through companies such as PG&E and SCE, but millions of dollars of electricity are lost through wires transmitting it to distant urban centers. Meanwhile, the desert along Interstate 10 to Arizona is being covered with photovoltaic panels on BLM land that is now known as The Riverside East Solar Energy Zone. This includes the sprawling Chuckwalla Valley, which has become a sea of solar panels that has also been advertised as the largest such project in the world. In both of these gargantuan solar energy “farms”, enormous expanses of open public desert ecosystems have been sacrificed to gather and concentrate solar energy and convert it to electricity that then must be sent out to urban areas more than 100 miles distant.  

As with other major power plants, these solar “farms” come with plenty of baggage. Habitat destruction haunts each project. Thousands of birds and other wildlife have been unintentionally killed each year by these behemoth projects. Precious groundwater supplies have been threatened. Desert dwellers and cultures that include Native Americans have also been impacted.

Desert devotees wonder why more solar panels are not being installed on top of existing warehouses, parking structures, homes, and businesses, in urban areas where the energy is being used. Even when the cost of storage batteries is added to solar installations, the payoff time is often less than 10-15 years, when consumers begin getting their solar energy for free for the life of panels that can last more than 30 years. And when homes or businesses with existing solar systems are sold, the seller gets more than their investments back from the added sales prices. Those who don’t want to pay upfront costs and take responsibility for owning and maintaining their solar systems are enticed by lucrative leasing arrangements; customers benefit from less expensive energy after paying a monthly fee to the companies who own and lease out the systems. Millions of rooftops and other urban spaces (including those for vital battery storage) are still waiting to harvest and store otherwise wasted and increasingly competitive solar energy for the taking. So why aren’t more families and businesses being encouraged to make such smart investments in otherwise underused urban spaces that can guarantee long-term profits?

You can see why the chorus of concerned citizens and energy experts advocating for more efficient, local energy production is growing louder. They argue that many of the most competitive sources of future energy can be found on our roofs and in our cities where energy is used and that destroying distant public lands and ecosystems is not sustainable. They also argue that local energy issues and problems can be more efficiently addressed with local solutions that help consumers gain control of their power sources. Similar controversies have swirled around some of the ubiquitous wind turbines that have sprouted above rural and remote regions across the state. I address some of these issues in my new book, The California Sky Watcher.   

And that leads us to the simpler and more pragmatic sustainable energy solutions sometimes known as passive solar. They often involve common-sense and time-tested planning with nature in practical ways that will allow us to save money, gain control of our energy destiny, and improve the quality of our living and working environments. Such solutions have been under our noses and calling out to us all this time.  

Many of us have already discovered the advantages of greenhouses, skylights, sunroofs, and sunrooms that allow natural sunlight in, rather than relying on artificial energy-consuming light and heat sources. And this reminds us that almost all the energy surrounding us is direct or indirect solar. It’s the energy plants use to grow and that animals store as they eat. Whether you are a vegetarian or an omnivore, you are using indirect solar energy to read this page and walk across the room. As covered in stories from my new book and on this website, solar energy creates temperature gradients that build pressure gradients that propel the wind. The sun’s energy evaporates water and lifts moisture into the air to fuel storms that provide life-giving precipitation. There it is, always surrounding us. Because there’s far more solar energy than we will ever need, we need to continue to find more efficient ways of harvesting, storing, and using it.

The simplest acts include opening windows during the day and closing them before sunset during the cool season. During warm summers, keep them open at night through early mornings and then close them when daytime temperatures rise outside. You will keep fresher, healthier air circulating during the comfortable open times and prevent sick building syndromes that can develop in closed spaces. Investments in efficient ventilation systems also cut AC costs in the long run. Plant deciduous vegetation along south-facing walls to shade the hot side of the house during summer; they will lose their leaves to allow more light in during winter. Follow the source of light and heat by keeping track of the sun’s location in your sky as it changes during the day and the seasons. Eaves and overhangs can be just the right length to shade walls and windows from high summer sun during summer afternoons and then allow direct sunlight to warm those surfaces when sun angles are lower during winter. Think of the dozens of other ways you can reconnect to the natural world in and around your own living and working spaces, relieve nature deficit disorders, reap the physical and mental health benefits, and save money in the process. After all, we are fortunate to live in plein air California, not Chicago.

The best California architects know how to design smart buildings with more sophisticated passive solar features. It might take a little more planning ahead, but such short-term investments will lead to long-term rewards that just keep on giving. Double-paned energy-efficient windows (with Energy Star ratings) and doors and improved insulation have become the standard for good reasons: these upgrades cut energy costs as they allow you to better regulate the air in your home or business when temperatures become uncomfortable outside.  Here is just one website from the U.S. Department of Energy that summarizes passive solar strategies. Here is another good introduction. You can also encourage efforts to become more efficient by supporting nonprofit organizations such as Sustainable Works. They have helped thousands of students, residents, and businesses save money while they also cut pollution and save our valuable resources.

We all use energy that can have negative impacts. But we are rediscovering how to create more comfortable, healthier living environments that will limit those impacts and save money in the long run. Sometimes it’s as simple as going back to nature. But it also requires that we work together. And in the bigger picture, that’s where Community Choice Aggregation (CCA) has made major progress across the state. At least 25 CCAs serve more than 200 communities in California that work together to pool their electricity loads, increase efficiency and grid resilience, and encourage renewable energy projects. The combination of simpler solar solutions outlined here, CCAs, and countless related efforts are moving the state toward a much greener and cleaner energy future … and proving how every Californian can make a positive difference.    

Check out these sources for more:

Community Choice Aggregation (CCA)

Inside Climate News reports on groundwater stresses from desert solar projects.

California Energy Commission

Passive Solar

A Passive Solar General Intro and Summary

NOAA Solar Calculator

Sustainable Works

California Academy of Sciences
The Academy’s Green Roof

California Air Resources Board Greenhouse Gas Inventory

US Green Building Council

One Architect’s Top 15 California Showcases

The Guardian Article

The 2023 Annual Global Climate Report summarizes how California is just another example of more general temperature trends around the globe.

The post Simpler Solar Solutions first appeared on Rediscovering the Golden State.

We start our weekend at the 50^th annual Summer Solstice Celebration and Parade in Santa Barbara. We end this only-in-California weekend by making extraordinary discoveries on our bikes when CicLAvia cut through South L.A. along Western Avenue. 

El Capitan State Beach provided a beautiful staging ground to plan our attendance at one of Santa Barbara’s most festive events of the year. Like most other Southern California coastal campgrounds, staying overnight at El Capitan usually requires reservations months ahead of time. Camp sites are just a short walk to their relatively secluded beach, which is about 20 miles (and minutes) to the little city that has been coined our “American Riviera”. And like much of the Santa Barbara coastline nowadays, you will find most of the beach submerged if you visit during high tide. Assorted rolled and rounded rocks have been deposited in piles and stranded along with wave-sculpted driftwood at the base of the bluffs and just above tideline. Low tide offers opportunities for long walks and/or runs along the strips of temporarily-exposed sand, which are occasionally interrupted by rock outcrops and a few tide pools.

During this summer solstice weekend, the monotonous June Gloom had finally been squashed to near the sea surface by air descending out of a strong high-pressure system, producing Southern California’s first widespread heat wave of the year. But as is often the case when water temperatures hover near 60°F (15.5°C), a shallow layer of chilling fog frequently drifted off the ocean and backed up against the coastal cliffs. Wisps of fog occasionally rolled up and danced on to the marine terraces only to burn off or retreat back down to the beach. Just inland, the Santa Inez Mountains are being lifted as the crust is compressed in this region where the Pacific Plate is jammed against the North American Plate along the big bend in the larger San Andreas Fault system. As this Pacific Plate side attempts to slide to the northwest at about the rate that your fingernails grow, folds and faults bend and break the crust, thrusting the Santa Inez Mountains above the sea so that they loom over this thin strip of coastal plain. The great barrier is part of the Transverse Ranges that cut across this widest transect of the state with ridges and long valleys trending west-east. On this day, the mountains abruptly emerged up and above the shallow fog, exposing their coastal sage scrub and oak woodland slopes to bake in the dry summer solstice heat wave.

Such typical June weather conditions kept the streets of Santa Barbara basking in that sweet sea breeze soft spot between the cool beach and hot inland slopes during most of the day: a degree too warm in the sun, a degree too cool the shade. How could anyone possibly survive such discomfort?   

Such a perfect setting and weather stage was set for the crowds of more than 50,000 people. They gathered along Santa Barbara Street on Saturday, June 22, to watch the parade that would end at the lush tree-studded Alameda Park, where the three-day festival featured colorful artists, dancers, and an eclectic mix of musicians and local bands. The bizarre parade and the entire weekend evolved into something resembling a crowded amalgamation of the Doo Dah, a miniature Burning Man, and the Rose Parade gone awry. Participants ranged from older established residents who found the best of the California Dream long ago, to younger free spirits attempting to revive older hippie and beach cultures, to folks somewhere in between. On the surface, the whole sun worshiping and summer near the beach stereotypical Golden State cultures came alive on this weekend. Even the mix of those who had wandered out of the security of their multi-million-dollar homes with those who were living by the day and didn’t care was classic Californica. Scenes of people celebrating their California Dreams, surrounded by Spanish-style architecture, framed by coastal Mediterranean environments, complete with nonnative palms poking up from perfectly manicured green landscapes, could have come right out of a Hollywood movie.

Closer investigation reveals another, more complicated side of Santa Barbara that counters most stereotypes. Thousands of residents (more than 13%) live below the poverty line. Blue-collar locals with their roots in this coastal town mix with recent immigrants working in service and construction industries. They squeeze into limited affordable housing, while thousands more workers cope with the local housing crisis by commuting from more affordable distant communities to earn a paycheck in paradise.   

To further demonstrate the great divide between the two Californias, we jump 100 miles east and a bit south into the just-as-renowned working-class cultures and densely-populated landscapes of South Los Angeles, about 10 miles from the beach. We can thank Metro’s cicLAvia celebrations for occasionally introducing thousands of visitors to these neighborhoods, which seem worlds away from the Santa Barbara where we reveled just one day earlier. At first, the only thing these iconic California locations might seem to share is the mild Mediterranean climate and a noon sun that climbs to nearly 80 degrees above the southern horizon during these longest summer solstice days. (The highest noon sun of the season is measured at about 71.5 degrees from the southern horizon along California’s northern border, to about 81 degrees along our southern border.) Community, environmental justice, access to open space, food deserts, poverty, urban heat islands, struggles for survival, economic opportunity, urban renewal, and gentrification enter our common vocabulary here. As with Santa Barbara (but for very different reasons), South LA has inspired researchers, writers, musicians, artists, moviemakers, activists, politicians, and entrepreneurs who have been sharing their perspectives about this place, while much of the world has been listening. The darkest narratives focus on crime, gang violence, drugs, and arguments about whether we should refer to historic violent eruptions as riots, rebellions, uprisings, or civil unrest. But look a little closer beyond the media’s oversimplified and exaggerated stereotypes and the stories become far more complicated — and interesting.      

Wander through the neighborhoods and business districts surrounding this gritty leg of Western Avenue that stretches from south of the I-10 Freeway to the I-105 Freeway. You will likely find people and landscapes that conform to whatever stereotype you choose. For instance, you will notice thousands of recent immigrants who are crowding in and filling spaces left by those who fled this crowded urban flatland to search for new opportunities in distant places. But you will also find people and landscapes that offer hope and new opportunities for success and renewal right here. The contradictions are complex. People from other parts of the country are often astounded to find the average cost of a modest single-family South LA home at around $700,000. Though this is less than the median $2 million+ in Santa Barbara, it is far higher than the U.S. average. And you will find plenty of folks who are rooted here and are staying and investing to improve the quality of these living and working environments. You will also find vegan restaurants, parks, churches, schools, and community meeting places where the focus is on physical and mental health and planning for a better future. I wrote about some of them in a few of our website stories we posted over the years, including A Cultural Tour of LA. (You can surf back through a few of our website pages to find them.) And when you venture along some of the tree-lined streets, where families work together to create a sense of community, you might not realize you are in one of LA’s more renowned lower-income working-class neighborhoods. It’s amazing how landscapes with trees can make such a positive difference by changing microclimates and cultural climates.

Enter entrepreneurs turned local heroes Joe and Celia Ward-Wallace. I met Joe while admiring some of the artwork in his now famous South LA Café. He might be considered a celebrity businessman, but I’d like to consider him the local positive influencer and geographer. He has proven how investing time, energy, and hard work into a struggling neighborhood can result in big payoffs for everyone. I could feel how his interminable positive energy is transforming landscapes and bringing new opportunities to South LA. Joe and Celia’s work has grown far beyond their coffee shop and cultural center theme: Coffee. Community. Connection. They champion a nonprofit community foundation and have worked as coaches and consultants for a string of budding local businesses.

Joe also understands the importance of trees that can add more than aesthetics as they soften the harsh urban heat island. When approaching South LA Cafe, you might first notice the trees he planted in spite of bureaucratic hurdles and costs that could have caused most folks to give up. And when you talk with him, you understand that he is one of those rare never-give-up souls with good ideas and dreams that are improving the quality of our living and working environments. It is obvious how a little greenery and shade in front of his thriving business has changed everything on this South LA corner, especially on an afternoon near the summer solstice. South LA Café has not only demonstrated how to cool the micro deserts created by urban heat islands, but how to bring healthy nourishment to a food desert.

South LA may never be a Santa Barbara (and vice versa), but comparing and contrasting the two places and their people during the summer solstice reminds us that we have plenty to learn from one another since we and our countless microclimates and cultural climates are all connected in profound ways. And the most impactful influencers are proving that Californians (like all of humanity) and our neighborhoods and landscapes really do have “more in common than the differences that separate us.”  

There’s a lot more to this Santa Barbara and South LA summer solstice story, so continue with the photo essay that follows and check out these websites:

South LA Café

LA Natural History Museum

TreePeople

Benefits of Urban Trees from the USDA/Forest Service

More Urban Tree Research

The post Celebrating the Summer Solstice California Style first appeared on Rediscovering the Golden State.

Just more than a century ago, the typical California commute or road trip around our growing cities and outposts was by foot, streetcar, or cable car, except for those who could afford a horse and buggy or carriage. Longer cross-country trips required wagons, stages, or trains. Bicycles were also pedaled into early urban scenes, with thousands of bicyclists organizing into bicycle clubs and demanding better roads for smoother bike rides. Our fledgling California settlements and wannabe cities grew into the 20^th century without widely-paved roads and parking lots to accommodate cars.

Revolutionary “horseless motor carriages” began rolling across the Golden State in the early 1900s. By 1905, there were already more than 6,000 vehicles (including motorcycles and trucks) bumbling through city streets and breaking down and getting lost and stuck on treacherous dirt roads to nowhere across the state. By 1906, the Auto Club was erecting directional road signs along crushed rock surfaces covered with oil and less-navigable dirt roads to serve those who were wealthy enough to afford their own vehicles. Auto Club members were issued ever-changing and improving road maps.

After Ford rolled out the Model T in 1908, cars became more affordable for average families (and much less expensive than the shorter-range electric cars that were already navigating city streets) and the California car culture was off to the races. By the time the $18 million State Highway Act was passed in 1910, funding was far too paltry to build the roads and other car infrastructures that the public demanded in nearly every town, city, and county. Still, the bonds funded groundbreaking and paving designed to start a continuous system of roads built to connect cities and other key points from north to south (including the birth of what we now call Hwy 101).

As the number of vehicles multiplied, there were plenty of critics. They noted the clouds of smoke belched out from unsafe vehicles that were running over defenseless pedestrians and crashing into one another, resulting in appalling rates of injury and death. But an unstoppable wave of car culture momentum took control and our relationships with cars eventually became as complicated as the people who have driven and interacted with them and the astounding varieties of automobile makes and models that have come and gone over the years.

Into the early 20^th Century, advancing streetcar tracks and technologies led to more efficient electric railways in our cities, often championed by real estate speculators who profited from increasingly dependable public transportation systems connecting to their new developments. Families with the financial resources were encouraged to move farther away from city centers to find their California Dreams on bigger lots within sprawling suburbs. Volumes have been written about how these early public transportation systems, ironically, set the geographic stage and paved the way for the freeways that would replace them.

The Arroyo Seco Parkway (later renamed the Pasadena Freeway) was completed in 1940 as the state’s (and arguably the nation’s) first freeway, connecting downtown LA to Pasadena suburbs. This was just a prelude to the pavement that was increasingly spreading and thoroughly covering and sealing the ground throughout cityscapes and suburbs and then extending in long and wide paths that radiated out to more remote coastal, mountain, and desert terrains. Following WWII, mass migrations into the state and out of our inner cities (commonly referred to as “white flight”) plopped millions of mostly middle-class families into outlying suburbs. These more distant developments were financed by bread winners encouraged by the accessibility and reliability of new free-flowing highways and freeways that quickly and conveniently linked commuters to urban centers.        

Those with the resources evacuated the inner cities and took their wealth with them, leaving behind those without the means. Exacerbating the segregation and inequalities, freeways and other car-culture connections to the suburbs were often built through older neighborhoods with the least political and economic power to stop them. Bifurcated working-class communities from the Bay Area to Southern California looked on as people drove through and passed by their neighborhoods to their jobs in the city in the morning and then carried their earnings out to spend in the suburbs every evening and throughout most weekends. By the mid-1900s, LA’s Bunker Hill (which once served as home to the wealthy business class) became another symbol for the new urban California. The old Victorian homes were abandoned and then razed and replaced by sleek steel and glass skyscrapers to serve as office spaces for the growing number of commuters from the suburbs. The car-culture wave impacted every California city, but LA became the poster child. Automobile worship was first tempered and then ridiculed by some as a series of seemingly insurmountable and disturbing problems developed. Stand-out San Francisco fared better and even thrived at times by offering a denser, more cosmopolitan urban experience with all the exciting, cutting-edge cultural attractions and innovations (and convenient public transportation systems) that go with it. Most other California urban centers weren’t so lucky.      

Little Selby (your author) was born into this California that was growing and changing faster than anyone could grasp. Our working-class outpost on the western edge of Santa Ana was quickly surrounded by a population and economy that seemed to take off with unimaginable changes in some places while other communities suffered from abandonment. Open fields that once supported orchards and truck crops grew cookie-cutter housing tracks attracting middle-class newcomer commuters. We watched new highways and freeways blaze their way through what remained of partially-open thoroughfares or reach farther by using eminent domain to scrape away older properties and neighborhoods that got in the way, new routes erected to support millions of neophyte commuters in their single-occupancy vehicles. We didn’t realize it then, but the growth and change was wild and unprecedented.

The times were exhilarating and exciting to some winners and participants, but troubling and destructive to some perceived losers who loathed a landscape and car culture with no sense of place or permanence. And these changes required wider roads, parking, and other paved spaces that dominated an infrastructure where cars were king. You know the old Joni Mitchell line about paving paradise and putting up a parking lot? Or how about Tom Petty’s editorial regarding life in Reseda, which more correctly referred to nearby parts of the San Fernando Valley: “There’s a freeway runnin’ through the yard.”    

Relatively sprawling and expansive, Southern California’s coastal plains served as perfect foundations for the pavement that was stretching from the beach to the base of the mountains. As LA’s urban heat island developed into a massive urban heat basin, local and then regional microclimates warmed by at least a few degrees. Place your hand near a paved surface on any sunny afternoon or try walking barefoot across the pavement on a summer day: you will quickly sense the additional heat that now radiates through every California urban landscape. Now follow the trails into nearby undeveloped hills covered with the natural plant communities that existed before our pavement: Evapotranspiration from Mediterranean grasslands, coastal sage, chaparral, and oak and riparian woodlands keep afternoon temperatures noticeably cooler. You can also compare the hot paved surfaces to the relatively cooler afternoons common to our city parks or beneath the street trees that decorate our precious urban forests. Further proof of how pavement transforms microclimates is found in research showing how urban heat islands have become particularly extreme even across car-dominated desert cities such as Phoenix and Las Vegas, after the natural soils, cacti, and other desert scrub communities are covered by expanding suburbs. I examine these changes in more detail in my California Sky Watcher book, which will appear in a few months, published by Heyday.

By contrast, you can also sense how the San Francisco Bay Area has evaded some negative effects of our car culture. Constricted on its bumpy little 49-square-mile peninsula, San Francisco was built and cast in the 1800s without cars; and its steep, narrow streets show it. The famed cable cars, streetcars, and hostility to automobiles stand out to this day as if The City were showcasing its antithesis to LA. Beyond The City, the Bay Area’s physical geography helped drive growing differences and perceived divisions between Northern and Southern California. Enormous water bodies separated spreading megalopolises and obstructed potential freeway routes that would have otherwise connected them. Limited car lanes were directed and merged toward the few exorbitantly-expensive bridges that acted like hourglasses; the flowing traffic had to be squeezed into narrow funnels that opened toward urban landscapes on each end of a bridge. The Bay Area’s combined hilly terrain, giant bays, and other assorted and dramatic natural landscapes concentrated populations, restricted where freeways could be built, and forced other ways of imagining transportation and daily commutes.     

From the 1960’s and 70’s and beyond, car troubles were emerging from the paved horizon and they impacted more than our urban landscapes. Exhaust that belched out of millions of vehicles without pollution controls began literally choking Californians to death, emboldening air quality management districts to exert their growing powers. Folks who didn’t develop lethal respiratory illnesses still felt the pain of ozone and other air pollutants originating from dirty vehicles. The problems were realized by kids like us who struggled to get a breath while participating in competitive sports and other recreational activities. We didn’t know that we would damage our health when exercising in smoggy air that was twice as polluted compared to today.

Like most adventurous California teens at the time, road trips for me meant escaping to the freedom of new places and open spaces. And the list of magical places to visit and experience grew as my mental maps expanded. I started driving when I was 16 so that I could get to my part-time blue-collar jobs and save some money that would lead to more independence and the great outdoors. I bought my first junk car with that money before graduating from high school. “Get your motor runnin’, head out on the highway” became a theme song for this new-found freedom as long as I could keep my car from breaking down. I tuned in my car stereo and turned up the volume to overcome the roar of wind whooshing into my open windows and past my ears as landscapes raced by and more distant and exotic places called out. What a rush! At last, I was free to break away and both figuratively and literally blaze my own trails. Fantastical vistas and the most remote trailheads were finally within my reach.

Back then, new freeway and road traffic flowed relatively freely compared to today. Global warming and anthropogenic climate change and crushing traffic gridlock had not yet entered into the public discourse. The expanding freeways and additional lanes to everywhere began resembling massive arteries and veins that gradually narrowed into capillaries to feed commuter traffic into more distant communities. When my unreliable clunker was working properly, I could smoothly zip between my jobs and college classes. I occasionally slapped my class notes on my steering wheel to cram study time into my drive time. Once, suffering from sleep deprivation and carbon monoxide poisoning from all the car exhaust, I dosed off while driving on the freeway. I woke up at what seemed to be nearly a mile later, still in my lane, stunned to realize how my steady foot on the accelerator kept my car pacing the steadily-flowing traffic. This was, literally, a car culture wake-up call that I wouldn’t forget. I realized how fortunate I was to be alive and free to make it to my job and classes that day among all the car-commuter madness. You would certainly not survive such an experience in today’s traffic that is constantly stopping and reaccelerating within much narrower lanes.         

And then the traffic monster raised its ugly head. During car culture growth years, if a freeway or road got too crowded, we widened it or built another one. But the throngs of new arrivals and commuters would quickly pack the new lanes until we had to build another and then another until we began running out of places to build them and neighborhoods that would allow them. “Rush hour” commutes expanded to two or three hours for some. And so we developed dysfunctional love-hate relationships with our cars and I shared those feelings even though my commutes were never that long. As we worked our way into the final years of the last century, many commuters found themselves trapped by the very car cultures and suburban lifestyles that were supposed to liberate them. Those who couldn’t afford to move closer to their school and work were stuck in gridlock, wasting away both physically and mentally in their nearly stationary cars, poisoned by the high concentrations of air pollutants surrounding them.

For too many Californians, today’s car culture represents an inefficient loss of precious time and a deteriorating quality of life and health. Bay Area commuters have settled as far away as Stockton and other relatively inexpensive Central Valley locales. Thousands of daily commuters into the LA Basin come from more affordable lnland Empire and high desert communities. Many of them drive up to two hours to their jobs in the mornings and then another two hours back home in the evenings. Living around relatively affordable Bakersfield and working in LA County job centers has become a lifestyle for some. Residents around other growing conurbations (such as the state’s second-largest city, San Diego, and in Sacramento) have watched with trepidation over the years and revolted with movements earning names such as “Not Yet LA.” Yet, apparently irresistible car culture momentum has also overwhelmed many of those communities to commit what critics consider the same old mistakes while expecting different outcomes. Look at the gridlock that builds each weekday afternoon as commuters check out of their jobs near the coast and then cram onto freeways, jamming all lanes that point inland, toward more affordable eastern San Diego County suburbs. Listen to the sometimes-daunting daily traffic reports reverberating from Sacramento and every other major California metropolis when serious injury and fatal accidents block lanes here and shut down freeways there. The lucky ones just get stuck in traffic gridlock behind each incident. For the least fortunate, their beloved (or hated) cars turned on them to become violent high-speed killing machines when seat belts, air bags, and other safety features weren’t enough to stop the carnage.  

The car-culture momentum balloon started deflating decades ago in some of our major cities, partly because it became too expensive and destructive to rip up neighborhoods and make way for more cars. You could argue that the revolt began way back in the 1970s when the San Francisco Bay Area committed to building and supporting efficient public transportation systems such as BART. I was a beneficiary of those attempts to get people out of their cars. When I moved to densely-packed San Francisco, it was like landing on another planet or in the Land of Oz. I quickly learned that trying to maneuver my manual transmission (AKA a clutch) while frantically bobbing my car up and down the steep, narrow streets was asking for stress and trouble. And it wasn’t necessary. So, I would leave my junky car behind for days and effortlessly ride safe and efficient buses, streetcars, and BART, with no worries about parking or traffic. And I got frequent free entertainment from the circus-like cast of characters that would unexpectedly appear on all the different public transit options. My car came in handy when leaving The City for one-day adventures over the Golden Gate Bridge to the Marin Headlands, Mt. Tam, Muir Woods, Pt. Reyes, Stinson Beach, or to points south such as Santa Cruz Mountains haunts like Big Basin Redwoods, or the scenic beaches around Pescadero, Año Nuevo, Davenport, and Santa Cruz. The car was discarded and convenient public transportation embraced during weekdays to get to graduate school and work, but the car was cherished during weekends. I’ve been the fortunate one to live, work, and play in the best of both transportation worlds.

The Bay Area’s anti-automobile movement was bolstered by the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake that badly damaged or destroyed elevated two-level portions of the Embarcadero and Central Freeways. Instead of replacing them, City residents successfully fought to reclaim their views and neighborhoods. The results are seen as today’s unobstructed spectacular views of the Bay from the Embarcadero and in the parks and other public spaces along Octavia Boulevard, landscapes that were previously sliced, blocked, and dominated by massive freeway structures. During this revolutionary period, San Francisco’s late poet laureate, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, famously expressed the growing popular frustrations: “What destroys poetry of a city? Automobiles destroy it, and they destroy more than the poetry. All over America, all over Europe in fact, cities and towns are under assault by the automobile, are being literally destroyed by car culture.”

In contrast to stereotypes, Los Angeles and other parts of Southern California have also recently rejected some new freeways. It may be no surprise that the once-proposed Beverly Hills Freeway (which would have cut through some of the wealthiest communities in the state) was scrapped decades ago. And the last freeway to slice through densely-populated LA Metro neighborhoods was the 105 (Century Freeway), completed in 1993, costing more than $2 billion. Today, giant billboards advertising personal injury law firms soar over this freeway and its working-class neighborhoods that didn’t have the power to stop such a divider. But more recently, South Pasadena and surrounding communities finally blocked the long-planned extension of the 710 Freeway that would have bifurcated their neighborhoods.

And just a few years ago, after long and bitter battles, activists managed to save beloved Trestles surfing beach and San Onofre State Beach (near the border between San Diego and Orange Counties) from a massive toll road. New highways and freeways are still being proposed and debated farther out in Inland Empire and high desert exurbs, complete with the familiar clashing pro and con players fighting to gain momentum and win the hearts of residents, business leaders, and policymakers. Similar battles over what to do about cars continue in inland exurbs beyond the Bay Area that extend well into and through Central Valley cities. They pit car-friendly traditionalists, motivated by growing traffic and commuter crises, against those who see what has happened to larger conurbations closer to the coast and want to preserve what remains of the places and environments they cherish.     

We must pause to pay homage here to some of the most offensive monuments demonstrating how we, in our desperation, torture ourselves when we are forced to crowd together with our cars: parking structures. Yes, multi-level parking structures save precious urban space for other activities and they decrease the extent of paved surfaces compared to sprawling parking lots. But once inside a monotonous parking structure, have you noticed that you could be anywhere at any time? It is difficult to imagine how we could build more generic and dull environments. Not only do the different sections and levels all look the same in one structure, but they look and feel no different in cities and suburbs hundreds of miles away. There is just no “there” there. As soon as we enter the gates, we lose our sense of time and place and become disconnected from the unexpected surprises waiting for us in the outside world. Day or night, rain or shine, who cares? We are suddenly surrounding by bland concrete surfaces in every dimension, as if stuck in a Twilight Zone existence. But we are forced to tolerate this loss of precious quality time and sense of place so that we can reach our desired destination, which could be government or business offices, or a clinic, college class, sporting event, amusement park, concert, store, theater, or some other mall-like experience. You can’t be blamed for suffering from a case of claustrophobia while hunting for a space to squeeze your car in to and then walking through these hardscape labyrinths. And don’t even dare start wondering what might happen during an earthquake or fire. The insults to the senses multiply when impatient drivers honk their horns and compete for the closest space and when cheap car alarms are activated to echo among the other commotions … parking structures quickly devolving into unnerving peace stealers. “It’s not a walk in the park” is the understatement for such experiences, which makes one wonder why we don’t demand better from the people who design, build, and maintain these scars on our landscapes and psyches. How about adding, at the least, a few more colorful murals or other displays of art and humanity?

As we progress through this century, you will notice valiant efforts in nearly every city to get people out of their cars. They include innovations in telecommuting, building more affordable housing near schools and jobs, and funding and encouraging the use of public transportation and safer pedestrian and bicycle right-of-ways. As example, several California cities are fishing for more resources to fund light rail and that includes new lines that are stretching across the LA area. Meanwhile, according to Public Road Data from the State of California, we now have more than 175,000 miles of maintained roads in the Golden State, with about 400,000 lane miles. The more than 14 million registered automobiles and 31 million total registered vehicles travel more than 330 billion miles each year on California roads. And according to the California Office of Traffic Safety and CHP in 2022, around 4,000 people (and 1,100 pedestrians) are killed in hundreds of thousands of accidents that result in hundreds of thousands of injuries on our state’s roads every year. We see every day how cars, and the infrastructures and landscapes we have built to accommodate them, are suddenly or in the long-run impacting all of us whether we like it or not. Even in many remote locations, the very same vehicles that give us access to the great outdoors are interrupting the peace and wild landscapes we cherish. Our bipolar love-hate relationship with cars intensifies.           

And isn’t it fitting that debates about cars have become just as polarizing as most political debates these days? Listen to the advocates (often on the political right), who mostly celebrate traditional car cultures, life in the suburbs and exurbs, and the perceived libertarian independence that accompanies such lifestyles. You’d think that cars were sent to us from heaven above. And for those living in the most rural and remote regions of the state, cars and trucks continue to represent necessary tools for survival. By contrast, listen to the pundits on the opposite side (often from the political left and clustered in our urban centers) echo the criticisms and sentiments of the late revolutionary writer Lawrence Ferlinghetti. You’d think cars were instruments of the devil.

What are your experiences with and views about cars? Do you think they represent freedom and independence or are they killing us and destroying California lives and landscapes? A little of both? I’ve chased the California Dream across our state on foot, on my bike, in my car, and on all types of public transportation; and I’ve been fortunate to have lived and learned from all of these experiences, celebrating in and sometimes suffering from very different transportation worlds. But I’m also now fortunate to live in a city (Santa Monica) where I have transportation options that include hopping on my bike and pedaling in almost any direction along our many relatively safe bike routes. Our ability to build bridges and pathways toward a brighter and more efficient transportation future depends on a better understanding of the important rolls all of these options (and that includes our traditional cars and newer EVs) have played and will play as we attempt to steer toward better living and working environments.     

View this animation illustrating how roads were paved across much of celebrated car-culture poster child LA County until there was no more room for them. The authors suggested that demand on those roads has been growing for nearly 40 years as more cars were crammed into limited transportation infrastructures. Check out their other maps showing historical growth in LA County.

Here are some traditional maps showing major California highways.
And: https://www.tripinfo.com/maps/ca

This impressive interactive GIS site classifies our highways and roads. You can click to choose a wide range of valuable information related to this story.

Finally, as a bonus for navigating through this story, you are invited to breeze through the following colorful photo essays that showcase classic California cars and transportation landscapes. The first set (click to page 2) skips around California’s landscapes made for cars and some that have rejected cars. The second set (click to page 3) celebrates various classic cars that I have recently photographed to illustrate some of California’s car art and culture history.

The post Cars: Driving and Dividing California first appeared on Rediscovering the Golden State.

Whether they are considered nature’s great cathedrals or breathtaking scenery without rivals, there is nothing quite like them on this planet. They helped inspire me and millions of others to learn more about the natural forces and processes that are shaping our world and how we all fit in. They and other grand landscapes in California and beyond motivated me to become the student, researcher, teacher, and naturalist that I am today. We have featured Yosemite Valley and Kings Canyon landscapes in previous stories that you will find in this project and website. In this story, we explore Zion Canyon.

How has it changed and how does this high desert canyon compare to and contrast with our Yosemite? Join me, your master ranger and natural history interpreter armed with 50 years of observations and field experiences, as I guide you to discover the science behind the scenery.

On the surface, there are some uncanny similarities between our Sierra Nevada’s Yosemite and Utah’s Zion. Each of these valleys sits at about 4,000 feet (1,200 m) above sea level, surrounded by thousands of feet of vertical rock walls soaring abruptly above their eroding rivers. Each of their names begin with the last letters of our alphabet, monikers that recall the people and cultures who once settled in these other-worldly canyons. But great differences stand out when we look a little closer.     

We returned to Zion’s campgrounds during the prolonged and historic heat wave of July 2023, a month when the high temperature at their weather station (near their Human History Museum and Visitor Center) made it to 110° F (43° C) on two days. Only four days of that month had high temperatures just below 100° F (38° C), which is closer to the July average. (The highest temperature ever recorded at Zion was 115°, including July 10 and 11, 2021.) This contrasts with their typically lowest temperatures in the teens over the winter and a low of 14° F (-10° C) on January 31, 2023.

Imagine experiencing such a 124° temperature range in one location within less than six months! Welcome to cold winters and hot summers common to the thin dry continental air of the high desert. During this trip, nature forced us to alter our daily schedule so that we could hike the dry trails during early mornings and evenings and spend the hottest afternoons within the shaded narrows, immersed in the Virgin River, or at the museum or visitor center. We were rewarded with comfortable evenings to view bats darting around and then thousands of stars rotating in the dark night sky.

Weather patterns and climates in Zion are glaringly different from our Yosemite, which drains and opens toward the west, facing the Pacific Ocean. As wet winter storms stream off the Pacific, they dump copious amounts of orographic rain and snow as they glide up Sierra Nevada’s western slopes. (Check out our earlier story on the atmospheric rivers of 2023 and an even earlier story following a water drop.) Yosemite Valley averages more than 36 inches (>91 cm) of precipitation per year and the surrounding high country receives even more.

But by the time those Pacific storms skim over southern Utah’s high desert, they are usually spent, leaving only trace amounts of precipitation. Zion Canyon averages only 15.7 inches (40 cm) of precipitation and 3.8 inches (10 cm) of snow each year, compared to the massive snow drifts that accumulate in the Sierra Nevada each season. Also in contrast to our Yosemite and Kings, Zion has a distinct late summer rainy season associated with the Southwest (North American) monsoon, averaging more than an inch of rain each month from July through October. And though Yosemite may briefly be dampened by infrequent isolated summer storms, such quick hitters are not reliable precipitation producers or drought busters in what John Muir coined our Range of Light.

Torrential summer rains soaked Zion and the Desert Southwest in 2022, causing extensive flash flooding. But the North American monsoon did not perform during our visit on this sizzling July of 2023. Only 0.05 inches was recorded on the only day of precipitation that month (July 25). The fickle monsoon thunderstorm cloudbursts and flash floods will repeatedly wash out roads and trails and carry people away in the debris during one summer and then be disappointing no shows the next. Plants and animals and people who have not adapted to these high desert weather extreme realities do not survive. There is even a late summer rainy season flowering cycle on exhibit in the Southwest and across the Colorado Plateau. This is also why, when cumulus clouds begin boiling into thunderheads within the thermals that rise in summer’s midday heat, we are warned to steer clear of Zion’s narrows and slot canyons that can become violent cascading death traps within minutes. You can thank these powerful gully washers for helping to carve the deep canyons such as Zion that have made Colorado Plateau scenery world famous. In contrast, Yosemite’s Merced River and other Sierra Nevada streams and their ability to erode and deposit are dependent on runoff and snowmelt from those winter storms off the Pacific.

The Sierra Nevada and Colorado Plateau are composed of very different rock formations lifted by very different tectonic forces. The core of Yosemite and the Sierra Nevada is mostly made of massive granitic batholiths that cooled and crystalized from gargantuan underground magma chambers formed in subduction zones around 100 million years ago. More recent vertical faulting has elevated their solid granitic escarpments along steep eastern slopes until high Sierra Nevada peaks reach more than 14,000 feet (4,267 m) above sea level, while western slopes more gradually descend toward the Great Central Valley.

In contrast, the Colorado Plateau is underlain by thousands of feet of mostly sedimentary deposits that also date back more than 100 million years. Millions more years later, heat, pressure, and nature’s glues had lithified the particles into sedimentary rocks. The relatively undisturbed layers were more recently and gradually warped upward by compressional forces until the highest points of the plateau soar over 12,000 feet (>3,658 m) ASL. Gravity’s pull on water flowing from such lofty elevations has energized streams to cut deep canyons into Sierra Nevada’s granitic plutons and into the Colorado Plateau’s vulnerable layers of sedimentary rock formations.

The Grand Canyon is often used as the classic example of how a powerful river (the Colorado) can erode deep chasms as surrounding landscapes are lifted higher. Weathering and erosion will eventually widen the incised narrows over time. The relatively young Zion Canyon is also widening as the Virgin River cuts through it.  

Yosemite and other Sierra Nevada canyons have been carved by floods from wet winter storms and snowmelt that runs off impressive snow packs well into the summer. But the most spectacular high country Sierra Nevada valleys and canyons were also extensively carved by alpine (mountain/valley) glaciers during previous glacial periods. As the flowing ice scraped out deep high-elevation cirques and U-shaped trenches through preexisting mountain canyons, glacial moraine rock piles were deposited downstream, leaving dramatic Ice Age landscapes. (Check out our webpage story from 2019, Norway vs. California, where we examine such glacial grandeur.)

Today’s summer storms contribute relatively little runoff into today’s Sierra Nevada streams that follow those canyons. On the Colorado Plateau, gentler cold winter rains and melting winter snows also add to frigid runoff into the canyons. And like Sierra Nevada rock formations, cycles of freezing and thawing during winter help to crack and physically weather rocks so that blocks are liberated to break off from the cliffs and eventually be carried away after they disintegrate into smaller pieces. But summer’s violent flash floods are responsible for transporting much of that loose rock and sediment downstream in Zion. And only the highest peaks and ridges of the Colorado Plateau exhibit some glacial topography; Zion Canyon and Desert Southwest landscapes were not carved by powerful Ice Age glaciers such as those that once scraped through Sierra Nevada high country.  

There are also glaring differences between Yosemite and Zion in the color and texture of their rock walls. The granitic rocks of the Sierra Nevada are dominated by lighter minerals of quartz and feldspar, but are often speckled with darker crystals containing more iron and other heavier elements. This massive stew of magma chamber chemicals solidified into a solid salt-and-pepper matrix of rocks and minerals.

As the mountains were lifted, overlying rocks were weathered and stripped away, exposing them to weathering and erosion. Chemical weathering processes can be seen as dark stains and vertical streaks on the cliffs where iron and other darker elements oxidize in the water and air. Physical weathering processes include exfoliation, the pressure release that breaks massive rocks into thin skins or onion-like layers to slide and fall downslope. (Check out our website story where we follow a grain of sand.)

In contrast, the sedimentary layers of Zion are clearly and classically stacked with the older deposits on the bottom and the younger rock formations on top of them. (Still younger rocks that once capped them have been eroded and washed away long ago.) Click here for more rock layer details. The Virgin River has sliced through all of them like a sharp knife through a layer cake: nature’s road cuts. Relatively resistant lighter-colored sandstones are dominated by sandy grains with more quartz and feldspar. The layers grading from sandstones to siltstones and mudstones and shales that contain more iron and other heavier elements tend to oxidize into rusty and red colors when exposed to air and water; thinner skins of these weathered surfaces are sometimes referred to as desert varnish. And so, the highly-resistant lighter-colored speckled cliffs and canyons of the Sierra Nevada look quite different from the thousands of feet of vermilion layers of sedimentary rocks weathering in Zion. In both cases, millions of years of internal mountain building forces and external denudational processes have conspired to sculpt some of the most spectacular landscapes on Earth.

Contrasts between our Sierra Nevada and the Colorado Plateau (and particularly Yosemite and Zion) are also noticeable within their plant and animal communities. In both regions, you can find the classic vegetation zones grading from Lower Sonoran grasslands and prairies to Upper Sonoran chaparral and open woodlands, to Transition Zone woodlands and open forests, to Canadian Zone cooler and wetter forests, to still loftier subalpine Hudsonian plant communities, into the highest Arctic-Alpine Zone islands. But wetter Sierra Nevada slopes nurture lusher forests with species such as Giant Sequoias (Sequoiadendron gianteum, the largest trees on Earth) that you won’t find on the drier Colorado Plateau.

So, as you climb up from lower elevations in Zion toward higher elevations on the Colorado Plateau, you will notice high desert xeric species. They include Rabbitbrush (Ericameria nauseosa), Big Basin Sagebrush (Artemesia tridentata), and several different species of buckwheat. A little higher up, you will find what some call pygmy woodlands. Pinyon pines (Pinus monophylla and Pinus edulis) grow with live oaks and other oak species that shed their leaves, growing from shrubs into small trees. They mix with Utah Juniper (Juniperus osteosperma) at lower elevations around 4,000-5,500 feet in the Upper Sonoran and Red Cedar (Juniperus scopulorum) at higher elevations above 5,000 feet in Transition and Canadian Zones. Ponderosa Pines (Pinus ponderosa) appear and grow denser at higher elevations as we make our way into wetter mixed conifer and aspen forests with Douglas Fir (Pseudotauga menziesii), White Fir (Abies concolor), White Pine (Pinus strobiformus), and Quaking Aspen (Populus tremuloides). You also will find a host of colorful wildflowers decorating the understories at these higher elevations. Several species bloom throughout the summer, nurtured by those monsoon thundershowers that more commonly soak the cooler high plateau.

As with riparian communities in the Sierra Nevada, biomass and species diversity dramatically increase along and adjacent to stream and river courses. Where soils remain damp and the relative humidity increases around water courses in Zion, look for denser stands of Fremont Cottonwood (Populus fremontii), Red Birch (Betula occidentalis), various willow species, cattails, and rushes. As you enter the narrows where natural springs and seeps erupt from the sandstone cliff faces, look for fern and other water-loving species that combine in rock cracks to form delicate hanging gardens. Water might also be king in California, but life-giving moisture can transform Colorado Plateau’s dehydrated high desert into productive ecosystems that support numerous species of plants and animals.

Zion’s birds share the advantage of flying to water and food sources. We spotted some raptors, roadrunners, ravens, turkey vultures, and a condor flying overhead. But the real flying shows in Zion start just after sunset, when a seemingly chaotic air show of bats dart around, using their sophisticated radar to hunt and keep insect populations under control. You will also find the greatest number of species and densest populations of animals around Zion’s water courses. We saw wild turkeys, mule deer, and fox in the canyon. Raccoons, skunks, bobcats, porcupines, and owls are also found in the riparian habitats near water, mostly at night. Coyote can be heard howling around the canyon as they hunt in the twilight and darkness. Though American Beavers (Castor Canadensis) have burrowed their lodges into the banks of the Virgin River, they are difficult to spot. They don’t build beaver dams seen along other western rivers, since the river-altering structures would be destroyed by frequent flash floods. Look for the chewing scars on cottonwood trees near the river. All of this gnawing and other beaver activity usually peak during overnight hours, when it is more difficult for predators to hunt them.

As with Yosemite, humans have impacted Zion mammals and cut predator populations in the canyon. There are only a few cougars in the entire park. Such extermination and displacement of mountain lions by early farmers and ranchers and then crowds of visitors caused an unnatural explosion of deer populations. These ubiquitous browsers then feed on cottonwood and other seedlings to reduce the normal rate of plant regrowth. The results include decreasing biodiversity and increasing impacts on populations of many different riparian species. Add efforts to control reoccurring flood damage and you can see how natural channel flow has been destabilized along the Virgin River. This is another classic example of how human impacts can become ripple effects that can change natural systems and cycles and then entire landscapes, even in our national parks.

And that brings us full circle to what Yosemite and Zion might have most in common: they are perfect examples of unique landscapes of grandeur and national parks that we are loving to death. Yosemite is just about 200 miles (or four hours) from Bay Area cities, just over two hours from Central Valley population centers, and about 300 miles (6 hours) from LA. Generations of traditional Yosemite National Park lovers live in these California conurbations. Zion is only about 160 miles (2.5 hours) from a growing Las Vegas. Each of these nearby major metropolitan areas welcomes millions of tourists each year and many of these visitors clamor to squeeze a visit to one of these iconic parks into their itineraries. Unlike those of us who adore our national parks as places to find peace and solitude and to experience and learn about nature, the average visitor spends only a few hours on the ground in those national parks. Millions of people each year exploit them as social media selfie checkoff lists.

The crowds began choking Yosemite Valley decades ago, especially on summer weekends. They brought massive traffic jams, pollution, chaos, and amusement park atmospheres in what were supposed to be exceptional natural environments to be cherished and preserved for the benefit of future generations. Yosemite experimented with reservation systems from 2020-21 and a peak hours reservations system in 2022. Park officials are currently using data gathered from these experiments to develop a Visitor Access Management Plan and you are invited to provide your input. Avid naturalists and backcountry hikers have also been impacted, with most backcountry trails and wilderness areas requiring permits. Growing crowds traipsing to the top of Half Dome (a round-trip hike of about 15 miles with a 4,800-foot elevation gain) eventually created dangerous and sometimes deadly conditions on the steep and slippery dome. I’ve trudged to the top a few times over the years, but today’s permit system limits 300 hikers per day to make use of the chains and steps that lead up the side of the dome.  

Zion National Park is challenged with similar dilemmas: how do our most beloved and popular parks offer access to the greatest number of people, without ruining the nature experience for each visitor and compromising the mission and integrity of our national parks?

Several years ago, Zion’s crowds multiplied as nearby Las Vegas grew and the Utah Office of Tourism began promotions to attract visitors from other states and from around the world. It worked too well if you enjoyed Zion for its nature experiences. The summer traffic and crowds in the canyon became so chaotic, the park was forced to close the road into the canyon to vehicles and require visitors to take the free shuttle from early spring into late fall. Another amusement park atmosphere erupted especially on summer weekends as overwhelmed tourists jammed the overwhelmed visitor center. Others were herded through the maze of winding chains that eventually led them into shuttles where they were crammed like sardines, hoping to eventually be dropped off at key stops to search for their elusive solitude. Add some stifling summer heat and you can see why rangers who wanted to interpret and share the beauty and magic of nature have been forced into crowd control that sometimes turns into safety concerns and crime control after visitors reach their boiling points; good for the businesses in adjacent Springdale, not so good for anyone seeking a quiet nature experience.

And as if to mimic Yosemite’s Half Dome, the narrow chain path up to Angel’s Landing finally got so popular, it turned into a dangerous line of frustrated climbers scrambling over one another. And so, similar to Half Dome, the National Park Service has been stringently enforcing their Angels Landing Pilot Permit Program. I’ve also meandered up the steep switchbacks to this popular peak a few times in past decades, but don’t attempt these memorable climbs without your permit these days.

Whether there are too many people searching for their peace and quiet in nature, or too many people searching for their perfect selfies to post on social media, I don’t offer any better solutions to the crowd control problems that have plagued these otherwise magical wonderlands during recent years. I do know that our world has changed since we could roll in and get first-come, first-served camping spots during the summer in our most spectacular national parks. And I wish the folks at the National Park Service the very best as they struggle to balance the often conflicting serve and preserve missions.

For your part, it is best to visit these magnificent gems off season during weekdays when possible. Or, you can find your solitude at nearby less popular and more remote natural sanctuaries; there are still plenty to choose from that can be just as rewarding and many have been highlighted in stories on this website. In California, some of these retreats are closer to home and more easily accessible than you might think.

If you have a little more time, come along on the following bonus trip. Let’s move up to the plateau more than 3,400 feet (>1036 m) above the canyon along what is called the West Rim Trail to see how the biogeography at higher elevations around Zion National Park is so different from the hotter and drier deserts below. We will leave the crowds behind and then leave you on the high plateau above 7,000 feet (>2,130 m) in the Zion wilderness where summers are delightfully cool (if you can avoid the occasional thunderstorms) and winters are icy cold. For those looking for an introduction to Zion from the National Park Service, check out the link at the end of our story.

Before you go, visit the official National Park Service website that will help you prepare for your adventures: https://www.nps.gov/zion/index.htm

The post Zion vs Yosemite: the Science behind the Splendor first appeared on Rediscovering the Golden State.

So what does it take to produce a superbloom?

Several factors must align, and in the right order, for a superbloom to occur. The first and most important is rainfall. California’s wildflowers require significant amounts of rain to germinate and grow. And this year we have had plenty.  Specifically, they need a steady rain in the fall and winter months, followed by consistent warm temperatures and sunny days in the spring.

It is that last part of the equation that is the trickiest. If it warms up too quick the delicate flowers can dry out too fast. If the nights are too cold frost can either damage the plants or delay their flowering.  

With these factors in mind, it’s no surprise that the Carrizo Plain National Monument is one of the best places in California to witness a superbloom. Located in the southwestern part of the state a bit southwest of Bakersfield, the Carrizo Plain is a vast expanse of grassland and rolling hills that is home to a variety of wildflowers.

In the past couple of decades, the Carrizo Plain has experienced several superblooms, drawing swarms of visitors from across the state and beyond.  The last bona fide superbloom was in 2019. In most years this explosion of color occurs in early to mid April. Some of the most common wildflowers that can be seen during a superbloom include:

California Poppy (Eschscholzia californica): The California poppy is the state flower of California, and it’s easy to see why. The flower’s vibrant orange color is a sight to behold, and it can grow up to 12 inches in height. The petals of the flower are delicate and may appear slightly crinkled, giving it a unique texture.

Lupine (Lupinus sp.): Lupine is a genus of flowering plants that includes several different species. In the Carrizo Plain, you may see several different types of lupine, including the Arroyo Lupine (Lupinus succulentus) and the Miniature Lupine (Lupinus bicolor). Lupine flowers can be blue, purple, pink, or white, and they typically grow on tall stalks that can reach up to three feet in height.

Goldfields (Lasthenia sp.): The goldfields is another genus of flowering plants that is known to bloom in the Carrizo Plain. The flowers are small and daisy-like, with yellow petals and a dark center. They can grow in large clusters, creating a sea of yellow that is truly stunning.

Blue Dicks (Dichelostemma capitatum): Blue dicks is a perennial plant that is native to California. It produces showy clusters of star-shaped flowers that can range in color from pale lavender to deep blue-purple. The plants are typically less than two feet in height, with narrow, grass-like leaves.

Owl’s Clover (Castilleja exserta): Owl’s clover is a unique flowering plant that is known for its distinctive shape. The flowers are hooded and tubular, with a bright pink or purple color. The plants can grow up to two feet in height, and they are often found growing in dense clusters.

Fiddleneck (Amsinckia sp.): Fiddleneck is a genus of plants that includes several different species. The flowers are small and tubular, with a yellow or orange color. They typically grow on tall stalks that can reach up to three feet in height.

But the Carrizo Plain isn’t the only area in California that offers an impressive display of wildflowers in the spring. Other notable locations include Antelope Valley, Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, and Point Reyes National Seashore.

In 2019, one California location experienced an exceptionally rare super bloom –which is when an unusually large number of wildflowers bloom at the same time. This event drew a massive number of tourists and flower enthusiasts to Walker Canyon near Lake Elsinore, CA, causing what only could be described as a circus-like atmosphere.

The crowds were so large that authorities had to shut down access to the canyon on several occasions, causing major traffic jams on the nearby freeways. People were parking their cars illegally along the roads, trampling over the wildflowers, and even causing damage to the environment that may take years or decades to fully repair.

In addition to the crowds, there were also vendors selling food, souvenirs, and other items, which added to the carnival-like atmosphere. Some visitors were even spotted posing for photos in the middle of the flowers, which contributed to the destruction of the delicate ecosystem.

Overall, the sheer number of people and the chaos that ensued caused concern among conservationists and local officials who were worried about the long-term impact on the environment.

As of this writing, the City of Lake Elsinore, Riverside County Parks, and the Western Riverside County Regional Conservation Authority (RCA) have listed Walker Canyon as closed to the public.

If you do venture out to the Carrizo Plain please know that the monument has many unimproved roads that can quickly become impassible in wet weather.  This is a remote area with no services and spotty cell-phone reception at best. A breakdown in the more remote portions of the monument could mean a long wait for help. Bring water and supplies.

Also, be sure to tread lightly and respect the delicate ecosystem that makes this fantastic, yet temporary, beauty possible. Stay on the roads, do not park on the flower beds and take only pictures while leaving only footprints.

Remember, these wildflowers are not just a pretty sight, but an important part of the Golden State’s natural heritage.

The post What does it take to produce a fantastic Superbloom? first appeared on Rediscovering the Golden State.