That's right, two weeks ago I sold my beloved Subaru Crosstrek. My new whip is a Tern GSD E-Cargo bike, the Toyota Sienna of E-Cargo bikes. It is awesome. Pedal assist up to 20 miles an hour, capacity to fit a full load of groceries and then some, plus a comfy back seat for a full grown adult passenger.

It's too early to draw many definitive conclusions... but, well, here we go anyway.

Two weeks in I have ZERO regrets! Here's my experience so far:

A quick primer on E-Bike Classifications

if you don't care about technical differences between e-bikes, it's best that you skip this part.

E-bikes have blown up in the last 5 years, and not all e-bikes are created equal. E-bikes, in a technical sense, come in three flavors:

Class 1
Pedal assist up to 20mph, no throttle. If you want to go, you've got to pedal. The electric motor puts out power directly based on the input it receives, and provides zero additional help above 20mph. This is what I have.

Class 2
Pedal assist & full electric up to 20mph, with a throttle. The only change from class 1 to class 2 is the addition of a throttle. No pedaling necessary when you take off from stop signs or just don't feel like it, these are extremely popular.

Class 3
Full electric up to 28mph, with a throttle. These are the fastest e-bikes on the market that are still legally bicycles.

Anything with a motor more powerful than 750 watts, or that can go faster than 28mph, is categorically not an e-bike. These are electric motorcycles. and can only be operated legally on the road with proper registration, insurance, and a motorcycle license.

Many brands (ahem, Surron, looking at you) sell electric-motorcycles-branded-as-e-bikes with 20,000 watt motors and top speeds of 50-70 mph.

Very very cool. Probably very fun to ride around. Categorically not an e-bike.

I get it. E-Bike is a great SEO term to slap all over your website, but at some point we need some market differentiation like we did with "dirt bikes" and "mountain bikes" anyway I digress...

I'm not weird, WE'RE weird

Ditching a car in favor of a bicycle feels like an act of rebellion in Los Angeles. A masochistic rebellion, if you ask my mother-in-law, one resulting only in longer travel times, constant exposure to the Southern California heat, and a loss of autonomy and agency. But a rebellion nonetheless.

Los Angeles and car culture are inseperable.

In Los Angeles, only ~1% of commuters bike to work (which is, shockingly, almost double the national average of 0.6%) making me one of around forty thousand people in LA who bicycle to get around.

But globally, I am in the company of hundreds of millions. Worldwide, around 1 in 10 people use a bike as their primary form of transportation.

Bicycles are the single most efficient, cost-effective, reliable, and popular transportation tool to ever exist. There are over a billion bicycles in use globally. Until the last few years, they outnumbered cars, making them the most widely used personal vehicle in history.

Bicycles are the most energy-efficient form of human transportation ever invented, significantly more efficient per-calorie than walking, driving, or even taking trains or public transit systems. They are mechanically simple, easy to maintain, and significantly less expensive than cars.

A small caveat…

We still do have one car. My wife's job does not lend itself to bicycle commuting, so during the week she uses it and I am 100% reliant on bikes/transit to get around. But on the weekend, the car is around for both of us to share. I drove it to go get bagels just this morning.

In two weeks, I've driven it one time, so I guess technically I'm living a car-lite lifestyle. Sue me.

The pace of bike

I've been biking around Los Angeles for years now, and a big factor in my decision to try a car-free lifestyle is an intentional choice to slow down. Life already moves faster than I can keep up with. Choosing to slow down my mode of transportation has, unexpectedly, left me feeling like I have more free time.

It seems backwards. Getting places takes longer... why does it feel like I have more time in my day? Apparently, this is not an uncommon phenomenon among people who switch from driving to biking.

For most of us, driving is a neutral activity at best. You can sip coffee, listen to a good podcast, call up a friend, and make it relatively painless. But in a car, a huge portion of travel is waiting. Waiting at stop lights, in traffic, or circling a parking lot.

Biking shifts your attention from dead time to alive time. On a bike, even if the trip is longer, you're actively moving the entire time. And when you do find yourself waiting for a light, it's usually a welcome rest, not an inconvenient delay.

Exercise is built into the day. No more driving to the gym to hop on a stationary bike. My ride to the climbing gym is a perfect warm up, PLUS my workout starts the moment I leave the house.

Driving in LA (and most other places, in my experience) tends to all blur together into one largely unconscious and forgotten "going places" activity. Biking slows things down, yes, but simultaneously raises the quality of the experience.

Consistent travel times

Although travel times are longer on a bike, they are largely more consistent than in a car. It takes 12 minutes to bike to the climbing gym, almost exactly, no matter the time of day or traffic conditions.

4 minutes to the grocery.
14 minutes to my friend Joe's house.
16 minutes to downtown Pasadena.
35 minutes to downtown Highland Park.

A few minutes longer than driving, yes, but predictable and consistent.

My default headspace in a car is can I shave a few minutes off this google maps estimate and the default answer is hahahaha, no... no you cannot you fool, in fact here is a construction delay because you deserve it.

On a bike it's easy to stop wherever you please to eat tacos, check out a shop, or take a scenic detour through a park. There's almost always a place to park within a few steps of wherever you're going. It's a different way of moving through and interacting with the environment. I feel like I live in a fully connected world of places on a bike. In a car, the in-between places blur into the same fuzzy blegh as standing in line or waiting for an YouTube ad to end.

A case study

A few weeks ago Nicole and I went to a Dodgers game.

Driving to the stadium takes 30 minutes. Parking was $60, plus a 10 minute wait to get in the parking lot, and a 5-10 minute walk across the asphalt to the gates. Not to mention the traffic jam when the game ends - 15 minutes to make your way out of the parking lot, and another 30 minutes home.

Total car travel time: 1:30 - 1:40 + $60

A combination of Metro and the E-Cargo bike took 55 minutes each way. Metro is $1.75 per ride. We parked the bike 20 steps from the main entrance gate, for free. After the game, we zipped out through traffic and were on the metro home before most fans had even made it out of the parking lot.

Total bike/transit travel time: 1:50 - 2:00 + $7

At face value, biking takes twice as long as driving. In reality, once all the driving-adjacent activities are factored in, we probably lost 20 minutes by biking, and saved $53 and the whole headache of stadium traffic.

The economics of a cargo bike

This is what I’m most curious about over the long haul. My back of napkin math (and common sense) says biking instead of driving is cheaper, but I’m still gathering data. Here are the numbers to-date:

I sold the Subaru for $8000. I bought the bike for $6000. We're already $2000 ahead.

Taking the car off our insurance policy immediately saved us $1600 per year. I did buy bicycle insurance, which comes out to $1 per day, $365 per year.

I would normally fill up the gas tank twice a month. With today’s gas prices, we’ll call that $1200 annually, conservatively.

Car registration in CA is something like $180 per year.

Maintenance is the biggest financial question mark. Over the long haul, it’s certainly cheaper to maintain a bicycle than a car. New tires on a bike are ~$200, compared to the last set of all-terrain tires I put on the Subaru for ~$850. Assuming you do your labor, new brake pads and rotors are ~$500 for a car, or ~$150 for a bike.

Routine things like oil changes, air filters, car washes, and wiper blade replacements will probably come out in the wash with tune ups, replacement chains, inner tubes, and brake pads.

What about long trips?

I assume I will have to rent a car several times a year for longer trips or larger loads than I can tackle on a bicycle. Next week, in fact, I am renting a car to go to Yosemite and Big Sur. For a week rental it's $164, all in.

Based on that figure, even if I rent a car for a full week every single month (which I don’t anticipate doing) it will only cost a few hundred dollars more than paying for insurance on a second vehicle.

More case studies

Figuring out how to haul various loads has turned out to be a fun puzzle (so far). A few of my favorite hauls:

• A trip to Home Depot carrying my wife Nicole + 2x hanging light fixtures + 8x garden path lamps + a gallon of paint.

• Another trip to home depot, this time hauling 16x 6-foot garden trellis poles.

• A trip to the nursery with 2x adults and a 5 gallon fig tree.

• A 30-mile round-trip to Griffith Park with Nicole to pick up ~100 liters of mulch (this one did push the range limit, which was sort of the point of the experiment, and I had to pedal the final half mile back to our house on full human power)

• A couple dozen trips to the grocery and other various errands

Conclusions

Like I said up top, I’m in the honeymoon phase with rose colored glasses and this relationship has ZERO issues!

I’m sure there will be issues, and I plan to reveal all here on LA Field Guide as my car-free(lite) lifestyle unfolds.

So whether you think this is a fool’s errand and want a front row seat to watch a granola LA transplant crash and burn (hopefully not literally) or whether you’re considering ditching a car yourself, I invite you to join along for the ride!

Thanks for reading, and have fun out there, LA.

I know we’re barely getting started here, but Substack really recommends that I put these subscribe buttons EARLY and OFTEN so if you aren’t already subscribed to LA Field Guide you know what to do.

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It’s the time of year when I know the best thing I can do for my overall mental health and well being is to get outside, but the shortening days make it harder and harder to motivate. The Big Dark, they call it up North, and though it’s not quite so big down here (though, scientifically speaking, equally as dark), the waning daylight still feels significant. And daylight savings time hasn’t even ended yet, oh boy, things are gonna get DARKER and WORSE and SADDER, buckle up everybody.

It’s fine. We’re fine. Instagram reminded me on Sunday morning that CicLAvia was shutting down eight miles of downtown streets and turning them into car-free bicycle paths for the day. So thanks, Ciclavia. This time it was slightly easier to roll out from under my rock and join the masses formally known as the public.

Sunday afternoon I biked to the gold line and took metro to Chinatown station. There were way more bikes on the train than I usually see, and everyone was going to the same place: CicLAvia - Heart of LA.

Confession: Before last Sunday, I had never actually been to a CicLAvia before. This truth gives me major imposter syndrome within the Los Angeles cycling community, but I’ve COME CLEAN and finally made my pilgrimage, so you can all forgive me now. I rode the entire thing solo dolo and it was incredible. 

CicLAvia is a nonprofit that does closed street events several times a year all around LA. They call them pop-up parks — fully blocked off routes through iconic stretches of the city: from Hollywood and Venice to South LA and the Valley. 

This one was one of the bigger ones. Broadway shut off to cars all the way through downtown, wide open streets out across the iconic 6th street bridge, and motor-free zones all the way over into Boyle Heights, a neighborhood I’d never explored before.

I rode through Chinatown, past the California Market Center, and along Hollenbeck park. I pedaled past the Crypto.com arena, home of the Lakers, Clippers, Sparks, and Kings, and the Wilshire Grand Center, the tallest skyscraper west of the Mississippi River.

I usually only ever see these buildings from the protected walls of a car (and even then, it’s been a while since I made my way downtown) but out here on two wheels they feel absolutely gigantic. 

Early… and… often… they say.

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I ran into some friends from Pedal Movement and chatted with a few strangers about their bikes. It’s incredible the different kinds of people that live in this city. There were rollerblades and roller skates and people on unicycles and tandem bikes and e-bikes and tricycles, mountain bikes and beach cruisers and choppers and vintage bikes. 

There really are no two bikes that are quite alike. 

In the middle of the 6th street bridge, there was what I can only describe as a karaoke trailer towed by a bicycle with live puppet show accompaniment. (Upon further research, that is exactly what it was.) When I rolled up, someone in full cycling spandex was belting Just A Girl to a crowd of fifty or so people with a trio of sock puppets headbanging along.

It almost felt like I was at church — I think maybe the puppet show was giving VeggieTales, a little bit.

Riding a bike through the streets of LA reminds me of how joyous it is to live life at the pace of a bicycle. It’s grounding. I feel like a real live person moving through an actual physical place on the one and only planet earth. A place with breezes and sounds, temperatures and textures, trees, parks, and people, food, sights, and smells.

I become aware of the human beings sharing the space with me, weaving in and out of one another without lane dividers, honking, or guardrails — much the way a school of fish dances along in unison without a clearly defined leader or predefined direction.

In this reality, it is actually encouraged to speak to one another. Saying “hey, sweet bike” or pointing to a chubby bobcat sticker and saying “I know the Cub House too!” doesn’t require yelling over the roar of engines, it’s as simple as leaning over and chatting with your neighbor.

But I want it all, and I too live in our reality of cars and wifi and email in our pocket. If I’m being honest, I love that pace too. The speed at which we can do anything or talk to anyone or travel anywhere in the postmodern age is tantalizing.

Just because speed is available to us, however, doesn’t mean we need to live fast all the time. Like all things, a healthy pace requires balance. It is vital that we create the space to slow down to the pace of bicycling, or walking, or gardening. Keeping time not with a stopwatch but by the cycles of the moon, and the gentle shift of the seasons.

It’s the pace of humanity, as much as our brains would like to convince our bodies otherwise.

Sometimes that means taking the long, slow, winding route instead of the quick and efficient path. We’re not really going anywhere anyway, are we… so what’s the rush? Are we too focused on where we’re headed that we miss the getting there? I suspect that often the answer is yes.

CicLAvia explicitly tells people to wear sunscreen, but because it is the middle of October and also mostly because I didn’t read the event description for details, I didn’t lotion up. Now I have a sunburn, but I’m wearing it as proof that I was out in the SUN. A great, slow, meandering day in the sun.

Take THAT, Big Dark. Better luck next month.

Second degree. It wasn’t premeditated or anything. I don’t spend my evenings dreaming up creative ways to execute insects, but it also wasn’t simply an act of bug-slaughter. I’ve killed dozens of bugs, sometimes with relative indifference, occasionally with fascination, and often with a pang of sadness. I’m usually more of a catch and release guy, but this time was different. There was malice in my heart. It was an act of passion. Vengeance, even. 

Let me explain.

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The Victim

There is a particular species of pest that is every gardener’s worst nightmare: the Tomato Hornworm caterpillar. These little monsters grow from zero to the size of a healthy index finger in a few days and wreak havoc on all kinds of leafy plants1: peppers, eggplant, potatoes, and, of course, tomato plants.

This is all well and good, unless you happen to be a tomato plant, or a human being who wants to harvest tomatoes from a tomato plant, or honestly any being that isn’t a tomato hornworm caterpillar. So if you are me, this is actually not all well and good.

If you are me, this is very bad news.

Hornworms don’t normally go straight for the tomatoes. For that, I might actually be able to forgive them. A summer tomato fresh off the vine is a singularly delicious treat. But these barbarians are more interested in the leaves than the fruit, and can kill off a plant before it even has the chance to provide any tomatoes. A single Tomato Hornworm can strip an entire tomato vine of its leaves in a matter of days.

Eat my tomatoes? I’m angry, but empathetic.

Kill the plant before it can grow tomatoes? Now we’ve crossed a line.

Hence the murder.

The Motive

In the late afternoon of Friday, September 8th, I walked into the backyard to spend a bit of time in the garden. My goal was to thin out some old growth on our tomato plants, check them for disease, and softly encourage them to make lots and lots of yummy tomatoes (yes, I talk to them, it helps, I promise). Everything was going well until I noticed a branch without leaves. 

My heart sank as I scanned up the vine and found another, and another.

They had come. It was happening. Telltale signs of hornworm apocalypse.

I silently cursed myself for not checking on the plants more often. We had been out of town for a week; the eggs must have hatched while we were gone, and now the damage was done.

I spent a few minutes searching for the culprit. Tomato Hornworms are sneaky bastards, their green hue blends in perfectly with tomato leaves, but eventually I found the perpetrator clinging to the top of the plant, chomping away at a cherry tomato.

The gall. The nerve. I get that a caterpillar’s got to eat like the rest of us, but to graze away on MY tomato RIGHT in front of me? The audacity! This was an act of defiance, through and through. I can’t prove it, but I’m pretty sure he flipped me off with one of his little caterpillar fingers and spewed insults at my friends and family as he went for another greedy mouthful of fresh tomato flesh. 

Exhibit A

I went to get a pair of gloves because, even though the internet says tomato hornworms are harmless, I don’t fully believe it. Their red stinger-looking tail is a harmless decoy, I know that much is true. But I wasn’t so sure that this one wouldn’t try to take a chomp out of my finger if I gave him the opportunity. I clearly had a wild-card caterpillar on my hands, there’s no saying what it would do if given a window of opportunity. I wasn’t going to take any chances. 

With my gloved hand I plucked — no, I yanked. It was a yank, I can admit that. I was not gentle with the caterpillar when I pulled him off the vine and walked around the side yard toward the street. But this little worm was eating the tomato plant my wife and I had raised from a seedling together. It was practically our child, and this invader inflicted bodily harm without remorse or apology. I wasn’t exactly feeling patience flow through my veins.

I marched down the driveway with the emotional energy and intelligence of a junior higher and hucked him — I’m telling you, I flat out yakked this guy with a full-extension overhand baseball pitch motion — out into the middle of the street. Like, he got some serious hang time. Multiple seconds passed as he twirled through the air. I had already turned around and started to walk back toward the house when he landed with a soft yet distinctly audible plep-p-p on the asphalt.

Some people use the sound of a bell or a gong to begin a meditation and return themselves to the present moment. For me, the sound of a caterpillar plummeting to earth from treetop height did the trick.

This sound brought me back to my senses, and I saw myself as the absolute monster that I am with the full blazing intensity of undiluted awareness. I had just walked into HomeTown Buffet for caterpillars and yanked the only other customer in the restaurant out of line by their shirt collar, dragged them into the parking lot, beat them up, and spit in their face (okay, I didn’t spit on the caterpillar) all for simply eating at the salad bar that I wanted to eat at.

I was Jabba the Hutt, but instead of feeding Luke Skywalker to the Sarlacc I had thrown Tomato Hornwalker to bake to death on the hot asphalt or be pecked to death by parrots.

This realization struck me in an instant, and a wave of guilt washed over me. A small wave. More like a barely noticeable ripple, really, but guilt nonetheless.

I needed to excise the caterpillar from the garden, this was non-negotiable. But maybe this brutal roadside execution was going a little too far.

I could have walked literally ten more steps and released him in the parklet across the street. At least that would’ve given him a fighting chance. Sure, there’s probably not any plants in the Solanaceae family for him to eat over there, and yes, he almost certainly would’ve been devoured by a squirrel/crow/parrot/possum within a matter of hours.

But it still would have been more merciful than leaving him to die in the street, right?

The Moral Dilemma

I get that this story is a bit of a reach. Caterpillar murder isn’t one of the traditionally recognized cardinal sins. 

I believe that we all have a built-in sense of what is good, right, and beautiful, but it only kicks in with certainty after the fact. You always get to find out when you miss the mark, but you have to act first. Call it whatever you want — conscience, self inquiry, the holy spirit, it doesn’t really matter — it is that small voice entangled in time right alongside us, or within us, that is figuring things out moment by moment.

This was one of those moments I knew I couldn’t just shake off. I’d caught myself in the act and, though I knew the guilt of caterpillar murder likely wouldn’t follow me to the grave, or even all the way back inside to the refrigerator, I recognize that the way you handle the little things in life is inevitably how you will handle the big things.

We all know that practice makes perfect. Ignore that still small voice too often, and you start to get good at ignoring it.

And so, not because I am any kind of morally upright being, but mostly because I had nothing else going on that afternoon, I decided to turn back down the driveway and make things right.

Exhibit B

No sooner had I come down from my spiritual epiphany and decided to do the right thing than a white Buick emerged around the corner and started vrooming down the street — straight toward the caterpillar I had moments ago wished dead but now felt morally obligated to protect. I froze in place as the Buick approached, and could do nothing but peer between my fingers as it rolled over the spot where Tomato Hornwalker helplessly lay.

Miraculously, Hornwalker passed unscathed between the wheels, and I let out a sigh of relief.

I rolled my eyes at how quickly I’d waffled on my killer instincts. I really couldn’t believe what I was doing as I walked toward the street. Let’s get this over with before I change my mind. Five seconds earlier I had literally hurled this caterpillar through the air to die in the street as recompense for ravaging my garden, and now I was practically running to save it from oncoming traffic.

Before I stepped off the curb, I looked both ways like my dad taught me, and it so happened that another car was heading up the street toward me. Listen, I’m all for helping out a caterpillar in need, but I draw the line at leaping in front of a moving vehicle to save a bug. I haven’t completely lost my mind.

He had no way of knowing, but Hornwalker’s fate hung in the balance, out of both my control and his. Whether he lived to become a giant hawk moth and raise a family of his own or returned to the earth from whence he came rested in the hands of an anonymous Pasadena Audi driver. All I could do was wait and watch, and quietly whisper a vow that if the lord delivered him through this one, I would personally deliver him across the street to the promised land.

Vvvvvrrrrroooooooooooooosssshhhhhh — thwack.

He never stood a chance. Hornwalker was instantaneously obliterated into a vibrant green streak across the tarmac, sustaining a direct hit from the front left goodyear of the passing Audi. It was absolute carnage. 

I could do nothing but stare, mouth agape, at the spot where moments earlier my newest friend and bitterest enemy once stood. I stood there on the curb blinking for a minute or an eon, I’ll never know for sure. For the first time all day, my mind went absolutely silent. Nothing. Nada. Blank and empty. Sortof peaceful, actually.

I have to believe that whatever karmic force governs the turning of the universe knows that my change of heart was genuine, and saw that I was robbed of my opportunity to make things right.

Eventually, I returned to earth, shrugged it off, and walked back to the garden. It was only a caterpillar, after all.

This week, I discovered two more tomato hornworms in the garden. I caught these ones early, they had hardly grown to the length of my pinky. I put on gloves (I still don’t trust caterpillars), gently snapped off the end of the branch they clung to, walked them across the street to the parklet, and deposited them in a fern.

I have no idea if they eat ferns, but it seemed like the safest place for terrible horrible no good very bad baby caterpillars to hang out.

I Wonder…

1. Do you kill bugs and if so how bad do you feel when you do it AND does it change depending on the kind of bug it is?

2. Do bugs deserve to be protected from murder under US law?

3. Are there more or less humane ways to execute get rid of bugs? What are they?

4. idk uh, do you have a favorite bug?

5. y’all ever feel bad for doing something not very bad? Tell me about it in the comments let’s chat.

It was always the highlight of my kid year.

Okay, it’s not really a secret lake. It’s Cherry Lake. Easily findable online, six and a half hours from Los Angeles, just outside the boundary of Yosemite National Park.

I feel comfortable disclosing Cherry Lake to the internet public because there’s honestly nothing special about Cherry Lake. I mean, it’s surrounded by granite slabs and pine forests which are inherently beautiful and therefore kind of special, but there are more than 4,000 lakes in the Sierra Nevada and I’d be surprised if Cherry Lake even made the top 50% of that list in a purely aesthetic vacation destination sort of sense. It’s technically not even a lake, it’s an artificial reservoir that only exists to store water for San Francisco as part of the Hetch Hetchy water project.

In fact, Cherry Lake has some pretty notable downsides. There’s no potable running water (which means no showers or flush toilets either), hardly any sandy beach swimming areas, and the campground isn’t even next to the lake. To swim, you either have to drive a few miles down to the gravel boat launch or brave a treacherous and steep trail down to a small, rocky lagoon and sit perched among the boulders at the waterline. 

Cherry Lake is, from an outside point of view, simply an okay lake not too far from civilization. But it’s our okay lake, and a lifetime of memories more than make up for its shortcomings. Multiple lifetimes of memories, actually.

My grandpa first discovered the area when he was 18 years old working at the Oakland Recreation Camp. That year, a forest fire broke out in Cherry Valley and, because 1949 was an absolutely reckless and wild time when there were few if any rules, CalFire drafted barely-legal-age camp workers to fight the fire and my grandpa ended up driving a water supply truck through the mountains when he thought he would be lifeguarding at the pool for summer family camp.

Cherry Lake didn’t even exist at the time. The dam wasn’t constructed until 1956, and the lake was originally called Lake Lloyd. But the area made an impression on my grandpa, nonetheless. So much so that 18 years (and six kids) later, in the summer of 1967, he packed the family station wagon to the gills with children, camping gear for a week, plus a dog and headed for the hills, unknowingly starting a family tradition that would last for decades.

Those early days honestly sound like they were pure survival. My mom and her siblings tell stories of canned corn beef hash and other choice delicacies that kept two adults and six younglings alive for two weeks relying on only a single cooler. There are family legends of bears wandering through camp, lightning storms striking the surface of the lake, and at least one instance of a three mile bushwhack back from the end of the lake when afternoon winds picked up and threatened to swamp their small inflatable raft. 

By the time I arrived on the scene in the 90s, things hadn’t improved much. We skipped the canned corn beef hash, but “hobo stew” was an annual staple. Our water bottles were single walled plastic wrapped in a neoprene sleeve, which meant every afternoon I drank lemonade the temperature of hot tea in order to stay hydrated. I remember forgetting what a cold drink tasted like by day three, and actively hallucinating visions of pizza and mcflurries by the end of a ten day stint.

We all slowly refined our practices over the years and, thanks to innovations in camping technology, these days Cherry Lake feels more like a luxury retreat than a survivalist encampment. We enjoy Manhattans on the rocks and cold beer throughout our entire stay. We’ve got food and snacks out the wazoo, and indulge in daily happy hours with cheese boards and fresh bruschetta while lounging in comfortable hammocks and reclining camp chairs. My brother and I work out a meal plan and share our own campsite now, but I’m pretty sure if we showed up with nothing we’d be clothed, fed, and drunk before we knew it.

I find it strange how visiting the same place year after year simultaneously reminds me of how much things change and how much they stay the same. We’ve been staying in the same campsites since I was a child, and they’re largely identical to the way they were in 1997.

In fact, they’re largely identical to the way they were in 1967, according to my grandpa. The towering sugar pine behind campsite 10 has been the backdrop to many a cornhole game for decades now, and the rotting log still sits in the meadow behind campsite 12, continuing to serve as the designated family photo spot.

We remember when they replaced the picnic tables and when they upgraded the food storage lockers. I mean, we don’t actually remember the years, per se, but we can generally get it down to the decade-ish. Everything sort of blends and smears together after a while, and everyone seems to have a slightly different memory of when certain changes took place. But the important thing is that we were there when they happened.

There was the time my grandma thought that ants were termites, and the time my cousin Jonathan capsized the canoe with my kid brother in it. There was the year we forgot the tent poles at home and the year it rained so hard the parents piled all the kids in the van, drove down the mountain, and spent the afternoon walking around Walmart buying tarps and ponchos and asking anyone if they knew when the rain would stop.

Recently, the forest service chopped down a whole bunch of trees throughout the campground. Perhaps they were dying or diseased or had been damaged in the wild series of winter storms that hit California this winter. Whatever the cause, enormous stumps and fallen logs dotted the campground, adding a new layer of contour to the slowly shifting fingerprint of the forest.

Nicole and I counted the rings on one of them, a massive Ponderosa with a trunk four feet across. It turned out to be somewhere around 200 years old. It was my age when California became a state. It was 100 years old when the Wright brothers made their first flight. It likely lived a century in the forest with the deer and squirrels before seeing a single human being.

Our group has evolved over the years from a feral band of pre-teen cousins fighting for survival in the bush to a relatively mature group of adults getting away from it all for some time in the woods. The crowd has ebbed and flowed over time depending on work schedules and availability, but some core group of us makes it up every summer. Four years ago I started bringing my wife Nicole up to the lake, and sharing it with her has added an entirely new layer of meaning to an already special place. 

My grandpa is 92 now and hasn’t camped at Cherry Lake in a number of years, but this year he managed to make it up for a single afternoon. He boated around the lake, lounged in the campground, and seemed to have a great time getting back to the place he stumbled upon so many years ago.

This year, my cousin Collin brought Dean his one year old son up to Cherry for the first time, making it the first time that four generations of my family were at the lake in the same year. Four generations is wild to me, and even wilder that it all happened in only the outer few inches of a 200-year-old tree stump.

It has me thinking about how, so often, the only thing that makes our favorite places our favorite places is that someone came before us and decided to stake out their tent and stay a while. Favorite places are ordinary places plus the passage of time. We infuse places with meaning by sharing meals in them, laughing in them, sleeping in them, and reflecting in them.

We all remember how Cherry Lake has changed over the years. But more so, Cherry Lake serves as a guidepost to help us recognize how much we have changed. Cherry seems to exist in a magical eternal present. A liminal space in the mountains we return to year after year, decade after decade, where we can step right back into unfolding time as if we’d never left.

As much as I love Southern California for how easy it is to get outside, it is severely lacking in the “access to rivers” department. I mean, they do rent kayaks on one section of the LA river, but if you’re looking for a proper river experience, you’ll have to get out of town.

In July, I took a seven-day guided trip down the big ditch with my parents. Seven days of waterfall hikes, frisbee on the beach, hot summer days, and a fourth of July dance party under the waning moon. Impossible to distill into a video, I know, but I tried anyway.

Shot on GoPro Hero 11

Los Angeles’ most well-known landmark turned 100 years old this year. The towering sign in the foothills of Griffith Park is as much a part of Los Angeles culture and history as the Dodgers and the 405 freeway. But despite how popular it is, most people have no idea how it got there, what it means, or why LA still feels the need to label itself with a giant sign on a hillside. Here are a few things you probably never knew about LA’s famous sign:

1. The Hollywood sign was LA’s largest ad

   

   In 1923, virtually zero advertising laws existed limiting the size of billboards and roadside signage, so when Hollywoodland Realty was dreaming up ways to advertise their new luxury housing development in the Hollywood foothills, the sky was the limit — literally. They dreamed up the idea to slap a 500 foot wide, 50 foot tall billboard across the face of the entire hillside. And if that wasn’t enough, they lit it up with 4,000 light bulbs, blazing out over the city for all to see.
   
   Contrary to many people’s imaginations, today the Hollywood sign is not illuminated at night. There are spotlights installed around it, and the city does have the capability to light it up if they want to (more on that in this LA Times article) but if you’re hoping to sneak a peek, plan to get your glimpses during daylight hours or you’ll be disappointed by a dark hillside.
   

2. Hollywood is a neighborhood in Los Angeles

   

   Although “Hollywood” has become synonymous with the US film industry, Hollywood itself is actually a neighborhood in Los Angeles county, incorporated in 1887. ​​Daeida Wilcox coined the name, saying she “chose the name Hollywood simply because it sounds nice and because I'm superstitious and holly brings good luck."
   
   In the early 1900s, four major movie studios opened up shop in Hollywood, mostly as an attempt to evade Thomas Edison’s camera and equipment patents that were shutting down productions on the East Coast. The Hollywood Sign didn’t make its appearance for 35 more years, but by then the name “Hollywood” was already tied to the glittering image of movie stars and fame.

   Share this post with your movie-obsessed, Hollywood loving friends.

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3. The Hollywood sign is not located on Mount Hollywood

   

   While common sense might lead one to believe the Hollywood Sign lies atop Mount Hollywood, the sign itself is actually located on the Southeastern face of Mt. Lee, a 1,708 ft peak in Griffith Park. Mount Hollywood is a slightly less prominent peak about a mile Southeast of the sign.
   
   If you want great views of the Hollywood Sign, however, Mount Hollywood is where you want to go looking. The trail to the top of Mt. Lee leads hikers directly behind and slightly above the Hollywood sign, which can be a disappointing view if you were anticipating the iconic full-frontal view of the sign. Modern Hiker has a great guide to get you to 16 incredible views of the Hollywood sign, if that’s what you’re after.
   

4. The Hollywood sign is missing four letters

   

   The original Hollywood sign read “Hollywoodland”, but by 1949 Hollywoodland Realty had gone out of business, the “H” had toppled over, and the sign was in a complete state of disrepair. The Recreation and Parks commission of Los Angeles ordered the sign be demolished.
   
   But by then, the sign had become a beloved landmark, and residents couldn’t bear to part with it. City council overruled the decision to tear down the sign, opting instead to refurbish it — with the stipulation that the last four letters be dropped so that the “Hollywood” sign would refer to the municipal district, rather than the flopped real estate company.
   

5. The Hollywood Sign still exists thanks to Playboy Magazine

   

   It’s true, Hugh Hefner himself saved the Hollywood sign from disappearing forever from the hillside not once, but twice! In 1978, the Los Angeles chamber of commerce needed $250,000 to renovate the sign, so Hugh organized a fundraiser to auction off the old letters to movie stars and celebrities who wanted a piece of history for themselves. He raised enough money to fund the renovation, and the Hollywood sign lived on.
   
   Several decades later in 2010, 134 acres around the sign went up for auction to a developer, bringing the future of the sign into question once again. Who stepped in at the last minute with a one million dollar donation to save the sign? You guessed it: Los Angeles legend Mr. Hugh Hefner himself. Vanity Fair wrote a neat article on it when Hefner died in 2017, if you’re interested in further reading.
   

6. The Hollywood Sign is a prankster's paradise

   

   Being such a prominent part of Los Angeles culture, it only makes sense that the Hollywood sign has attracted a range of troublemakers and street-artists hoping to leave their mark. All owe their inspiration to Danny Finegood, a Cal State Northridge art student who turned HOLLYWOOD into “HOLLYWEED” in 1976 (a prank which would be revisited in 2017, after California legalized recreational marijuana).
   
   In 1985, an obscure rock band called The Raffeys altered the sign to read “RAFFEYSOD” which, ironically, became the most publicly viewed work the band ever produced. Over the years, football teams and artists continued to prank the sign until an upgraded security system was installed in 2005, at which point the pranks drastically decreased in frequency. The LAist has a great history of all the times the sign has been pranked if you’re curious to read more.
   

7. The sign is getting smaller
   I mean, not minute-by-minute or anything. No laws of physics are being defied at the Hollywood Sign, as far as I know. But the letters have indeed shrunk since they were first installed. In 1923, the letters were 50 feet high and 30 feet across. After several renovations and a full rebuild in 1978, the current letters stand only 45 feet high and range between 31 feet and 39 feet across.

The Hollywood sign just underwent a deep-cleaning and restoration to get it photo-ready for its 100th birthday, so if you’ve never made your way to Griffith Park to sneak a peek, now is your perfect opportunity to go for a hike, drive, or bike ride. The sign is shining brighter than ever, reminding you that you’re in a place where movie stars roam the hills and giant signs make sure you’ll never get lost.

One family of birds, however, makes their presence known with far greater intensity and volume than any other in the area. You hear them long before you see them, their squabbling and squawking drowning out the melodic calls of every other bird in Los Angeles County. Before you know it, you’re in the middle of one of the more unique and bizarre wildlife phenomena in Southern California: the daily Pasadena parrot migration.

Pasadena is home to a population of more than two thousand parrots—and growing. They’ve been spotted as far North as Bakersfield and South into Orange County and San Diego, but the epicenter of their population is here in Pasadena. Every morning and evening, vast flocks of red crowned parrots, red-masked parakeets, and yellow-headed amazons squelch, crawk, and screech their way into roost trees throughout the San Gabriel valley.

The parrots are originally native to the Northeast regions of Mexico, and several theories try to make sense of the parrots’ presence in Southern California. One hunch is they migrated North from Mexico of their own accord, though this view seems unlikely given that 1) very few species of parrots are naturally migratory birds and 2) parrots are the most bumbling, frantic, awkward fliers of any bird I’ve seen. It seems to take all their energy to simply stay aloft for short flights between trees, much less journey hundreds of miles by wing.

Another theory is that they were released from the Pasadena Busch Gardens when it closed in 1937, though records say most of that population was transferred to nearby zoos or animal sanctuaries. That leaves my personal favorite theory, which places the origins of the Pasadena parrot population on one individual named Hal Simpson.

Hal started Simpson’s Garden Town Nursery in East Pasadena in 1928 with a $500 loan and a wide variety of interests. Over the next forty years, it would grow to become the largest and most diversified garden center in Los Angeles, hosting a plant nursery, lawnmower shop, materials shop, garden supply center, florist, and a pet store. Tragedy struck Simpsons in 1959 when an electrical fire started in the pet store and threatened to annihilate the entire facility. Rather than watch dozens of exotic animals burn alive, firefighters and a pet store employee scrambled to open the cages and unwittingly changed the course of Pasadena history as 70 parrots took to the Southern California skies.

In 1968, the construction of the 210 freeway forced Simpson’s Garden Town Nursery to relocate to East San Diego county where Hal’s family continued to run the business until finally closing in 2011. His flock of parrots, however, would continue to grow and multiply in Pasadena long after his passing.

It turns out Pasadena’s temperate climate and abundance of fruit trees offer a perfect home away from home for the parrots, whose population has been growing steadily for the last fifty years. Loquats, figs, apricots, kumquats, and a wide variety of citrus provide the parrots with an ample diet of fruit, and the vast oaks and sycamores give roosting space for the social birds.

Only the parrots truly know their origins, but ironically, many of the parrot species currently thriving in Pasadena including the red-crowned and yellow-headed parrots are endangered in their native Mexico due to poaching and illegal capture for the exotic pet trade. Beyond simply being a strange and delightful (if loud and annoying) addition to the Pasadena ecology, their growing populations here in Southern California may prove to be a vital key to their species’ survival in the future.

This is a conversation space in the Substack app for subscribers to shoot the breeze and toss around ideas — kind of like a virtual campfire. I’ll post short prompts, research topics I’m tossing around, outdoor musings, and updates that come my way, and you can jump into the discussion.

To join our chat, you’ll need to download the Substack app, now available for both iOS and Android. Chats are sent via the app, not email, which means this is the last time I’ll bug you about it here. Turn on push notifications so you don’t miss conversation as it happens—or don’t and chime in whenever you feel like it.

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1. Download the app by clicking this link or the button below. Substack Chat is now available on both iOS and Android.

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2. Open the app and tap the Chat icon. It looks like two bubbles in the bottom bar, and you’ll see a row for my chat inside.

3. That’s it! Jump into my thread to say hi, and if you have any issues, check out Substack’s FAQ.

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The Salton Sea flooded into existence in 1905 when historic rainfall breached temporary dams and levees near Yuma, Arizona. Ironically, engineers were working on a network of aqueducts to get a little water into the Imperial Valley to support agriculture.

They inadvertently got a lot more water than they expected. The entire flow of the Colorado cascaded downhill into the Salton Sink for the next 18 months, wiping railroads, farms, and an entire valley community off the map. In a year and a half, what was once an arid depression in the desert became a freshwater oasis.

What does one do when a new lake pops up in the California desert? Build expensive resorts on it, obviously. During the 50s and 60s, developers constructed immaculate yacht clubs, hotels, restaurants and beach fronts along the shores of the Salton Sea. Families enjoyed days boating and swimming, and celebrities escaped the city for weekends at a desert oasis. In its prime, the Salton Sea attracted more visitors annually than Yosemite National Park.

The Salton Sea sits 200 feet below sea level, and therefore has no natural outlets to the ocean. This means it is essentially a giant mineral-trap. Salts and trace minerals dissolve into the incoming rivers, and as water evaporates off the surface of the lake, the salinity of the water increases.

This isn’t a completely unique phenomena, and in and of itself isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The moment the Colorado River was diverted back to its original course, however, the Salton Sea was on track for disaster. Without its main freshwater source, the Salton Sea’s remaining inlets were exclusively a mixture of agricultural and industrial runoff.

Nevertheless, for twenty years the Salton Sea was whimsically blind to its impending doom. As pesticides and toxic chemicals slowly leached into the lake, tourists kept partying in the sun. But the desert beachfront holiday was short lived. In the 70s, the first of several massive fish die-offs occurred at the Salton Sea. Thousands of dead fish covered the shores, and the smell of rotting seafood filled the entire valley for months. In turn, massive bird die-offs followed when migratory shorebirds ate the contaminated fish.

Needless to say, tourism ground to a halt. In a matter of a few years, what was once a pristine desert oasis quickly became a post-apocalyptic nightmare. In 1999, an algae bloom killed another huge portion of the remaining fish in the Salton Sea, and fish remains covered the shores for the next decade. The resorts fell into complete disrepair — the once-luxurious Bombay Beach Club is now a small grid of mobile homes and derelict art displays. Counter-culture desert communities like Slab City replaced the yacht clubs, and funky art installations like Salvation Mountain and East Jesus are today’s big tourist-draws.

Historically, lakes have existed in the Imperial Valley off and on for the last ten thousand years, periodically refilling and drying up as rivers change course and the climate shifts. The last lake in the region covered more than five times the surface area of the Salton Sea and dried up around the year 1600. In the last twenty years, the water level at the Salton Sea has dropped more than 10 feet, leaving 15,000 + acres of dry lakebed baking in the sun. The sea is on track to evaporate almost entirely by the year 2030, which is the natural course of things for a lake in the desert. 

This inevitability poses a massive health crisis for communities in the Imperial Valley and beyond. As the Salton Sea evaporates, it leaves behind a lakebed contaminated with toxins that are swept up by wind, creating poisonous dust storms. This has already resulted in widespread health consequences for people living in the area. The asthma rate surrounding the Salton Sea is three times higher than the rest of the state, and selenium and arsenic in the contaminated soil lead to hair loss, cardiovascular disease, and neurological damage.

Left unchecked, the Salton Sea has the potential to become the worst air-quality disaster in the world. Ironically, the contaminated water is the only thing keeping the pesticides and chemical runoff out of the atmosphere and contained on the ground.

Despite the horrific conditions, the Salton Sea is still an essential wildlife area for plants, animals, and birds. It is one of California’s few remaining wetland ecosystems and provides a critical stopover point for migratory birds on their route from Alaska to South America. Every winter, bird watchers gather at the Salton Sea to spot great blue herons, double-crested cormorants, and the 400 species of migratory birds that stop in at the Salton Sea. The Salton Sea is also home to the largest population of American white pelicans in North America. Nearly 30,000 acres of shoreline are designated protected wetlands, and conservation efforts are underway to ensure the area remains a viable habitat for wildlife.

In a full-circle confluence of modern irony, the question up for debate today is how exactly to preserve the accidentally-created desert lake in order to avoid further ecological disaster. Some groups have proposed desalination plants, and it is clear that farming practices that use toxic fertilizers and pesticides need to change. The leading solution proposed by the Salton Sea Association (SSA), however, is to build a 125 mile canal from the Sea of Cortez to the Salton Sea — a distance twice as long as the Panama Canal.  It would be the second largest water-control project in North America behind the Hoover Dam. Questions have been raised as to the practicality of this solution and, more importantly, our ability to maintain infrastructure of that scale into the future. So far, no consensus has been reached and the clock ticks away.

If history is any indicator, the Salton Sea will almost certainly disappear into the desert again in our lifetimes. Although the heyday of bustling beachfront resorts sits in the past and the threat of toxic dust-storms lay inevitably in the future, the Salton Sea seems for the moment frozen in time. A modern-day ghost town, inhabited intermittently by White Herons, Great Egrets, and Sandhill Cranes on their journey across the desert.

I think Los Angeles lures people in because it’s a place where you can reinvent yourself and become whoever you want to become. Your place of origin doesn’t define you here, it’s where you’re headed that’s important. Do you want to be a movie star, a real-estate mogul, or the next TikTok influencer? Go for it. The possibilities are as endless as the traffic on the 405.

Despite LA’s reputation as a land of famous people, most Angelinos never achieve legacy status. Most of us live pretty normal lives and consider ourselves lucky if we have a drink named after us at the local bar or learn our neighbors names. But a select few manage to endure a handful of generations beyond their passing. One such lingering transplant spent most of his time alone and only lived in Southern California for five years, yet his legacy is memorialized with a granite gravestone on a hilltop above Pasadena: Owen Brown, son of John Brown the Liberator.

If you’ve never heard of him, you wouldn’t be the first. I stumbled upon his gravesite on an afternoon hike and had to look him up when I got home. Turns out, Owen was an abolitionist alongside his father, John Brown (the liberator). You may or may not remember John Brown from your US History class, but in case you weren’t paying attention that day here’s what you need to know:

• John Brown was one of the most well-known white abolitionists of the 1800s.

• He was catapulted to fame for his Raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859.

• Harpers Ferry is a town in West Virginia, not an old-timey steamboat belonging to a guy named Harper.

• The raid on Harpers Ferry was an attempted seizure of the US arsenal of over 100,000 weapons. It was intended to inspire a slave uprising in the American South.

• At the time, the press called it “treason” “rebellion” and “insurrection” — the word “raid” wasn’t used until after the Civil War ended.

• The raid was the last major political event before Lincoln’s election, the Southern States secession, and the US Civil War.

Twenty five years before he would arrive in Pasadena, Owen Brown was anxiously guarding supplies at the Kennedy Farmhouse while his father and a small militia invaded the US arsenal and held its workers hostage four miles away in Harpers Ferry.

John and Owen had been living at the property for three months leading up to the raid, importing hundreds of out of state weapons and covertly training a small army of abolitionists. John lived under the pseudonym Isaac Smith, and told curious neighbors he was a gold prospector to explain away the oversize shipments arriving at his front door. He even went so far as collecting mineral samples out in public and taking them back to the farm for analysis to further sell the ruse. A true actor, through and through. Of course his son would end up in LA.

John’s goal was to incite a slave uprising in the South, though his plan was deemed suicidal even by his close friends. Some sources report the untrained and poorly armed militia was disorganized and drunk during the raid. Brown expected over a thousand slaves from nearby plantations to join the raid, but nobody showed. In the end, John Brown and a mere 20 accomplices were quickly overpowered by the army, and everyone involved was either killed in the fight or executed for treason. 

Everyone except Owen.

When he caught wind that the raid had taken a turn for the worse, Owen and four others made the split second decision to gather what supplies they could and flee to the mountains. The plan was to head Northwest until they reached some of Owen’s friends in Ohio or, if worse came to worst, continue onward to Canada.

It’s 200 miles from Harper’s Ferry to the Ohio border. Google Maps says it would take 69 hours of continuous walking to make the trek by foot, and that’s taking modern day roads and trails. In 1859, the trek on foot would have been perilous even under the best conditions. Although Owen was an experienced outdoorsman, the odds of making the journey alive were slim at best. He had a $25,000 bounty on his head, nearly $1 million in today’s currency, so traveling by road was out of the question. If Owen was to make it to safety, it was going to be by bushwhacking hundreds of miles through the Appalachian wilderness.

Owen immediately assumed the role of guide and decided the group would travel only at night, sleep under cover during the day, build no fires, buy or steal no provisions, and speak in whispers until they made it North of Pennsylvania. One of Owen’s companions deserted the party only a few nights into the journey, and another never returned after going against Owen’s guidelines and journeying into town for provisions. Owen later learned he had been captured and executed.

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The remaining three hiked through the mountains for weeks, living primarily on dry corn, sugar, biscuits, and raw potatoes. They slept huddled together under tarps for warmth and ran from chasing dogs, prowling troops,  and suspicious townsfolk. On top of contending with the elements of nature and the bounty on his head, Owen had immense trouble managing his traveling companions. They were younger and wilder — you know, the kind of rambunctious youths who signed up to raid government arsenals. They wanted to take a more gunslinging attitude toward the escape, and on multiple occasions Owen had to restrain them from attempting to steal horses, shoot at squirrels, and light fires to keep warm.

Despite all odds, after a month on the run the trio made it to a network of Quakers in the North who fed them, housed them, and underground-railroaded them to safety. They parted ways and Owen escaped to Ohio where he reunited with his brothers John Jr. and Jason, who were living abroad and hadn’t participated in the raid. Although the imminent threat of capture lay behind him, Owen spent the next decade living under false names and skipping town whenever his resemblance to his father, the now-famous-insurrectionist, raised public suspicions.

Owen lived in relative secrecy for nearly twenty years. He and John Jr. settled in a farmhouse on a dreamy island on Lake Erie, hoping to leave their lives of activism behind them. Even after the Civil War, it was difficult to outrun their father’s legacy. John Brown was the most famous man in the country until Lincoln’s assassination in 1965, and stood as a symbol of the nation’s polarization. Whether you viewed him as a hero or a villain, nearly everyone had something to say about Brown’s legacy. 

Eventually, Owen’s past caught up with him and a reporter came knocking. It took journalist Ralph Keeler nearly a dozen informal meetings and interviews, but eventually he managed to wring out the tale of Owen’s daunting escape from Harper’s Ferry. It was the only time Owen ever told the story publicly.

The harrowing account took up 25 pages in the March 1874 edition of the Atlantic Monthly. Mark Twain himself said of the article, “Three different times I tried to read it but was frightened off each time before I could finish. The tale was so vivid and so real that I seemed to be living those adventures myself and sharing their intolerable perils.” To me, it sounds like Twain is saying he never finished reading it, but his review does hold up — the piece is riveting.

While Owen likely could have become a public figure and made a fortune telling his story to audiences across the country, he didn’t seem eager to speak up about his past heroics, preferring instead a quiet life of solitude. He lived as a recluse for the remainder of his life, spending most of his time fishing, writing, and hanging out with his dog.

In 1884, Owen’s health was deteriorating and he looked to relocate to a milder climate. He followed his brother Jason out West to a fast-growing town on the edge of the desert: Los Angeles. They built a small cabin together in the foothills of Pasadena.

The people of Pasadena embraced the Browns with open arms and applauded their abolitionist achievements. While they would always be associated with Harpers Ferry and their demonstrative youth, in California the Browns oddly became well known for their vocal support of the temperance movement, which was gaining momentum at the time. It just goes to show that no matter your past, in LA you can become whoever you want to be. Yesterday an abolitionist, today an early proponent of prohibition.

For the most part, Owen and Jason kept to themselves in the hills and lived life as homesteaders, farming several acres of land. They were in the process of building a trail to the top of Brown mountain when Owen died of pneumonia on January 9th, 1889. He was buried on Little Roundtop, a small hill near their homestead just off the present day El Prieto Loop trail.

Though the public had granted Owen a degree of anonymity while he lived, he was a bona fide celebrity. Around 2,000 people attended his memorial service — the largest funeral ever held in Pasadena. Nine years later, the granite headstone was installed on his grave, complete with the “liberator” inscription, forever commemorating Owen as an instrumental force in the fight against slavery.

Even in death, however, Owen Brown couldn’t manage to avoid controversy. In 2002, just after the land surrounding the gravesite was sold to new owners, his gravestone mysteriously disappeared from the hilltop. Though nobody was formally accused of dismantling the grave, it’s hard to imagine the disappearance wasn’t intended to make a statement. A decade later, a hiker happened upon the gravestone in a nearby canyon and in 2021, preservationists worked to reinstall the site on top of Little Roundtop and ensure its accessibility into the future.

I wonder how Owen would react if you told him that a hundred years after he died, anyone with an internet connection would be able to read all about his family history, his daunting escape from Harpers Ferry, and his late-life anti-alcohol sentiments. I have to imagine a guy who built a cabin on the outskirts of town wouldn’t be thrilled with how much attention he’s continued to get over the past century. And he’d definitely roll over in his grave to know that I drank a fair share of whiskey while researching and writing about him. 

As a transplant to Los Angeles myself, I feel a certain kinship with Owen Brown. I am drawn to these same mountains that he was drawn to, and feel the same sense of peace and calm I imagine he did when I walk along the oak-lined El Prieto canyon.

Standing at his gravesite and looking out over the rolling hills, I feel time collapse. There’s something special about this blip on the map, perched on a hillside between the desert and the Pacific. And if it’s good enough a spot to settle down for Owen Brown, a man who truly embodied the adventurous life, it sure as heck seems good enough for me.

“The world is bursting with wonder, and yet it’s the rare productivity guru who seems to have considered the possibility that the ultimate point of all our frenetic doing might be to experience more of that wonder.”

That line from Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals bounced around my head as I hiked up a thousand feet of switchbacks that retrace the steep incline of the old funicular railway to the former site of the Echo Mountain House.

Wonder-seeking and hiking often go hand in hand, but at that moment I was slogging up the steep, long route to the top of Echo Mountain and wasn’t sure this was the experience of wonder that was particularly worth waking up early for.

In case you’re just emerging from a two week meditation retreat and this is your first contact with the outside world, California has been absolutely pummeled with snow lately. Joshua Tree became a Dr. Seuss inspired winter wonderland and closed briefly due to the severe winter conditions.

Yosemite received up to 15 feet of snow in some areas and closed in late February with no estimated reopening date. Mammoth Mountain has a monstrous 120 inches of snowpack, compared to the seasonal average 45 inches.

Here in Los Angeles, large sections of the Angeles Crest Highway are closed with drifts up to a dozen feet high. Big Bear received 134 inches of snow in the last week, a record high — but most notably to me: on March 1st, a few flakes of snow fell on the sleeves of my jacket while I waited in line for a burger in Pasadena, CA.

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: there is no need to relocate to Colorado or the Pacific Northwest for a world class outdoor experience. Los Angeles is a sleeper mountain town like no other.

All this new snow is why I groaned my way out of bed for an early morning hike up Echo Mountain to see it for myself. I’m falling more in love with morning hikes these days. No other time bears witness to quite the dramatic transformation of weather and landscape as an early morning. There’s something spellbinding in the air while the earth takes its first deep breath of sun, warmth, and light after a cold night asleep. Plus it’s my wife’s favorite time to hike, and hiking with company is always nice.

Sagebrush, yucca, and other telltale signs of the desert SoCal landscape disappearing underneath pillows of snow is a wild sight to behold, and it felt especially fitting to see the White City Ruins covered in a white patchwork quilt of snow.

It was easy to imagine what it must have been like for guests at the Echo Mountain House to stand on their balconies overlooking Los Angeles while a light flurry swirled around them. We enjoyed our peanut butter tortillas and thermos of coffee at the summit, but I couldn’t help dreaming of room service eggs benedict and a mocha.

Some adventurers don’t seem to struggle with popping out of bed on a cold morning to go bag a peak or snag a sweet wave or whatever. Not this guy. Evening-me and morning-me are two completely different people. Evening-me is a huge fan of AM yoga, sunrise hikes, and dawn patrol bike rides. Morning-me really likes blankets, pillows, and the snooze button. 

My truest self knows heading out to the snow-covered mountains before work on a Monday morning will leave me more energized, joyful, and fulfilled than sleeping in a few extra hours. Evening-me knows this too, and even has strategies to help kick morning-me in the right direction. Here, morning-me, your hiking boots are right by the door. Look, I’m filling up your hydration bladder ahead of time. Check it out, your favorite socks are right here next to the bed for you.

Nevertheless, morning-me has very little trust that evening-me has any clue what he’s talking about. Even with so much preparatory action taken by evening-me, morning-me wakes up with no residue of evening-me’s excitement. Instead, morning-me has to wade through a snowdrift of existential doubt weighing the net-human-value of hiking.

It all disappears the moment I step foot on the trail. But still, there is a massive disconnect between the part of me that loves the idea of sunrises and the part of me who is responsible for making moves to experience them.

Resistance, Stevan Pressfield calls it in The War of Art. It’s disconcerting how often resistance gets in the way of morning-me doing something that evening-me knows will be good for him.

There’s so much out there to go do, see, touch, taste, and feel. All it takes is to go and do it.

I think evening-me feels the way he does because he’s sat on the couch at the end of thousands of days where he didn’t hike into the mountains, and wishes he did. Morning-me feels the way he does because, well - it’s infinitely easier to not-do something than it is to do something, and he still has a whole day ahead of him. What difference will these few morning hours really make?

The answer is always more than you think.

In any case, I feel grateful that this week’s Monday-morning-me listened to the advice of Sunday-evening-me and dragged himself up into the San Gabriels on the heels of one of the most incredible winter storms LA has experienced in recent history.

As it often does, the wonder hit me right on cue — when the switchbacks were behind me and I had some food in my belly. As we ascended from Echo Mountain toward Inspiration Point, the slight drizzle that had started at the trailhead turned into a full-on SoCal snowfall.

Magic.

The heart of the MTBGB is in the revolutionary new frame design. Beginning with the timeless two triangle standard, our design team pulled inspiration for the MTBGB’s geometry from the entire pantheon of bicycle history. Road, BMX, downhill, cross country, time trial, motocross, tandems—a little bit of everything went into this frame.

Except triathlon bikes, of course. 

While at first glance it may look just like last year’s model, rest assured that the nearly unnoticeable adjustments to chainstay length and head tube angle translate to drastic improvements in handling and power transfer on the trail. Can you spell Strava KOMs? We can, and we did.

We take cargo seriously—that’s why we added over 75 bottle bosses to the 2023 MTBGB. The fork alone sports 22 braze-ons—the only limit to what you can carry is your imagination. Utilizing standard bottle mounts, the 2023 MTBGB can carry up to 23 water bottles. That’s 506 oz of H20 to get you through even the longest days in the saddle.

If 500+ oz isn’t enough, we even developed a proprietary mount to carry 10 gallons of water up front: the CamlHump (sold separately). Perfect for summer desert touring, farming in California, or impending nuclear fallout—any situation where water is hard to come by—the CamlHump ensures you will stay optimally hydrated no matter the circumstances.

But we didn’t stop there, because we don’t know where to stop. Our proprietary line of bolt-on accessories include essentials such as TheKitchn, the BikeSpresso, and the KittyKarry—pending OSHA approval.

We consulted with top engineers from Formula 1 and NASA to design an all-new drivetrain, the likes of which were once thought to be a mechanical impossibility. Introducing: our brand new, completely proprietary 1x18 drivetrain.

This drivetrain features “Fully Actuated Range for Climbing Excellence” (F.A.R.C.E.) technology with a wide-range cassette spanning 11 - 112t (yes, 112, that’s not a typo) crafted specifically with climbing in mind. Like, actual climbing. Load the MTBGB with everything you’ve ever brought along car camping and still conquer the steepest hills with ease.

Our engineers tested every drop bar on the market before deciding they needed something… wider. No, wider. Wiiiiider. The result was, dare we say, Gravelicious. Where the Gravelicious bars really shine is while trying to apply enough leverage to control the front end with nearly 85 lbs of water attached via the CamelzHump rack.

We here at Trendy Bike Brand believe the 2023 MTBGB has a place in any cyclists quiver. We've taken everything mountain bike designers were doing 10 years ago, exaggerated it, stuck drop bars on it, and rebranded it. The 2023 MTBGB is optimized for gravel measuring 1/4” to 1/2” in diameter or paved roads with 1/5” to 3.5” potholes. For the optimal bike in conditions outside those ranges, please check out our ever growing product range of other “do-it-all, quiver killer” bike models.

We know we said you could do it all on last year’s bike, but on the 2023 model, you can do more than all of it.

Although botanists seem certain there are observable distinctions between all 600 Oaks, I am not so sure. Defining characteristics amongst Oaks seem murky at best, and sometimes downright cryptic. Laid out side by side in a scientific diagram, picking out the differences is easy. But introduce the variable elements of actual nature, and suddenly every Oak looks like a 3rd grader’s rendition of a tree.

Nevertheless, here is my guide to convincing your non-botanist friends that you can identify the eight most common Oaks in Southern California.

Results may vary.

Is It An Oak Tree?

First things first — is it even an Oak tree? The dead giveaway is acorns: if it has acorns, it is an Oak. Boom, case closed. Oaks are the only tree that produce acorns, and every species of Oak produces them. Some are narrow, others are stubby. Experts can identify Oaks by their acorns alone, but to be honest they all kind of look the same to me. The main takeaway here is that acorns = Oaks.

Here’s the catch: Oaks don’t begin producing acorns until they reach maturity, which doesn’t happen until the tree is 20-30 years old. The other catch is that in drought years, which is pretty much every year in Los Angeles, Oaks produce few or zero acorns at all, instead directing their energy toward self-preservation. Another caveat is that Oaks drop their acorns in the fall and don’t grow them again until Spring, so if you’re hiking in the winter none of the Oaks will have acorns.

Masters of deception, those Oak trees. If you don’t see any acorns, it still might be an Oak, or maybe not. You’ll have to do some more sciencing.

Lobed or Oval Leaves?

Lobes are a big distinction in the Oak world! Globally, the vast majority of Oaks have distinct lobes on their leaves. But here in SoCal, lobed vs. oval leaves is an easy way to divide our Oaks into two major categories. If the leaves are lobed, you’re looking at a Valley Oak, Oregon White Oak, California Black Oak, or Blue Oak. If the leaves are rounded ovals, you’re either looking at one of the three varieties of Live Oak or the extremely rare Engelmann Oak.

That is, if you’re looking at an Oak at all. Lots of other trees also have oval leaves — it’s like the most common leaf shape. And even the prickly edges of Live Oaks have many doppelgangers, like Toyon or Japanese Holly.

Most people don’t know the difference though, so if you proudly declare “check out this neat live oak” on your next hike while you point to a Holly bush, your friends will still be impressed. If one of them questions your ID and points out the distinct red holly berries, simply put on a straight face and say those are what developing acorns look like. They’ll be none the wiser.

Deciduous Oaks

Oaks with lobed leaves are deciduous, which means they drop their leaves in the fall and grow new ones again in the spring. Oaks with oval leaves are Live Oaks, which means they keep green leaves on their branches year round. 

Here’s the thing — in Southern California where it’s nice and warm, many deciduous Oaks forget they are deciduous and end up keeping their leaves year round like their Live Oak cousins. So, yeah, thanks for nothing, Oaks. I guess the rules don’t apply to you. 

Valley Oaks vs. Blue Oaks

Valley Oaks are the largest California Oaks out there, so if you’re looking at an Oak tree thinking “hot damn, that’s a big-ass oak tree” there’s a good chance it’s a Valley Oak. Except when it’s a Blue Oak instead, which on average are only slightly smaller than Valley Oaks. Unless you’re hiking around with a measuring tape and very tall ladder, it will be difficult to tell for sure.

Science says you can tell it’s a Blue Oak because the leaves are blue-gray rather than a dark waxy green. Unless of course they are covered in dust, which tends to happen a lot outside, at which point it becomes difficult to tell what color the leaves are. When you’re not sure, just go with Valley Oak and hope nobody starts wiping dust off the leaves to prove you wrong.

Oregon White vs. California Black

With names as different as black and white, you’d think these two varieties would be easier to tell apart. White Oaks generally have rounder tips to their lobes while Black Oaks come to points. Framed as a multiple choice test, it’s a piece of cake. Left as a short-answer field out in the wild, it’s a head scratcher that will leave you wondering just how pointy a lobe has to be to be considered pointy. 

There’s one slightly more apparent way of distinguishing between White Oaks and Black Oaks: acorn caps. The scales of Black Oak acorn caps form a fringed edge where they hug the acorn body, while White Oak acorn caps end in a straight line around the acorn.

Honestly at this point, making your best guess and speaking up with confidence will probably work. If you hike fast enough, none of your friends will have time to fact check you anyway.

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Coast Live Oak vs. Interior Live Oak vs. Canyon Live Oak

Let’s get the easy one out of the way: if you’re in a canyon, it’s probably a Canyon Live Oak. Even if it technically isn’t, nobody is going to question you when you stop and say “wow what a beautiful Canyon Live Oak” while hiking through a canyon. Canyon Live Oaks often look more like scrubby bushes than trees, and the steeper the terrain the more sure you can be.

While you might be tempted to apply the same logic to Coastal Live Oaks and Interior Live Oaks, their territories overlap over the entirety of Los Angeles. The main way botanists claim you’re able to tell them apart is by their leaves — Coastal Live Oaks supposedly have cupped, curved leaves, while Interior Live Oaks have flat leaves. If I’m being honest, they look pretty much the same to me.

Engelmann Oaks

These Oaks are incredibly rare, and only remain in small populations in San Diego, Riverside, and Pasadena. If you are not in one of those locations, you are probably not looking at an Engelmann Oak. Like the blue oaks, Engelmann’s have bluish tinted leaves. Like the Live Oaks, their leaves are ovals, but with one key difference: the edges are smooth.

I don’t have any jokes for Engelmann’s — they’re just plain awesome trees.

Overview

While you’re sure to find these eight Oaks out and about in Southern California, there are still 28 other species out there rooting about, which means your odds of IDing these Oaks correctly are pretty slim. But I bet your friends don’t know those species either, and if you speak confidently and make eye contact you’ll be the tree ID pro of your hiking group in no time.

(for further learning, follow the links to CalScape.org — one of the best online resources for native California plants)

Valley Oak - Big ol’ tree with deeply lobed leaves and long pointed acorns. Very common. When in doubt, go with this one.

Blue Oak - Slightly smaller big ol’ tree with lobed leaves and long pointed acorns. Blueish-gray tint to the leaves, but frequently mixed up with Valley Oaks

Oregon White Oak - Lobed leaves with rounded tips, straight line across the acorn cap.

California Black Oak - Lobed leaves with pointy tips, fringed edges where acorn cap wraps around the acorn.

Coast Live Oak - Oval leaves with prickly edges. Leaves are cupped and edges curl  inward.

Interior Live Oak - Oval leaves with prickly edges. Leaves are flat, slightly more elongated.

Canyon Live Oak - Located in canyons. Oval leaves, prickly edges. Often looks more like a shrub than a tree.

Engelmann Oak - Oval leaves, smooth edges with bluish tint to them. Older trees have gnarled trunks and winding, swooping branches. Only remaining populations are located in San Diego, Riverside, and Pasadena.

Their website brags, “The L.A. Tourist Race seems more akin to folklore and myth than an actual event.” Legends aside, the Tourist is in fact an actual event: a self-supported, self-navigated race through LA’s most wild places.

Race organizers plant four books at remote locations surrounding Los Angeles, and task riders with collecting the page from each book that corresponds with their race number. Missing a checkpoint, tearing out the wrong page, or losing a page all result in a DNF. The specific destinations change every race, but you can always count on visiting the Verdugos, climbing the Angeles Crest, and discovering some new corner of the steep mountains surrounding the LA basin.

I must confess, I missed registration this year, and therefore did not officially race. But I still dragged myself out of bed and tagged along with a group of brave registered souls who set out for the finish line at 8:30am on January 28th, 2023.

Here’s what I learned along the way.

What bike should I ride?

One thing is guaranteed: whatever bike you decide to ride will be the wrong bike at some point during the ride. Your road bike will get you from Burbank to the foothills in a breeze, but the fire roads descending from Mt. Wilson will rattle your shoulders out of their sockets. Your mountain bike will shred the single-track out to Idlehour, but the road climb up Highway 2 will resemble Damien Chazelle’s Babylon — an hour and a half longer than it needed to be.

One person in our group rode a mountain bike, but the rest of us rode drop bar gravel bikes with tires ranging anywhere from 3” mtb tires to 32mm all-road tires. We only had to hike our bikes a few miles, which at the end of the day felt like a pretty good trade off. People are out there on pretty much every kind of bike you can imagine — though as far as I know nobody has finished on a beach cruiser. Yet.

Do I need to train?

Ride, ride, ride your bike, and then ride some more. Go up some hills. Big hills. Mountains, mountains is the word I’m looking for — go ride a bunch of miles in the mountains. Get comfortable going up them, down them, over them, around them, and up them again. Take it off road. Get familiar with steep gravel ascents and descents. Become intimate with them. Raise a family with them — you’re going to be seeing a lot of each other on the LA Tourist.

Really, do not try to off the couch this one like I did. It will hurt, and you will not finish. The Tourist often clocks in ~70 miles and ~10k+ elevation.

What is the route?

A week before the event, race organizers send out GPS coordinates to the four race checkpoints. In addition, they kindly provide a default route connecting them. This route is a trap designed to punish you for not reading the fine print.

It connects the four checkpoints, yes, but it does so in the most inefficient way, with the most climbing and miles. It is strongly advised that you ignore this “recommended route” and instead build one of your own. The ability to build a route from scratch through the mountains is one of the skills the LA Tourist demands.

For the most part you can build a route using Google Maps, but even with its big-data accolades, Google Maps does not hold all the secrets to the Angeles National Forest. If you’re wanting to dig deep into the spirit of adventure, head to www.caltopo.com and get your hands dirty. They host scanned topos and forest services maps of any place you could ever want to explore, and is quite honestly a destination in and of itself. You can export your maps with waypoints and routes to location-enabled PDF files and open them in most backcountry mapping apps. I use the free version of Avenza Maps.

Most people recommend loading the route onto a dedicated bike computer. I agree this is the best option, but I don’t have a bike computer and don’t know how they work. The second best option is to save offline maps to your phone.

The third best option is to let someone else build the route and stay on their wheel. This resulted in our group taking the scenic route through Cherry Canyon and JPL, adding 1000 feet of unnecessary climbing and a dozen or so extra miles on dirt. No checkpoint existed through this stretch of trail, and more hard-core racers might describe what we did as a “waste of time.”

But it was a real fun waste of time, and my day was better for having done it.

What do I eat and drink?

One of my buddies said he ate three full burritos during the ride and still ran out of fuel. You are going to need lots of food and water to finish the LA Tourist. A few nutrition solutions that stood out to me:

• Spam Musubi (a friend pulled one of these from his jersey pocket in the parking lot before the Tourist, gave it to me, and perhaps changed my ride nutrition game forever)

• Rice and bean burritos

• Thermos full of soup

• Full loaves of bread

• The McDonald’s on Foothill and Gould Ave

My go-to riding snack is a large bag of Haribo gummy bears, which are the same thing as Clif Shot Bloks but cheaper. Prove me wrong.

Water is trickier. I ran out of it in the mountains with a dozen miles to go because I thought there would be a spigot at a place where there wasn’t. Make sure you fill up before you head out there, and don’t count on any of the seasonal campgrounds. They will let you down.

What gear do I need to bring?

The LA Tourist is a self-supported race that takes place far out of cell service, which means you need to be fully prepared to repair your bike if something breaks and to get yourself to safety if something goes wrong. Although the race starts and ends in a city of 9 million, the Angeles Crest is a wild environment, and bad things can and do happen. While on the route, I met two people who had tumbled thirty feet off the edge of the trail and had to be hauled out by hikers. One of them had a crack in his helmet where his bike had landed on top of him.

While descending the fire road from Idlehour toward Henninger, I pinched a tube and got an immediate, violent rear flat. When I took my repair kit out, I couldn’t find my CO2 canister. A low-grade panic began to set in. I was out of water, nearly out of food, and still had 3.5 miles and 1300 feet to descend back into civilization.

The reality was that the group was a few minutes behind me, and moments later I found my CO2 in a rogue pocket and laughed at my wave of anxiety. But still, it was easy to imagine myself on the road alone. I’d been in that situation many times before, and this time it would have been bad news.

Ride with a group, hope for the best, and prepare for the worst. At the very least, bring a flat-repair kit. A chain breaker and master link aren’t a bad idea either. In my opinion, the best thing you can do is thoroughly pre-inspect your bike and keep it well-maintained. This is not the time to see whether your brake pads have one last descent left in them. Replace that stuff ahead of time and solve your problems before they’re problems.

Good Vibes

Truth be told, I don’t actually know how to finish the LA Tourist Race. I only made it to one of the four checkpoints before heading home and eating an entire pizza. The race starts at 8:00am and we didn’t roll out until 8:30, if that says anything about how seriously we took it.

Jen Whalen was the first female to collect all four pages and make it back to the shop in nine hours flat. Kent Hammond won the men's category in just under six hours. If you’re looking for real advice, take a peek at either of their Strava pages and you’ll see what it really takes to crush the LA Tourist.

It took me eight hours to ride 38 miles and 5,100 feet of climbing, which included a leisurely stop at Unincorporated Coffee, a relaxing time by the creek at Idlehour, and a bunch of goofing off along the way.

The LA Tourist is a race for some people, an endurance test piece for others, and a cycling social club for others still. Whichever way you decide to approach it, one thing is certain: The Tourist is a SoCal cycling classic that will leave your ego stripped bare, your legs full of lactic acid, and a grin on your face so big there’s no question whether you’ll sign up for the next one.

See you out there on March 11th for Race #2

One such peculiarity is located just within the Northern bounds of Joshua Tree National Park. After parking at a nondescript turnout and following a faint trail for a mile into the desert, then wandering up an unmarked wash, passing the shell of an old truck and the remnants of a small cabin, you’ll arrive at an outcrop of boulders. A prominent stone a dozen feet tall stands guard at the northern edge of the pile, its smooth face etched with all-caps scrawl:

You’ve arrived at Samuelson’s Rocks, a collection of nine cryptic inscriptions carved into seven stones in the Mojave, a mile and a half from the nearest road. 

The etchings look as if they were chiseled yesterday. The arid conditions preserve Samuelson’s voice in a way no other environment could. From decade to decade, time operates on a different scale in the desert, far removed from the pulsing inputs and outputs that transform forests, bogs, and coastlines. Perhaps this timeless quality is what draws the hermits, artists, and mystics to seek refuge there, far from the influences of mainstream culture.

Once you’ve convinced yourself that you are in fact looking at hundred-year-old carvings and not the work of a modern-day Banksy, you can’t help but wonder what was going through the mind of the carving’s author. John Samuelson ended up in the California desert via a long, meandering path. Many years before, he claims he was shipwrecked on a mysterious island off the coast of the African continent where he came upon a mystical tribe of natives. He lived many adventures on the island, including discovering a gold treasure guarded by man-eating ants and seducing the tribal chief’s daughter, before a medicine man forced Samuelson to eat the “bread of forgetfulness” and extricated him to the nearest colonial outpost, where he woke up with no memory of who he was or what had happened.

The only reason we know any of this is because in 1928, Samuelson had a few too many drinks with pulp fiction author Erle Stanley Gardner and divulged the entire tale, which had apparently come back to Samuelson over the years in fragmented dreams. Gardner bought the rights to the story on the spot for $20 “At the time,” Gardner says in the tale’s introduction, “I thought it was just a wild lie of an old desert rat. [Eventually] I came to believe it was true.”

After the shipwreck, Samuelson made his way to Boston where a doctor of tropical medicine studied him for six months in an effort to cure his lapsing memory. The “bread of forgetting” had not only caused Samuelson to lose his memory of the entire shipwreck escapade, it left him suffering amnesiac blackouts whenever it rained. Unable to find any lasting remedy, the doctor finally suggested that Samuelson simply move out West where the weather was better. In the early 20s, John Samuelson landed in what would eventually become Joshua Tree National Park, where it only rains a handful of times a year. 

Who knows how much of the account Gardner actually believed, but it made for one hell of a narrative. It is difficult to pick apart the truth and fiction of Samuelson’s past. Like most folks who settle in the desert, Samuelson was a pretty solitary guy.

He spent the late 1920s preserving his musings in stone, eager to share his truth with anyone who would listen. His etchings land somewhere between eccentric conspiracy theorist, new age philosopher, and grumpy anti-capitalist. They allude to political figures of the day with such specificity that a modern day spectator can’t help but wonder just what it was that Samuelson was trying to say. Before the age of email, twitter, and instagram, this was one man’s attempt to make his voice heard. A shout into the void.

Samuelson’s legacy took a tragic turn in 1942 when he shot and killed two people during a bar fight in a neighborhood south of Los Angeles. He was jailed without bail, and pleaded not guilty to murder by reason of insanity in order to avoid the death penalty. The court committed him to Mendocino State Hospital on April 8, 1943, where he was sentenced to live the remainder of his days.

Several years later, while working on one of his more well-known pulp series, Erle Stanley Gardner found himself back in the Mojave and went searching to see what had become of Samuelson’s old homestead. He found the old cabin completely leveled, with only the cryptic stone carvings left as evidence that Samuelson had ever inhabited the area.

While wandering through the boulders, however, Gardner happened upon a new carving he had never seen before. Perhaps he had just missed it many years before, but he had a strong hunch that he had not, and that it had in fact been added more recently. He wrote a letter to Mendocino State Hospital inquiring after Samuelson, and received a haunting reply:

“On July 1, 1946, the patient ran away from the hospital, and no word has been heard from him or about him by anyone up to this time. He did not go home, and he did not contact his wife; and nothing is known as to his whereabouts.”

We’ll never get to know exactly what Samuelson was trying to say with his desert proclamations. Maybe he was a poet ahead of his time, or perhaps his rocks are nothing more than a portrait of a man losing his mind in solitude. Or maybe, everything he told Gardner was the truth, and, in Gardner’s words, “somewhere in the shifting sands of the California desert is an old prospector, hiding from the rain, digging for gold, cherishing lost memories.”

Next time you find yourself in Joshua Tree, make the trek and see Samuelson’s rocks for yourself. Maybe you’ll uncover some hidden meaning in his enigmatic phrases, or perhaps you’ll be the lucky soul to uncover his tenth dictum, hidden in the desert stone for the last hundred years.

1. Find a clear, level spot.

2. Double check that there aren’t any better spots.

3. Remove any sticks, rocks, or pinecones.

4. Locate your tent amidst your camping gear.

5. Extricate your tent from the trunk of your car or backpack or pile of gear you haphazardly dumped on the picnic table.

6. Determine which way to orient your tent. Factor in windbreaks and slope.

7. Lay out your groundcloth or tarp.

8. Walk circles around the edges of your tarp while the breeze repeatedly folds the corners in on themselves.

9. Place rocks on the corners of your tarp to keep it from blowing away.

10. Unroll your tent and spread it out on the footprint.

11. Maintain your composure when your partner says they found a better spot for the tent.

12. Go look at the spot they found.

13. Argue the merits of each spot for 10-20 minutes.

14. Move the tent to the new spot.

15. Repeat steps 2 - 7.

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16. Ask your partner help you lay out the tarp.

17. Wonder why you didn’t ask for help the first time..

18. Locate the tent poles.

19. Dump them in a jumbled heap on the ground.

20. Attempt to figure out how the poles fit together from memory.

21. Eventually, check the bag for instructions even though you know you threw them away a decade ago.

22. Keep trying to fit the poles together from memory.

23. Discover new laws of geometry while attempting to force the poles together.

24. Scratch your head in confusion.

25. Push a pole through the tiny nylon sleeve until it gets stuck.

26. Push harder until you hear the nylon start to rip.

27. Stop pushing and try to pull the pole through instead.

28. Murmur curses to yourself when the pole comes apart inside the sleeve.

29. Try to put it back together inside the sleeve.

30. Somehow pinch your finger between the poles through the nylon all without getting the pieces back together.

31. Work it inch-by-inch through the sleeve until it comes out the other side.

32. Swear you will never try to pull a pole through one of those sleeves again

    

33. Bend a pole too far until it breaks.

34. Argue with your partner about house chores.

35. Dig through your gear to find duct tape.

36. Remember you didn’t bring any duct tape.

37. Wonder aloud why you haven’t upgraded your tent in 20 years.

38. Attempt to repair the pole with a bandaid from your first aid kit.

39. Surprise yourself with how well your bandaid repair works.

40. Realize you still don’t know how this tent goes together.

41. Walk up a hill in search of cell service.

42. Attempt to look up a YouTube video about how to set up your tent.

43. Find no cell service.

44. Walk back down the hill.

45. Apologize for arguing with your partner.

46. Try the poles the first way you had them. This time they fit together perfectly.

47. Exhale a deep sigh of relief.

48. Sit down in the shade for a minute.

49. Take a quick snooze.

50. Wake up

51. Prepare a snack.

52. Go for a hike.

53. Play some corn-hole.

54. Wander back to your half-assembled tent.

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55. Find one extra tent pole laying on the ground.

56. Spend 10 minutes puzzling over where it goes.

57. Put the pole back in the bag and pretend it never existed.

58. Locate the tent stakes.

59. Remember that you forgot a hammer again.

60. Berate yourself for forgetting a mallet/hatchet every time you go camping.

61. Forgive yourself, for you are only human.

62. Reflect on the way engaging in positive self-talk makes you feel.

63. Take another deep breath and feel gratitude for the miracle of life.

64. Search for a rock to pound in the stakes.

65. Find a rock that is too small.

66. Try it anyway. Hurt your hand.

67. Search for a bigger rock.

68. Pound in 3 of the 4 stakes easily.

69. Try the fourth stake in a dozen different orientations. Strike an underground obstacle each and every time.

70. Accidentally break the fourth stake.

71. Re-enact the apes scene from 2001 A Space Odyssey.

72. Decide 3 stakes is probably good enough.

73. Take another snack break.

    

74. Search for the rainfly. Realize it somehow ended up under the tent.

75. Un-stake the tent.

76. Retrieve the rainfly.

77. Re-stake the tent.

78. Question why you go camping in the first place.

79. Take a deep breath. Look at the trees.

80. Remember why you go camping in the first place.

81. Unfold the rainfly.

82. Put the rainfly on inside out. Remove it.

83. Put the rainfly on so that the zippers are going the opposite ways as the doors. Remove it.

84. Put the rainfly on correctly. Rejoice.

85. Argue with your partner who wants to remove the rainfly so they will be able to see the stars at night. Try to explain that you can look at the stars before you go to bed and once you are in the tent you’ll just be sleeping anyway.

86. Give up and remove the rainfly. (optional: skip step 85 and proceed directly to step 86)

87. Pray for no rain.

    

88. Dump your gear inside the tent.

89. Put a small lantern in the tent so you won’t lose it in the dark later.

90. Go watch the sunset.

91. Get inside the tent.

92. Realize you forgot to pee.

93. Climb out of the tent.

94. Walk far away from the tent to do your business.

95. Get back inside the tent.

96. Wish you blew up your air mattresses before you wanted to be sleeping.

97. Lay down and realize that despite your calculations your head is facing downhill.

98. Turn yourself around.

99. Contort your body to avoid the one rock you missed in step 3.

100. Sleep soundly in your successfully set-up tent.

In the last week, Los Angeles has received an absolute deluge of rainfall, setting off landslides in the mountains, stranding hikers in canyons, and raising flash flood warnings across the city.

Altadena Mountain Rescue closed off Eaton Canyon after a landslide locked in four hikers up the canyon. Several days later, they pulled an injured hiker out of the same canyon by helicopter. Fortunately, everyone made it out safely.

In only the second week of January, LA has already received nearly all the rain due through the end of September.

Eaton Canyon took 5 inches of rain in seven days. Further into the mountains, Big Tujunga caught 6.5 inches, Crystal Lake nearly 8, and Red Box Junction over 10 inches of rainfall.

In one week. That’s a lot of water.

I’ll pause here for you to make a joke about LA’s inability to handle even the slightest drizzle. It’s true, we love to make a big deal about our weather in SoCal. What can I say, when its 85 degrees and sunny 300 days of the year, the offhand rainy day catches us off guard.

But this. This is actual insanity.

In Northeast Los Angeles, the LA River normally trickles between 25 and 100 cubic feet per second (cfs). When it rains, it swells to two or three thousand cfs — a proper stream.

As I write this, at 8:10pm on January 9th, it’s topping out at 29,864 cfs. Further downstream in North Long Beach, the LA River is flowing at 53,657 cfs.

For comparison, that’s more than the average flow of the Colorado and the Hudson rivers combined.

3X the flow rate of the Kalamath. Here’s a picture of the Kalamath, just in case you’re not grasping the scale here.

When compared to average river discharge flows across the country at 9:21 pm on January 9th, 2023, the LA River was (briefly) the 19th largest river in the United States.

If you’re curious why LA isn’t reclaiming all of that water, I wrote all about it in this brief history of flooding in Los Angeles. Suffice it to say, the LA basin is essentially a bathtub with 4 million houses in the bottom of it, and the people who live in those houses have politely asked that we leave the drain plug open.

After a series of severe floods in the 1930s, city officials decided enough was enough and cemented the LA River in order to get water out as quickly as possible. We haven’t had a major flooding event since, which I’d say is a good thing.

If you’re curious where Los Angeles gets any of its water if we’re sending the LA River straight into the Pacific Ocean, you are a human after my own heart and you’ll probably enjoy reading this brief history of the LA water supply.

What all this rain means for me is that the 2023 Adventure List is off to a slow start. I’m spending most of my time sitting inside in sweatpants. I got a climbing gym membership again to get in shape for some Spring sending, and I managed to hand-draw this map to track #6 — run all the streets in my neighborhood.

I’m calling it the Run Every Street challenge.

This week looks like the weather is clearing up a bit, and there are only two more weeks until the first LA Tourist Race, which means I’ll be spending some quality time in the saddle.

See ya next time, LA

But can you blame us? It rains only 36 days per year in Los Angeles, and 90% of that rain is concentrated in a few short months. Pair that with steep, sandy mountains to the north and east that funnel water to the ocean and you’ve got a recipe for some significant weather events—though they may remain few and far between.

One such storm made the front page of the February 19th, 1914 Los Angeles Times.

For a city that likes to play up its weather events, I actually think the editors showed restraint on this one. The flood control district of LA, however, was not so cavalier.

They determined that a marooned downtown and flooded lowland homes required action and introduced their first line of defense in what would become a century-long war against flooding in Los Angeles: Devil’s Gate Dam.

Located on the border of Pasadena and La Canada Flintridge, the dam was constructed in 1921 and continues to be an integral piece of LA flood prevention to this day.

It’s most famous for being haunted (allegedly) and though I’ve yet to see a ghost there, the devilish rock face for which it is named is unsettling. Dozens of canyons upstream catch rainwater in the San Gabriels and coalesce into the Arroyo Seco below, which flows through Devil’s Gate and is one of the primary tributaries of the Los Angeles River.

During a downpour, these canyons spit out a lot of water:

Twenty four years after the historic flood, an even larger storm system put LA’s flood prevention infrastructure to the test.

In March of 1938, a storm generated almost a year’s worth of precipitation in just a few days, killed 115 people, destroyed 6000 homes, and left one third of Los Angeles underwater; an almost unfathomable idea in drought-parched Southern California today.

The storm was so powerful it relocated the banks of the LA River up to a mile in some places. At the time, the Red Cross deemed it the fifth largest flood in history.

Devil’s Gate Dam, while structurally intact, was not enough to ward off the floodwaters.

This prompted the City of Los Angeles to reconsider how it dealt with excess storm runoff. They didn’t appreciate the fundamental ever-changing nature of rivers, as it generally messed with their city-planning.

The solution they found was simple, robust, and monumentally shortsighted: cement the whole thing, and freeze the river in place.

We don’t have time to get into it here, but suffice it to say this has been hugely problematic for the greater river ecosystem in Los Angeles, not to mention the fact that during storm events it jettisons millions of gallons of desperately needed fresh rainwater directly into the ocean with almost zero recapture system to speak of.

But it did accomplish one goal: mitigate flooding. We haven’t had a significant flooding event in Los Angeles since.

But all solutions eventually create their own problems, and Devil’s Gate Dam is no exception.

In 2009, the Station Fire burned 160,000 acres of the San Gabriels—the most severe fire in LA History. But the fire turned out to be only half the problem. That winter, with no vegetation left to hold the sandy mountain sides together, storms carried more than 1.3 million cubic yards of sediment into Devil's Gate Reservoir.

Enough to fill the Rose Bowl three times.

As in the case with literally every dam ever constructed, sediment build up is 1) inevitable and 2) a huge problem. Not only does it present a structural threat to the dam itself, it also severely reduces the reservoir's capacity.

Until recently, the Devil’s Gate Reservoir lacked the storage capacity for even one major debris storm event. A repeat of 1938 appeared almost inevitable—this time with exponentially more people living in the basin.

Fortunately for everyone living downstream, in 2019 LA Public Works began an excavation project to remove 1.7 million cubic yards of sediment from the dam area, increasing the reservoir’s capacity. 10 years in the planning, the Devil’s Gate project has encountered a wide variety of criticism ranging from diesel particle emissions near schools to the environmental impact reports overlooking nearly 500 native Southern Steelhead, an endangered species thought extinct in the Arroyo until recently.

The video is 18 minutes long, but a super fascinating look at native species in Los Angeles.

But flood control is the winning priority so far and over the course of the last 4 years an army of dump trucks have removed thousands of loads of sediment from behind the dam, distributing it at two plants in Sun Valley and Irwindale.

I don’t know what Irwindale did to deserve a giant pile of dirt dumped on their front door, but so it goes.

As impressive as the operation is, and as grateful as I am that the city won’t be swept away in a major debris storm event next winter, the excavation project feels like a tiny bandaid on a gaping wound.

Devil’s Gate Dam was originally constructed in only 13 months. The project to remove sediment buildup from a single wildfire took 10 years of planning, 4 years of active excavation, and will require ongoing annual excavation around the base of the dam in perpetuity.

I’m no civil engineer, but it doesn’t feel like an elegant solution.

But for now, at least, it’s working. In January 2022, after the much-welcomed December and January rains, I finally watched the reservoir fill with water for the first time since I’ve lived here. The excavation project went as planned and the lake actually looked nice while it lasted, reflecting the oaks below the towering mountains. Of course I didn’t manage to take a picture of it, but here’s one from LAPW.

It’s true that we still can’t drive on the freeways in the rain without crashing into one another, but we’ve at least managed to curtail the next downtown-marooning flood for the time being.

Only time will tell when the next big storm decides to test our aging infrastructure again.

2023 LA Field Guide Send List

1. Find every bit of gravel riding within 10 miles of my house

2. Offroad in Anza Borrego

3. Bomb all of Dirt Mulholland

4. Go bikepacking somewhere that isn’t Los Angeles

5. Make sure the Hollywood Sign is still there

6. Run all the streets in my neighborhood (1 mile radius - in progress)

   

7. Camp at Henninger Flats

8. Coffee outside on the LA River

9. Texas Canyon TIAD (tens in a day) challenge (19 routes, 5.10a/b, 1,475’ vertical)

10. Finally climb Power Station in Malibu Creek

11. Bike to a rock climb

12. ✅ Shred the Rim of the Valley trail

13. Cherry Pick at Cherry Canyon

14. ✅ Do more yoga

15. ✅ Snowboard at least one day

16. Finally climb that one sketchy route on Eagle Rock

17. Revisit the Corpse Wall at Saddle Peak

18. See what the Arroyo Seco Boulders are all about

19. Tour De Disc Golf

20. ✅ Attempt LA Tourist Race #1 Accomplished

21. ✅ Finish LA Tourist Race #2

22. Conquer LA Tourist Race #3 (campout was cancelled, opted out)

23. Off-road to that mine in Joshua Tree we didn’t find last time

24. Raft the Grand Canyon

25. Climb something multi-pitch in Yosemite

26. Camp in the desert on a New Moon to stargaze

27. ✅ Bike-camp from my front door

28. Backpack from my front door

29. Hike San Gorgonio

30. Hike San Jacinto

31. Hike Baldy

32. Hike Cucamonga Peak

33. Hike San Bernardino Peak

34. Hike Mount Wilson (#29 - #34 = Unofficial SoCal Six Pack of Peaks)

35. Bike Mount Wilson

36. Camp on Mount Wilson (Combine all three for the Mt. Wilson Triple Crown? Sounds epic, I’m in)

37. Do another Beer Walk? (but maybe not a marathon distance this time)

38. Volunteer on a trail day

39. Revisit Zorro in Yosemite

40. Annual bike pilgrimage to San Diego

41. ✅ Ride a century

42. Soak in some hot springs

43. Have a Pacifico on Pacifico Mountain

44. Go mountain biking with the Topanga Creek folks

45. Jump in the Mighty Pacific

46. ✅ Pay my respects to Owen Brown

47. Find the best veggie taco in LA (or at least NELA)

48. ✅ Explore the White City Ruins

49. Go to the top of Mt. Lukens

50. Summit Strawberry Peak the hard way

51. Camp at Lightning Point

52. Sunrise to Sunset the Solstice

We only organized a minimal outline for the trip, making sure to leave plenty of room for spur-of-the-moment road trip-isms. We knew how long the drive was each day and what city we wanted to arrive in, but didn’t book any campsites or places to stay in advance. Both Nicole and I tend to be pretty controlling people, so it took a solid day on the open road to adjust to the relaxed pace of a road trip. Once we settled in, though, it was refreshing. All we had to do was set a course and go with the flow. 

The plan was to switch off driving so I could get some work in from the road. Tulkas (my Subaru Crosstrek) is a 5 spd manual and Nicole figured she could handle a few hundred miles of open desert highway while I plugged away at some emails.

That was the plan, until Monday afternoon. Our second day on the road, Tulkas’ clutch started making an unmistakable squealing sound. By Tuesday morning, 800 miles from home, it had gotten worse. From what I understood about clutches at the time (which was minimal, to be sure) the throwout bearing was going out. While the noise was a sure sign to replace it soon, throwout bearings weren’t known to suddenly and catastrophically fail.

On Wednesday morning, mine suddenly and catastrophically failed. Also loudly failed. After I’d woken up the entire campground with horrible grinding metal sounds, three guys wandered over and helped me push the car out of the site, where we rolled in neutral down the hill until I managed to get it into third gear. I understood the gist of how to drive a manual transmission without a clutch, but had never practiced it before, and now we were rumbling down a dirt road towards town without cell service, a way to idle the car, or a real plan for what to do when we inevitably reached traffic, intersections, and stop lights.

A mile or so down the road we miraculously came across a tow truck driver. When he heard the sounds my car was making, he shook his head and motioned to turn off the car. He had just dragged a 4Runner out of a gully. The driver had gotten distracted the previous night while driving up the road in the dark, missed the turn, and rolled into a drainage ditch. The car ended up on its side and the driver, miraculously unhurt, had managed to climb out of the door and walk the mile up the road to his campsite in the dark.

The other guy’s car was definitely totaled, but when I chatted with the driver he was most upset about his stand up bass that had been stored in the back seat when he crashed. It was completely demolished in the accident. He looked like he’d lost a part of himself with it. Really helped put my busted clutch in perspective.

Our initial estimate for a tow from AAA was 2-3 hours, so naturally we set up our camping chairs and passed the time playing cards and reading. We’d planned to be hiking to a lake that day, but hanging out on a road in the forest wasn’t the worst thing to be doing instead. When three hours had passed, Nicole called again. Still no driver assigned, but we were first in the queue. Another hour. Another call. Still no driver.

Meanwhile, we had been calling half a dozen auto shops in Durango trying to find one that had a new clutch assembly to get back on the road. Everyone was booked out for weeks. I needed to be back in LA to film a bike race on Saturday. It was Wednesday, and we were a thousand miles from Los Angeles, stranded in a forest with a car that wouldn’t drive. I’d wanted to lose a little bit of control on this road trip, but this was getting out of hand.

But by another stroke of good fortune, the Subaru dealership in Durango called me back and said they had one new clutch in stock that would fit my car, and they had an unexpected opening in their service schedule. If I could get the car to them before they closed at 5:30pm, they could have it ready the next day.

At that point, we’d been waiting on the side of the road for five hours and had officially entered AAA purgatory. If you’ve never visited, let me explain: AAA purgatory is the horrible little place at the end of the phone script where stranded motorists in rural areas find themselves when no tow truck drivers are available. The root level of the code. The part of the conversation where AAA says thank you for your patience but you might want to start walking.

The only new piece of information one learns in this liminal space is that AAA will reimburse you if you decide to fend for yourself and hire a private tow company, which we obviously immediately did.

Well, Nicole did. At this point I’d lost all hope and was wandering around in the gully helping the driver of the totaled 4Runner look for his bike helmet that he thought may have flown out the window in the crash. I guess it felt like one small bit of good I could do in that moment.

A tow truck showed up an hour later and managed to get Tulkas to the Subaru dealer only minutes before closing. We ubered into town, ate our first hot meal of the day at 7pm, and spent the night in a cheap motel. Subaru finished the car the following afternoon and by 5pm on Thursday we hit the road to begin the long drive home. 24 hours earlier I hadn’t been sure we would be driving this car back to Los Angeles at all. It felt fantastic to be moving again.

That night, Nicole found a campsite a couple hours west of Durango. Truly in the middle of nowhere. We drove directly toward a growing thunderhead through miles of farmland on a gravel road that became a dirt road that became a slick mud road in the dumping rain. We got to a campsite and waited in the car for the downpour to subside. When the rain let up and the thunder stopped, we set up camp in one of the most incredible places I’ve ever stayed.

We cooked dinner, watched the sun set, built a campfire, and sipped hot chocolate as the stars peeked through the patchwork of clouds overhead. We held each other in the dark, watching for just one more strobe of distant lightning to backlight the billowing clouds and far-off mountain ranges before we went to sleep. That night, as I tried to put toothpaste on my toothbrush without a headlamp—balancing an iPhone between my chin and sternum—I started thinking about that subtle dance between preparation, control, and improvisation.

The magic of road trips is rolling with whatever happens. We go on these kinds of adventures to experience something new. Something unexpected. But then we bring along particular ideas about what we want those new experiences to be, and we forget that the only real experience is the one happening in front of us.

Our Colorado road trip was the most memorable adventure I’ve had in a long time. We camped on the edge of the world, stumbled upon ancient cliff dwellings, drove into raging thunderstorms, broke down a thousand miles from home, ate a gas station hot dog for breakfast, cooked backcountry brussel sprouts, split a Denny's grand slam, and met a bunch of wonderfully kind human beings along the way.

As far as we know, AAA still thinks we’re stuck on the side of the road in Colorado. We never heard back from them. It still gives us a sense of preparation and control to have them in our back pocket, but in reality it’s only a phone number printed on a plastic card.

Being prepared doesn’t mean the world is going to stick to a predictable script, which in the end is a good thing.

Life is a lot less boring that way.