It seems there is a blog post I wrote but never published, in fact I never even wrote it. This thought, this idea of what it was like to visit D.C. for the first time back in April 2015 never fully came to fruition. I remember thinking about it. I know I laughed a little at how this “drained swap” was sinking and thought on the topic of man’s need to control nature that is generally to our detriment. I remember walking the monuments of the of the mall reading great quotes from fallible, human men that have been entombed unnecessarily on invisible (and visible) pedestals. I remembered meandering from one free museum to the next absorbing as much as my brain could handle and remarking on how freely we show of our enterprise and our folly to any in the world who wants to see. I remember standing in the dimmed and solemn room that houses the star-spangled banner. As I stood there I did feel a sense of pride for a young America full of grit.

Outside in nearby Baltimore the streets had just erupted in multiple decades of suppressed anger and anguish due to the police killing of a 25 year old black man named Freddie Gray. Eventually U.S. Marshals would walk the streets to keep “order” of a disordered, classist, racist society. Meanwhile at the Supreme Court men in tutus and women with butch haircuts stomped and shouted on the steps while internally we all held our breath and prayed, and prayed, and prayed on this first day of hearings on same sex marriage (Obergefell vs. Hodges). Down the Mall reporters stood at the Vietnam Memorial and interviewed Veterans whose brothers’ names were etched into the black reflective wall, a memorial designed by a 21 year old Asian-American who hadn’t seen war but represented it’s loss perfectly with this black ‘V’ gouged into the earth. As you walked down into it’s embrace the sounds of D.C. slipped away leaving nothing but our own voices bouncing back at us and so we got quiet and reflected on this 40 year anniversary of the fall of Saigon, the atrocities of war, the mysteries of what we had been fighting for so far away when we’re still fighting wars here at home, for what it means to be free.

I never thought that two years later, for Earth Day, we’d be standing near a stage next to the Washington Monument listening to Maya Lin (designer of the Vietnam Memorial) espouse the benefits and need for open and honest science research and education in America. I didn’t know that we’d hear from a transgender scientist about collaboration or a black man from New York City talk about inner city scholarships for science programs or a Native American woman talk of the early science of generations of observations for the first Americans. We heard from a farmer, many musicians, doctors, teachers, benefactors of scientific research, all there to defend science. Frankly, I didn’t think we would need to. And I certainly didn’t want to when it was 50 degrees and raining. We waffled back and forth between cold, wet and uncomfortable to amazed, inspired and joyful. As the stage event ended and the march had yet to begin the musicians, led by the beautiful Jon Batiste, struck up a raucous beat to lift us past our soggy pity party to a real dance party in the streets. However, shortly after that the crowd stopped the slow lurch forward, the rain picked up again. Signs dropped, umbrellas were raised and suddenly I was having an internal yet massive panic attack from being pinned in the middle. But then I turned and saw a sign that said “Park Rangers for President” and I remembered why we were there in the first place.

I’m finishing up these thoughts two months after the event having hit the ground running here at our summer stint in Sequoia National Park. I’ve been having a hard time trying to keep up on what I need to accomplish this summer and feeling more and more removed from this movement. That is until I realized I’m not removed, I’m living the march alongside my NPS family, not out of any sort of rebellion but it’s just what we do that makes our work meaningful for us and the visitors alike. Here we are working on talks that highlight the cute and precocious Pika that could be in real danger due to warming temperatures. We are walking in meadows that have been meticulously restored looking for mosses that help represent the growth and natural succession of the meadows. We are working with partners to study the effects of the elongated and extra hot drought on the Sequoia trees and we have partnered with Native tribal members to apply their indigenous scientific knowledge to do prescribed burns their way for the health of the oak trees. Everyday we’re out there having conversations about drought, fire, restorations and conservation with our visitors who are happy to be here and to learn a little about the beautiful place they came to visit.

There are many social physics at play in these times but, I can only hope that these scientific efforts that are in motion stay in motion. Marches won’t fix the mess we’re in but it’s nice to know that we are not alone in our fear and frustration and that even a cold rainy day won’t keep away a 100,000 angry scientists.

I’ve spent a goodly portion of the last two months saying over and over “Hi, Welcome”, doing my best to sound as happy as I truly am welcoming visitors to Sequoia National Park. That way when I follow up with the $30 cost of entering the park they are much more likely to feel good about paying this chunk of money towards this particular park of choice. Things have slowed quite a bit since I got here but it’s not unusual to say this a couple/few hundred times in a day. While hands down I prefer a more interpretive interaction with park visitors, I have enjoyed this position and feel grateful that we have been able to continue seeing where this NPS avenue might take us.

Today I am welcoming you to our new website. Tim put in a great many hours moving over our old blog. The format is different and so the old blogs are a little screwy with pictures that are much too large. An unfortunate side effect to what is otherwise a beautiful website. He also set up an online store of his photographs. Many of these photos are from our travels last year and from this year’s more stationary explorations in Mojave National Preserve and Sequoia National Park. These photos can be order in large format or even as greetings cards, should you take a fancy to any.

During our travels last year we enjoyed getting our thoughts onto “paper” and creating a type of road map through our writing. It felt good, was a fun collaboration and looking back at what we wrote stirs many memories that are already beginning to get buried. Many of these memories are worth revisiting, revising and augmenting with some of the larger stories involved around the places we visited. Tim has begun this process with the Nature Walk books and podcast. In a mash up of our punk rock and buddhist personalities we are moving forward by starting “where we are”. Meaning we don’t have top of the line recording equipment or production capabilities but feel that we’re doing alright with what we’ve got and hope that you all will appreciate what we’re putting out there.

Lately we’ve been saying welcome to a fresh carpet of green grass. After some much needed rain our very brown neighborhood burst alive, while at the same time many trees lost their leaves. With Tim spending half his life in California and me my whole life we’re reminded there is still so much to learn and love about this misaligned Mediterranean climate. Looking to the future we’ll continue to document this amazing planet with our photos and words. We hope that you’ll continue to follow along. Feedback is always welcome as it helps us know what we’re doing right and what we can maybe do better.

Taking an ecology class at City College of San Francisco several years ago got me down on my hands and knees doing something I hadn’t really done before, dig into my own urban backyard. At the time I had a sweet studio overlooking a lush backyard and in a “only in San Francisco” experience had a view of downtown from my basement apartment. For the class I needed to start and maintain a nature journal that documented the same place over the course of the semester. Lucky for me I had a wonderful yard to enjoy. I found pill bugs under leaves, discovered a pincher bug mama and babies in a lily flower, watched a hummingbird drink from the firecracker penstemon and chase others far out of “his” yard. Because I was now always paying attention to my yard I got to see scrub jays build their nest in the bamboo. At first I thought they’d be sorry when the winds came but then I saw that they had tucked their nest in the area where the bamboo was most protected by the yucca tree and thus it swayed only a little compared to the more exposed bamboo. On my own porch I watched as hundreds of baby orb weaver spiders hatched and made their way into the world. This experience not only gave me first hand knowledge of the wilds that can happen right in the middle of an urban area but also got me back in touch with my own personal passion of earth science.

In early August some friends with a little urban homestead in Noe Vally asked me to “chicken sit” for a week. I took advantage of the midday sunny weather and spent a good portion of my week just like I had when I had my journal, looking for bugs, watching the hummingbirds and digging around in the plants while the girls scratched, pecked and enjoyed a thorough dust bathing.

Raven lands on the power pole and calls out the desert’s news. We sip our coffee and listen intently but we’re not surprised when he gets to the weather and croaks “hot, hot, hawt”. The morning breeze is about as cooling as standing in front of a hair dryer. I put my shirt on last not wanting to soak it through on my quarter mile bike ride before I get to work. I still show up disheveled, hair a mess and shirt untucked. First thing I do is go to the bathroom dry off and clean myself up. I appreciate my cool confines of the beautiful, historic Kelso Depot but make point of going outside and walking in the sunlight. I stay hours past closing and then suck it up and go home.
We make a point of checking the temp inside the RV when we first open the door. If it’s 100 or cooler we’re doing ok. That hasn’t happened in two weeks. It’s too hot to move but we change from our clothes and put on shorts that are 105 degrees, open a beer and melt into our camp chairs. Too hot to eat or talk let alone do anything productive. We watch a Verdin build a beautiful nest in the branches of the dead tree, that serves as our landscaping, but it seems as though all the ladies are smart enough to be in cooler climes. We watch night hawks teeter and dip catching prey. Next the bats swing by, sometimes too close to our heads. We reach out for each other and then recoil from our shared body heat.

Driving back from Baker one night I go slow as much to maximize time in the air conditioned car as it is to better see the creatures of the night roads. This is their time and they do their best to run you off. We see night lizards and snakes, we see kangaroo rats by the dozens, we see scorpions doing a tango. Looking in vain for a flashlight we know isn’t there and kicking ourselves for not having boots knowing that sandals are not safe at night. This is their world and their time to own the desert lands. We see a ghostly figure scampering without a tail, a bobcat caught off guard changes course and vanishes.

A visitor chats with me about his high school friend who worked the rails in the summers in the 60’s. He tells me how they wore thick gloves because touching the metal out here would scald the skin in seconds. He says they did the work they needed to do without complaint because that’s what you did “back then”. I think they were probably tougher back then but he’s kidding himself if they did it without complaint. We are stupid animals working from dawn to dusk. The desert animals know we are stupid. They look at us with dead eyes and wonder why we move around when the sun and heat are clearly telling us to wait until later or get up earlier.

I can’t wait to leave. I imagine being on Ocean Beach in SF enveloped in a windy fog. I imagine undressing and feeling the cool damp air on my whole body as I run and breathe salty air. We bring up stories of when we were freezing, how painful it was to crawl into our cold bed and try to sleep. We yearn for that pain. Yet driving to our friend’s house past Joshua trees, up into the pinyon-juniper forest past sage brush and back into the cactus-yucca scrub and I can’t imagine we’re leaving. I love this place. How could I possibly be so eager to leave a place I have fallen madly in love with? Such is the life and times of a vagabond. It’s time to go but the Mojave will still be here. We’ll come back, just not in the summer.

While it is true that Tim and I are Visitor Center connoisseurs that interest is often in place of a real love of Nature Centers. Nature Centers tend to be exclusive to the plants and animals and not as much on the human history. Not that I don’t enjoy learning all about the park or area but I love learning about why we’d make a park in the first place which always boils down to plants, animals and geology. The other great thing about Nature Centers is you get to touch.

As a small child I loved going shopping with my mom not out of any interest in gaining new clothes, in fact I was and still am a pain in that department, but I loved to touch all the fabrics of the draped shirts and skirts. Of course us adults are constantly telling children not to touch, we don’t want them breaking anything or leaving their greasy germ filled finger prints all over. Unfortunately this is the best way for children (and adults) to learn. We learn with all our senses, just ask any blind person how important touching is to knowing. We have a touch table at our little information center at Hole-In-The-Wall and I think I’ve seen more adults go over to it than children. Without fail every single person picks up the Coyote Gourds (Cucurbita palmata). They look inside the holes and they rattle the whole ones that still have dried seeds to bounce around. Young boys love to pick up the skulls and other bones. One little guy noted the loose teeth on the deer skull and commented on how “someone’s going to get something from the tooth fairy soon!”, he was quite serious. I debated with my friend’s three year old on whether or not the coyote skull could really be from a coyote, he thought not. Others enjoy picking up the cool-to-the-touch rock core. We also have two male mule deer skulls mounted showing how they stuck together during a rutting match and died of starvation. Even though it’s not at the touch table people enjoy running their hands over the entangled antlers.

I look back to our travels of 2015 as one of the best educations I’ve ever had, that I gave myself. Naturally I learned from reading and researching the topics we’ve covered here in the blog, by using iNaturalist to research the plants and insects I photographed but also just by being outside and really looking at what I was looking at. I suppose that is what makes one a naturalist. Even in, or especially in, the age of Google there is still no substitute for making our own physical observations. Reading about the density of beaver or otter fur will never help one understand just how soft, thick and luxurious these furs are to touch. Reading or seeing on a nature show that such and such birds have clutches of 2-3 eggs a year will not tell you that these are only the eggs left in the nest. The females still make eggs that they might just leave in a parking lot for Tim to find and crush in his hands when he realizes the hard way that the rock that looked like an egg really was an egg. Looking at the spines of a Cholla one will not know that they have a skin on them. It takes a certain bored interest while waiting for a Woodrat (Neotoma lepida) to come out of its midden that I bothered to pinch at a Buckhorn Cholla (Cylindropuntia acanthocarpa) spine and had the sheath come off in my fingers. This was so interesting that I did it again and again. Prickly pear, hedgehog and barrel cactus do not have this sheath. This morning after a lizard in a yucca caught my attention I looked at the Pencil Cholla (Cylindropuntia ramosissima) below. Something about the translucent spines made me grab at them too. Sure enough the papery sheath came off and reveled the waxy dark spine. I suppose there might be some sun protection to these skins so this time I stopped at just the one.

A group of older men from Canada that spend their winters in the desert came into the information center with pockets full of rocks they’d found and were asking about a bean plant that had very spicy beans. “You ate it?!” I asked. They also told me how they ate a Cholla flower and I knew exactly where this story was going to go because I know that the flowers of Cholla Cactus’ also have spines. That was a hard won lesson. We don’t ever stop learning by touch but we do stop learning to touch when that is what we’ve been taught.

Back in December I spent a few minutes being entertained by my then 18 month old nephew on a restaurant patio so that my sister could be inside making a purchase uninhibited. He walked the patio touching just about every single thing out there. If he knew the word of the object he’d say it as he touched. If he didn’t I made a point of telling him. When he grabbed at the rosemary bush I said his name and then smelled my hands a couple of times until he realized I wanted him to smell his own hands. He got a good whiff, looked at me and exclaimed “Yum!”.

It’s Monday, the first day of our three day weekend. It seemed as good a day as any to catch up on our Zs and rest. The deep layers of dark clouds and high winds helped to facilitate this desire. Recently showered and cozy in our camper Tim turned in for a nap and I read page after page of Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire. After a bit I put on the kettle and put down the book, tired of his grumblings on humans and musings on the desert being put into words better than anyone else could ever say such things. I decided instead to spy on the neighbors who were out and about despite the weather. It seemed so harmless since they were just going about their business eating a late lunch (early dinner?). Their movements became blocked a bit by some yuccas but I got my first hint that all was not necessarily well. At this point Tim got up and got out his camera to document their movements. It was shortly after this that we got a bit of domestic violence on film. Or was it courtship? Hard to tell sometimes with Jack Rabbits. The male kept moving in slowly with his ears back. Seemingly just wanting to nuzzle muzzles. Our female wasn’t having it and the male got a one two punch right on the kisser! Of course I have no true way of knowing the sex of either but the act was a clear “No!”.

The Black-tailed Jack Rabbit and the Desert Cottontail are by far the most abundant animals in the park both by numbers and sightings. With their high metabolisms they need to be almost constantly eating. One can catch them almost any time of day but driving at dusk one needs to be very careful. We call them suicidal, interjecting human intentions, when they cross the road and then double back onto the road right in front of us, having evolved skills to out maneuver four legged predators and not the four wheeled, bright light, kind.

Their abundant numbers mean that they can be legally hunted in the Preserve all year long. They also breed all year long having up to four litters with an average of three offspring. Jack Rabbits are not true rabbits but instead are hares. The distinction being that when born they are fully furred and eyes are open. Laid in a protective covering of mom’s fur and separated from each other in case of predation hopefully not all are found. Mom forages nearby but won’t go to them until the cover of night for nursing.

We don’t often see them engage their ability to bound 5-10′ at a time in an attempt of escape but rather a teetering lope from front to back feet as they move from one nibbling spot to another. Or in the case of our not easily discouraged suitor back and forth to his afternoon love interest. At one point he stopped to shake out his front paws in a hurried twisting movement that made us wonder at whether or not he had gotten poked by some cholla bit. We find these spider like bits all over our boots, laces and pants on a daily basis ourselves. At yet another stop he pulled his clown like hind foot to his mouth and plucked at it.

Adding to the goofy look of the Jack Rabbit are their iconically large ears, up to five inches long and rather thin they light up when the sun hits them. This highlights the many veins throughout the ears. The veins across the large ears move heat up and away from the body of the Jacks, an inventive and efficient adaptation to the (mostly) hot desert. Our neighbors seem to be on constant alert stopping every few seconds to take in the sounds around them. Sometimes they raise up on their front legs with ears fully forward, looking ever much like the chocolate bunnies of Easter time. They can also articulate the ears towards their backs so that in looking in one direction they are picking up sounds from the other.

Not just hunted by humans they are also prey to coyotes, eagles and bobcats. I’ve come to realize though that most are donated to the cause laying somewhat tenderized on the side of the road. Never for long. I’ve yet to see the same Jack carcass twice.

The undismayed wooer keeps coming around for more. I can’t be sure but our female might just be giving in. She steals away into the bushes and he follows. Our voyeuristic time has come to an end, just in time because the water for tea is boiling.