Coyote Crossing

Underfoot

Hiking pal Erica and I found this cute little guy in the Verdugo Hills, between Burbank and La Cañada Flintridge. We’d been warned about his (?) presence by a mountain biker with a golden lab puppy, who apparently tossed rocks at it to get it to

Dragon Trees and Spanish Needles

One of the steadiest jokes in the plant world — for rather nerdly definitions of the word “joke” — is the degree to which a person must constantly relearn the proper Latin names of plants. Just as soon as you get used to calling something a

Sheet steel saguaro

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Cephalocereus apicephalium

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Envoy

One day melds into the next. I sleep fitfully, wake late, write nothing for days on end. I stare at the screen, get up, get more coffee, fall asleep drinking coffee.

We walked into the hills three days ago, my gaze turned sullen inward. Ceanothus

Random shot in the neighborhood

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Xolotl

Citrus flower hangs heavy in rain-washed air.
Restless parrots argue over palmfruit,
their brilliant green tails flashes against the lapis sky.
Coyolxauhqui’s round white face
watches over all from above the temple.

Xolotl’s blood drips on the

I Want My MammothTV

(Half my readers are gonna think the title to this post is with-it and happening, and the other half will find it an appealingly obscure retro-historical reference. It’s win-win!)

Via The Excavatrix, Paleolab Guy Trevor Valle and Zed the Mammoth

Who says I haven’t accomplished anything in this life?

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Breaking Pleistocene Update

I went over to the Page Museum this morning to get a look at some of the fossils they pulled out from underneath the May Company parking lot.

I got a handful of blurry, underexposed photos with my phone. They’re here.

On a side note, why is it

Major cache of fossils unearthed in Los Angeles

From the Los Angeles Times:

Workers excavating an underground garage on the site of an old May Co. parking structure in Los Angeles’ Hancock Park got more than just a couple hundred new parking spaces. They found the largest known cache of fossils

Cleft

I walked the other day in Runyon Canyon, a cleft in the Hollywood Hills with a steep short climb. It was good to get my blood flowing again. It was good to breathe hard, to feel the growing wet in the small of my back, and though people half my age

Possum in West Hollywood

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Diorama-rama

[photo, left: Dead porcupine, Los Angeles]

One thing about the home I left this year, the SF Bay Area: The science museums there will spoil you but good. The flagship is the California Academy of Sciences, for whose erstwhile publication I

Elysian Park

I miss the certainty I had back then.
I miss the knowing all of it, the keen,
the ardent hewing to my heart’s clear path.
Old men slow-shamble in the liquor aisle,
sigh Russian imprecations baleful, soft
under their smog-choked breath. This

Letters from the desert: Full Disclosure

Ed Abbey had a wife and kid in the trailer with him in Arches while he wrote some of Desert Solitaire. Despite the opening of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, the old fighting tomcat did not actually leap in through Annie Dillard’s window and knead her