Dispatch #8 - Berryessa Snow Mountain National Monument
Molok Luyuk, Wildfires, and A Walk In the Wilderness
Good morning from Los Angeles. “May Gray” is in full effect, which thankfully means the knock-you-down heat from July through Halloween is still a ways off. If anyone has a home in, say, the Pacific Northwest and wants to house swap with my wife and I for those months, I’ll gladly take you up on it … in 2032, when our youngest heads off to college.
There’s a lot happening on public lands, but I’ll leave all of that reporting to the pros. Folks like the Land Desk, Wes Siler, Western Watersheds, and More Than Just Parks.
While I will occasionally cover the more urgent threats facing BLM lands, this newsletter is about the landscapes themselves. As long as these places remain unknown and unloved by the broader outdoor community, their protection will remain tenuous.
Baba Dioum was right:
In the end, we will conserve only what we love.
And the only way to love a landscape is to experience it. I hope these newsletters are giving you a vibrant dose of beauty, but are also pushing and prodding and equipping many of you to consider a trip to visit these wondrous and vulnerable lands.
And Now, This:
Building on my last dispatch from the Cache Creek Natural Area, we now move to its next-door neighbor: the massive 344,476-acre Berryessa Snow Mountain National Monument.