Synopsis

In the 1980s, I moved to California from Colorado. I found work I loved and ended up staying there for more than thirty years. Still, I always missed the Rocky Mountains.

Many of these stories are set in an urban wilderness park comprising several thousand acres of coastal sage and chaparral, one of the few remaining pieces of untouched land in San Diego. To anyone who gets to know it, it is a fascinating, complex, intricate, very alive wild world. It taught me to see.

About thirty miles east of the city are “real” mountains on which snow falls a few times every winter. I trekked those trails as often as I could. Most of the time, my hiking companions were my dogs.

When I retired I returned to Colorado. Every day I have the chance to get out somewhere I see and feel again how much I learned on the dusty trails of Southern California’s chaparral hills and the higher mountains beyond.