Fox News... Pigs Fly. Really

Island Fox (Urocyon littoralis)

The Island Fox, weighing in at no more than 5 pounds is the Featherweight Champion of apex predators on the Channel Islands in Southern California.  The islands, including Santa Cruz Island where I recently went camping, rose as volcanoes from the sea 19 to 15 million years ago. In all that time, no larger land predators than Island Foxes have showed up. This could be that heavyweight contenders like grizzly bears have made it from the mainland to the Channel Islands only to die. Until recently, the largest prey out there are mice. Nobody knows for sure how the first foxes got out there but the islands have never been connected to the mainland so it’s probably the case that a pregnant fox made a sea voyage of twenty miles at least and the voyage many tens of thousands of years ago.  The island of Santa Cruz was connected to the neighboring islands of Anacapa and Santa Rosa during the last ice age but never connected to the mainland.  Birds abound on the islands in legion. Marine mammals fill the seas.  The Island Fox has been out there for tens of thousands of years living on small prey like mice, birds, and eggs.  When the Chumash Indians arrived some 10,000 years ago, there wasn’t much change to the life of the Island Fox, though I would guess the fox soon learned to beg for food and steal it too. They are good at both these days.

Our trip out to Santa Cruz Island started out as a clusterfuck that eventually came under control. It was a beautiful trip but first I have to explain the clusterfetch. Growing up I had a friend that used the word clusterfetch. I grew up religious with religious friends. I really did.

Not Delicate Arch. Arch Rock in center. 

Traffic reigns over California thought with an iron fist and that includes a camping trip to an uninhabited island with no roads or vehicles. We went camping on Santa Cruz Island from Tuesday morning to Thursday afternoon. We had to be at the Ventura Harbor at 8AM to check in to a ferry that leaves at 9AM. Without traffic, it’s a 70 minute drive from Long Beach to Ventura and with traffic it can be at least three hours. This meant we could leave Long Beach at 5AM and miss traffic and get to Ventura two hours early or leave at 530 and get to Ventura late, and beg the ferry service to forgive us. The latter would have been easy. The phrase “Traffic was a bitch” is believable.

Traffic is a bitch and not just that morning.  Traffic is always a bitch. We opted to leave at 5AM and pulled into Ventura Harbor at 610 and twiddled our thumbs for hours. Traffic has a way of hijacking our sense of time and space.  In places with heavy traffic, distance is measured in hours, not miles or kilometers, and the “distance” changes radically depending upon traffic. I was told it is three hours from Long Beach to Ventura in heavy traffic and 70 minutes in light traffic but nobody mentioned how many miles it is.  Distance itself is barely relevant in a big city and that is why city folks don’t understand it.  This is more traffic detail than I thought necessary but you need some background because later I plan to present a theory (not hypothesis) about traffic.

Would you exchange your left nut for this?

We borrowed some camping gear and cobbled it together with stuff we brought down on the plane. That wasn’t the problem. Evonne’s sister’s stuff was perfect. Our problem was that we brought WAY too much stuff. The Island Packer’s web page showed people getting on their ferries with ice chests and plastic totes, not back packs. We brought two plastics totes, one large ice chest, two day packs, and a guitar. I don’t have a theory on how our arsenal grew; hypotheses yes, but no theory. I also have a solution that involves listening to my gut from the start. My first response was to bring only the contents of one backpack per person and I should have listened to my instincts.

We went to the grocery store to buy food for a three day trip and we just wandered around plucking stuff off the shelf. The ice chest weighed 49 pounds. Before we walked into Trader Joe’s we should have been shopping specifically for two breakfasts, three lunches, and two dinners. That’s it. it wasn’t just food either that got out of hand either. We had enough clothing for an arctic expedition and/or a trip across the Sahara. You never know what you are going to get in California. Our campsite was a mile from the pier and we made two trips with gear. It would have been three trips to bring the gear but Evonne’s sister Celeste came out with us but only for the day. Celeste helped us our gear. She brought a day pack.

Celeste and Evonne, Santa Cruz Island Campground

Once we settled into camp, all was well. It was actually just fine while we lugged our gear in stages but a bit embarrassing. There was a couple with a baby out there camping and they had less stuff than we did. Admittedly, they told us they did not bring enough.  The weather in the Channel Islands mirrors that in Los Angeles with the exception that you can see the stars and the air doesn’t ever smell like sulfuric acid.

After we got our stuff to camp we went on a hike to the overlook of Potato Harbor with Celeste. The water out there is so much more clear than it is on the mainland twenty miles away. Potato Harbor isn’t much of a harbor as I can’t imagine brining a boat in there, except maybe a kayak. I can’t imagine it as a good harbor even on a good weather day because it’s surrounded by 400 foot cliffs that would make it very difficult to bring goods ashore or load goods from shore. It’s called Potato Harbor though and it’s strikingly beautiful. The north shore of Santa Cruz has more sea caves than anywhere else in the world and some of them are in Potato Harbor. I should get a sea kayak out there some day.  Before going out to Santa Cruz Island, I thought the Channel Islands were like southern California was like before white people arrived. It’s sort of like that in some ways but in other ways it isn’t.

Santa Cruz Island, you can't see the many sea caves in the cliffs

First off, there isn’t anybody living out permanently anymore and people lived there long before white people showed up. There are a few houses tucked behind a hill for Park Service folks but they stay there a week at a time and live in Ventura. There is a visitor’s center out there that isn’t staffed. Plaques in the visitor center tell the story of the ranching history on the island that spans 150 years. The names of the ranchers are written in stone, literally. There are stone tiles on the floor with their names and photos of them astride horses looking regal. The visitor canter contains little to no information on the impact of grazing. They mention feral pigs that ran amok for a century but there is no info about what they did to the landscape. They don’t mention that the ranchers released the pigs and a gadzillion sheep or that those things led to massive erosion. It took the Park Service and the Nature Conservancy decades to kill all the pigs. The pigs nearly wiped out the native oaks by eating acorns. Oak seedlings are surviving now that the pigs are gone. 

Evonne and Celeste near Potato Harbor.

It’s important to document history but an honest telling of history should document the whole story including the island’s ranching history. The rancher dudes, and they are all dudes, trashed the place and got their names written in stone like they did some noble act.  The Chumash Indians first arrived some 10,000 years ago, possibly 2,000 years before Adam and Eve. There is one photo on the wall of the visitor’s center commemorating those millennia. They built huge canoes called Tomols from redwood logs that drifted south and travelled the open sea. Modern Chumash built a replica and paddled it out there back on 2001. I am gobsmacked at their bravery even considering a motor boat followed them. Their ancestors were braver still.

Santa Cruz Island is also not like Los Angeles pre-Spanish conquest because the Channel Islands have never had any large animals. When the Spaniards arrived in Los Angeles, they reported huge herds of elk and grizzly bears. Deer were common and so were mountain lions. Deer, elk, and mountain lions are still common in some mountains of California. Grizzly bears (now extinct) once fished for salmon  (also extinct) in the Los Angeles river.  These days humans in BMWs (Homo pretentiousii) outnumber more interesting wildlife a thousand to one. There are marine mammals all around the Channel Islands but the largest terrestrial mammal native to Santa Cruz Island is the Island Fox. Introduced feral pigs also set into motion changes in the ecological community that almost killed off the Island Fox. The fox population is doing fine now but about thirty years ago they were nearly wiped out by golden eagles. Bald eagles are native to Santa Cruz but they went extinct out there from DDT about fifty years ago. Ball eagles ate primarily fish in nearby waters. Golden eagles came in large numbers when the feral pig population exploded. Golden eagles fed on piglets. Pigs fly though it doesn’t bode well for them. Golden eagles also feed on foxes and for the first time in a hundred thousand years, in the 1990’s it looked like the Island Fox as going to die off.  Finally, the NPS killed off the pigs, relocated the golden eagles, and brought back bald eagles. Apparently, baldies don’t eat foxes and they were the most common eagle on Santa Cruz before the ranchers brought pigs and sheep.

Potato Harbor, Santa Cruz Island

The Island Foxes are cute and sly indeed. They circle your camp while you are eating and they will come up behind you and take your food if you are not careful. The ravens are just as bad. They can undo zippers so you have to wrap packs in tarps so they don’t tear your stuff to bits in search of food. A raven trashed our map of the island and there wasn’t any food in that bag. They just like to wreak havoc. Rock and roll.

The ranchers named the landscape as if their brains were infected by elementary school kids playing pirate. The two piers on Santa Cruz Island are at Scorpion Anchorage and Prisoner’s Harbor. Across the island from Scorpion Anchorage is Smuggler’s Cove. The tallest mountain on the island is Devil’s Peak.

At 330 PM the afternoon ferry arrived and Celeste headed back to the mainland. Evonne and I set up camp and made dinner.  We sat and talked by lantern and I played some guitar. We went to bed early. They don’t allow fires out there and we found that sooner or later, the lantern isn’t a substitute for staring at a fire. The place is a potential tinder box. The following morning, we woke up early because we heard that the SpaceX rocket was going to fly overhead. We didn’t see anything except a beautiful morning. I suspect we got bum info about SpaceX.  We ate breakfast and then went on a hike to Smuggler’s Cove, a beach on the opposite side of the island from Scorpion Anchorage. It’s about a four miles one way. Nobody was on the beach at Smuggler’s. We sat in the sunshine for about and hour and headed back. In the evening, we watched the sunset over the ocean. You can’t get too much of that.

Island Fox, Santa Cruz Island.

The following day we lugged our stuff back to the pier and this time it took THREE trips because Celeste wasn’t there to help us. That is five miles of walking with plastic totes weighing about 40 pounds each. Next time we go anywhere we are going to pare it down. Once we got our stuff to the pier, I went on a trail run that was one of the most scenic runs I have ever done.

We caught the ferry back to the mainland at 330PM. Seas were a little rough and I was having a good time. I like rough seas when in a good boat.  Evonne isn’t a fan of waves but she didn’t get sea sick. We also saw about fifty dolphins. We got back to Ventura Harbor at 5PM and went to a Mexican Restaurant to eat and wait out traffic. The food was good but we didn't wait long enough. We left Ventura at 630 and traffic was clear until we got into Los Angeles. On the 405, we saw no grizzly bears, elk, deer, mountain lions, golden eagles, bald eagles, salmon, or anything else worth seeing. Most of these  species went extinct in Los Angeles ages ago. It's not clear if they were killed off or if they left because they have a better sense of ascetic than most than humans. We were stuck in traffic for two hours and got a great view of the Los Angeles Airport.

Grizzly Bear Fishing.

Taken from internet, not in Los Angeles

I did a rough calculation and figured that at 8PM on a Thursday evening, there were likely a million people stuck in stop and go traffic somewhere along Interstate 405 in the LA area and I gestimate that 999,000 of those people hadn’t once stopped to think about how insane the situation is. It’s not just that many folks' commute robs them of many hours of life every day. To be in traffic you must be constantly on watch to make sure you don’t miss when it stops suddenly or sudden lurches forward. Our primal senses react like we are in danger and our limbic system responds like we are being attacked a sabre toothed tiger or squashed by a mastodon.  Human are monkeys in clothing; we evolved in caves and our health and happiness still live in caves. The part of our brain that conducts reason knows we aren’t being attacked directly but our eyes see objects the size of mastodons headed straight at us at cheetah speed.  Our senses are right until we use mental gymnastics to justify otherwise. The fact that occasionally modern metal mastodons do collide with tragic force reinforces our generalized anxiety that comes from driving the freeway in traffic. The air quality in Los Angeles is bad but it’s much worse on the freeway itself because carbon monoxide hangs around because it’s heavier than air. It’s poisonous when taken in daily. Day in and day out millions drive the freeways and waste their lives and their health to get something they think important. It doesn’t matter if the thing they thought was important is a big house, a pile of electronics, or a chunk of metal and wheels from “World Famous Beverly Hills BMW.”

Anacapa Island as seen from the east end of Santa Cruz Island. 

Anacapa is actually three islands.

Nothing is worth driving in traffic like that every day. It takes a huge amount of groupthink to rationalize subjecting that many people to that much crazy. In addition to the ill effects on ouI have mentioned this to Southern Californians lots of times and they always respond the same. “You get used to it.”  Even the Southern Californians that work near their homes and don’t drive freeways every day say much the same. They defend the insanity and I don’t know why. Maybe they subconsciously sense a need to defend their commuter friends’ insanity. People say freeway drivers develop a system to kill the time like listening to the radio or audio books. The tone is much like a person that lost a limb might speak of the way they cope. You get used to living without an arm. You learn to cope. The difference between losing an arm and taking a job that requires driving the freeway is that nobody would ever willingly cuts off their arm for anything. Certainly not for a BMW. Losing an arm might be better than a daily freeway commute because once your arm is off, you aren’t going get lung cancer or emphysema later in life. Losing your arm sucks but at least there are no hidden health effects from a lost arm.

Selfie on the beach at Smuggler's Cove. 

We would have asked someone to take this but we might have waited for days for someone to show up.