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Stories by Steve Sorensen

Life on the Crest, Part 2

As wilderness lovers go, Jerry Schad was a late bloomer.

He was born and raised in San Jose’s Santa Clara Valley, where, in the 1850s, his ancestor had been among the first American settlers. But after five generations, the pioneer spirit in his family had ...

Life on the Crest

Jerry Schad loves to explore the desert, and the rougher it gets, the better he likes it.

Jerry Schad died on Thursday, September 22, 2011. He wrote the Roam-O-Rama outdoors column for the Reader from 1993 to 2011. This is the first part of a story originally published in the Reader's pages ...

Please Don't Tell Anyone That Old Surfers End Up Here

Not long after the New Year, my friend and neighbor here in Zacatitos, Marilyn Z, sent me an email saying that, at 81 years of age, she had lost her battle with cancer and had ...

Return of the Mountain Lion

Ten years ago when Buzz Johnson moved from Colorado to the 650 acres he owns on Angel Mountain, ten miles south of Mount Palomar, the property was so thick with manzanita and chamiso that a ...

The Big Hike

About a mile and a half south of Campo, just past the pig farm, on a rutted clay road, is a barbed-wire fence that marks the end of one way of looking at the world ...

The Big Lure

At four o'clock on a Saturday morning about the only people you will find awake in San Diego County are short-order cooks, cops, insomniacs, truck drivers, and bass fishermen. Of them all, the bass fishermen ...

Sweet, Wet, Ugly, Tough

Some people say that the only other thing a lobster fisherman does besides fish is drink. This image of the hard-drinking, hardworking, hardheaded fisherman is traditional, and it might even be true. At any rate, ...