Out & About
Booming, roaring, barking, squeaking, and whistling sands have figured in folklore and travelers' tales for 1500 years, with the earliest references found in Chinese and Mideastern chronicles. Marco Polo describes encountering the phenomenon on a …
Lake Hodges has become one of the key units in the sprawling San Dieguito River Park, slowly taking form along 55 miles of river valley from the coast at Del Mar to Volcan Mountain near …
Deeded to the Orange County parks system by the Irvine Company in 1992, Peters Canyon Regional Park has -- like several other newly declared open-space areas around the periphery of the Orange County metropolis -- …
The Pine Mountain Trail, the newest designated trail in the Laguna Mountains, invites your attention this verdant and merry month of May. Spring rainfall in our local mountains, abnormally extending to as recently as last …
One of L.A. County's most attractive waterfalls, Fish Canyon Falls in the San Gabriel Mountains, lies today in a canyon whose mouth has been ripped apart by large-scale quarrying operations. Once beyond the canyon's gaping, …
“I’m a scopophiliac, I guess,” says Arthur Ollman. “I love to look.” What the founding director of the Museum of Photographic Arts in Balboa Park loves to look at is photos. He claims his eyes …
Cowles Mountain, the centerpiece of Mission Trails Regional Park, stands 1591 feet above sea level, making it the highest point within San Diego's city limits. On a warm springtime day, hundreds of people -- maybe …
As the gloom of a late afternoon descends upon the deep-cut, linear furrow of Tenaja Canyon, dozens of orange-bellied newts waddle determinedly uphill and across the trail, oblivious to my footfalls. The cute faces and …
After a wet winter, the shallow ponds in Love Valley hold the shimmering, upside-down image of a classic California landscape: a weathered barn nestled at the far end of an Ireland-colored meadow, rounded foothills studded …
While he was governor, from 1845 to 1846, he sold or leased the missions. He needed the money to run things. He sold the mission at San Juan Capistrano to his brother-in-law for $750.
The all-day, 14-mile-loop hike up to the viewful summit of Condor Peak and back by way of verdant Trail Canyon in the San Gabriel Mountains is well suited to properly conditioned hikers but punishingly difficult …
If you're a bicyclist with an antipathy for steep hills but a love for rural scenery, you'll appreciate El Monte Road. Few rural roads in San Diego County can offer as long a stretch of …
Oak Canyon Nature Center, a 60-acre natural park tucked amid the hilly housing tracts of eastern Anaheim, offers small kids (and their interested parents) plenty of room to roam on its tightly nested five miles' …
Standing apart from nearby peaks, Viejas Mountain can be seen from many parts of metropolitan San Diego as a dusky, obtusely triangular feature along the eastern horizon. A faint, partially overgrown trail Fed by countless …
Tens of millions of years in the making, Devil's Punchbowl is certainly Los Angeles County's most spectacular geological showplace. When looking down into this 300-foot-deep chasm, you sense the enormity of the slow yet inexorable …
What San Diego's backyard mountain ranges lack in terms of scale and grandeur is outweighed by the sublime and circumspect beauty to be found in some of its remote canyons. A case in point is …