Posts by Mike McPhate

Buried deep in the California sand, about 150 miles from Hollywood, is one of the film industry’s strangest legends. It began 95 years ago, when the director Cecil B. DeMille chose a remote dune ecosystem near the sleepy Central Coast town of Guadalupe to stage his silent epic “The Ten Commandments.” For the set, he…

Less than two years had passed since the attack on Pearl Harbor when a strange mist settled over Los Angeles. People’s eyes and throats stung. The haze dimmed the sun, seeping everywhere like a “beast you couldn’t stab,” as one account put it. Panicked, some residents piled into cars and headed for the foothills. In…

In 1985, a California man made a travel blunder so epic that it put him 6,600 miles off course. Michael Lewis, a 21-year-old college student from Sacramento, was returning home from a vacation in West Germany. He arrived aboard Air New Zealand’s London-to-Auckland flight at Los Angeles International Airport, where the passengers disembarked so the plane could…

The world’s largest tree by volume is a giant sequoia in the Sierra Nevada called General Sherman. But a nearby settlement once knew it by a different name: the Karl Marx Tree. In the 1880s, a group of timber men conducted a grand experiment in utopian socialism known as the Kaweah Colony. Its leader, Burnette Haskell,…

Fingers of rock jutting from California’s coast have devoured thousands of ships over the centuries. Among the most voracious has been Point Reyes. The cape, diabolically, is the windiest and foggiest place on the West Coast, thrusting 10 miles out to sea just north of San Francisco. Countless lost passenger liners, schooners, and other vessels rest…

1. San Francisco Bay and the adjoining delta comprise the largest Pacific estuary in the Western Hemisphere. Depending on whether sub-bays are included, it covers about 550 square miles, roughly 50 miles long and 12 miles wide. It was formed during the waning of the last ice age, when rising seas spilled into the valley…

1In the 1990s, rave culture blossomed in Los Angeles. Before long, the ravers’ look — visors, pacifiers, phat pants — became a de facto dress code for dance parties across the country. The photographer Michael Tullberg was there from the start, capturing the thumping, blissed-out gatherings in thousands of long exposure pictures. He curated the…

San Diego is a natural paradise of tree-lined streets, lush parks, and homes covered in trellises of roses and bougainvillea. But the port city was once largely barren and brown. The genesis of its transformation arguably came in the winter of 1884. That’s when a young teacher named Kate Sessions arrived in town. Sessions grew…

Public shaming has been having a moment in California. In the last few months, a drumbeat of viral videos has subjected people behaving obnoxiously, at best, and abusively, at worst, to the internet outrage machine. There’s been, among other cases, the Sacramento man who accosted a Laotian senior citizen for wearing a camouflage shirt; the…

The territories of the Bureau of Land Management have sometimes been overlooked by nature lovers. The best spots, the thinking goes, were snapped up long ago by homesteaders or the more glamorous forest and park services. Yet the B.L.M. oversees roughly 15 percent of California’s landmass — more than 23,000 square miles — which includes…

1. On Highway 99 between Merced and Fresno, a peculiar pairing of trees rises from the center median. A palm tree and a cedar tree stand side by side, like companions, the only two trees along a stretch otherwise filled with oleander shrubs. The origin story of the trees is murky. But some researchers think…

1 The boisterous sounds of Latin American jungles echo across California. They come from flocks of brightly colored parrots of at least 10 different species that have made an unlikely home in the arid state. Their origins in California date back as far as the 1940s, when parrots arrived via the pet trade. Over time,…

Climatologists are predicting a scorcher of a summer across California. The weather would follow a season of meager rainfall and higher-than-normal temperatures beginning last fall that was among the driest on record in the state’s southern reaches. It all spells trouble for a state still recovering from its most destructive year of fire on record.…

In the early days of Gold Rush California, murder and mayhem were the order of the day. And for a time, perhaps no class of rogues spread so much terror as the Australian ex-convicts of San Francisco. Thousands of Aussies crossed the Pacific to try their luck in the goldfields. Many gained honest employment, worked…

In 1979, a Los Angeles man decided to get a personalized license plate that would express his love of sailing — and ended up with 2,500 parking tickets. Here’s what happened: Robert Barbour requested plates that would read either “SAILING” or “BOATING.” But the DMV form contained a line for a third choice. Barbour didn’t have…

While filming “Mrs. Doubtfire” in the early 1990s, Robin Williams would walk around San Francisco in full makeup and costume. On one occasion, according to his telling, he walked into a sex shop and tried to buy a double-headed dildo. “Just because,” he explained in an online Q&A. “Why not? And the guy was about to sell it to…

1 San Diego has the most predictable weather in the continental U.S. That’s according to an analysis by the statisticians at FiveThirtyEight. They measured weather variability across three categories — temperature, precipitation, and severe weather — in 120 American cities, one for each of the country’s National Weather Service forecast offices. Cities in the Midwest…

Every Hass avocado in the world traces to a single tree planted by a Los Angeles-area mail carrier in 1926. Rudolph Hass had purchased some seedlings of unknown origin and planned to use them as rootstock on which to graft another avocado variety. But one of them didn’t take. A few years later, according to one version…