#ventura-hills-nature-preserve

#ventura-hills-nature-preserve

The fire was reported in the 15900 block of Gilman Springs Road in Riverside County, just before 11 a.m. Gusty Santa Ana winds were forecast for much of Southern California on Friday.

Get up early to drive into the hills and park in the main lot, which opens 30 minutes before sunrise. This will leave you with enough time to make your way to the peak through the wildflower-scattered trails and watch the sunrise over the Bay.

For 2025, there was good news and bad news: overall, these areas were visited 323 million times over the course of the year. That's the good news; the bad news is that this figure was down ever so slightly - specifically, 2.7% - from a record-setting 2024.

Named after the legendary Big Sur female pioneer and rancher, Julia Pfeiffer Burns State Park stands out even among the rest of the region's attractions. The park features stands of centuries-old redwood trees and provides a haven for a variety of California wildlife, though it's best known for the 80-foot-high McWay Falls, an impressive cascade that drops directly from a sheer cliff to the sandy beach below.

Formal groundbreaking for the Ahmanson Ranch project, a town-style development on 2,800 acres in the Simi Hills in southeastern Ventura County, will not take place until 2001. However, the project has already achieved historic status for the size of the private-to-public land transfer it produced and for reviving a design concept that marks a major departure from the car-dependent suburban enclave typical of the postwar era.

As a SoCal resident, I visit Anza-Borrego at least once a year to explore the sandstone Slot canyon and surrounding desert, keeping an eye out for animals like chuckwalla lizards and bighorn sheep. Despite its incredibly dry environment (the park averages just four to eight inches of rain a year, and summertime temps routinely hit the hundreds), Anza-Borrego teems with life and opportunities to explore one of the nation's most unique ecosystems.

Ganesha Hills is a neighborhood of some 500 homes described by one resident as 'the San Gabriel Valley's best-kept secret.' Named for the elephant-headed Hindu god of good fortune, Ganesha Hills is situated in the rolling hills north of the San Bernardino Freeway (10), just east of the Orange (57) Freeway. The community of single-family homes in a variety of architectural styles set amid chaparral and oaks is in the northwestern section of Pomona bordering La Verne and San Dimas.

Out of an abundance of caution, access is being paused to give wildlife space and allow for ongoing monitoring. The investigation involves scientists from UC Santa Cruz and UC Davis, along with California State Parks, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, the California Department of Food and Agriculture, the California Department of Public Health, the California Marine Mammal Stranding Network, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and NOAA Fisheries.

It looked like the silvery blade of a knife. Peering through his goggles, diver Ted Judah had laid eyes on a deep-sea creature rarely encountered by humans. He and wife Linda were diving off McAbee Beach in Monterey County in late December when, near the surface, he spotted the undulating thing. It was some kind of ribbon fish, he wrote in a post on the Facebook group Monterey County Dive Reports. Kevin Lewand solved the mystery.

If that sounds like a dry lab statistic, here's the part you'll actually remember: Lyme is one of those infections that can make you feel like you got hit by a truck. Feverish. Wiped out. Achy. Foggy. And it can start as the kind of "I'm just run down" stretch that people blow off for a week or two - especially when it's winter and everyone's tired anyway.

Welcome to Shangri-La-Dee-Da. This aptly named 58-acre estate offers its future owners a real shot at reinvention. They could become stewards of (a rather large chunk of) the Earth; they could raise, ride and train horses. Maybe they'll decide to grow grapes and make their own wine. Or, they can become event planners or hosts, offering our one-of-a-kind location for celebrations. Conceivably, they could do all of these things at 3970 Leavesley Road in Gilroy - that's the magic of the Shangi-La-Dee-Da.

A long, winding path takes guests around and under felled trees. Aged gray tree hunks form arches, for instance, over bridges that tower over clay-colored paths with hoof prints. The design is meant to reorient us, to take us on a trail walked not by humans but traversed and carved by elephants, a creature still misunderstood, vilified and hunted for its cataclysmic-like ability to reshape land, and sometimes communities.

First came the heavy winter rains that soaked the soil. Then, the sunny weather not too hot, but just warm enough to fuel the growth. A few more winter rainfalls and Southern California could be ripe for an epic wildflower season in the coming weeks and months. And when they bloom the vibrant colors popping from rolling hills as far as the eye can see thousands of people are bound to seek out their beauty, if past years are any indication.

For the last decade, wildlife biologists have been using remote camera and scat surveys to track the movements of the fox in the southern Sierra. For the last three years, they have been carrying out intensive trapping efforts. But the fox has proved stubbornly difficult to capture. The speedy and delicate species is extremely wary of humans. The few remaining individuals live in barren, rugged terrain at high elevations.

I felt like a hawk catching a gentle breeze as I flew about 400 feet over the oak woodlands and ranchland below me. I was harnessed into the first of three zip lines available at Highline Adventures near Buellton, an expansive adventure park where Californians of every age can find something fun to do - including zooming down the fastest zip line in the state.

The water bubbles up hot from the earth and sunlight filters down through the branches of mighty oaks. But before you can soak in Santa Barbara County's highly popular Montecito Hot Springs, you'll need to hike a little over a mile uphill, threading your way among boulders, oaks and a meandering creek. And before the hike, there are two other crucial steps: getting to the trailhead and knowing what to expect.