But I Also Really Mean the Other Part

California is plummeting into a politically engineered decline, but I mean to say that it’s both magnificent and a disaster. Both of those realities live side by side.

That’s my favorite campground, somewhere in a part of Humboldt County that’s not easy to reach. On the other side of those dunes:

At sunset, or at the pre-sunset sunset when the sun drops behind the marine layer…

…the hills that enclose the beach light up with the late evening sunlight.

Miles of beach with no one around.

Nearby, the mouth of a river that’s currently a coastal lagoon, lacking the volume to breach the sandbar:

If you head upriver a bit in the evening:

Later, running out of time, we raced up to the string of redwood parks north of Eureka and divided a long day between the extraordinary groves and the coastal trails.

A miracle that extractive cronyism, single-party machine politics, and batshit ideology have made this so painful to tolerate. I can show you a bunch of misery and ruin within easy driving distance of all these places, and the population all around the places you see in these pictures is stagnant. It’s quite an accomplishment.