1 week Ago
In early April of 2008, environmentalist Dan Haifley, who had spoken to the Sentinel editors about doing a regular column on the coast and ocean, asked me if I wanted to share this with him and write a story on alternate weekends. Haifley is a local coastal hero and long-time environmental activist. He was the executive director of Save Our Shores from 1986-1993, and as much as any other individual, led the effort to create the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary.
He was also directed the O’Neill Sea Odyssey for 20 years, which has offered an oceanography and ecology educational program for school kids in the bay. I was honored to be asked by Haifley, and while I had some concerns about how long I might be able to come up with stuff to write about, I said sure, I’ll give it a shot. That was over 16 years ago now, and this is my 432nd column.
I will say that the topics, stories and events keep coming, and there never has been a week when I felt I had run out of things to write about. There are, without question, some topics that I have felt were important enough that I’ve touched on them numerous times — such as climate change and sea level rise, beaches and coastal erosion. There are also stories that have taken more than a single weekend column to tell, like the amazing adventures of Shackleton in the Antarctic and Nansen in the Arctic.
And then the three local kids who “borrowed” a 52-foot ketch and sailed it to Puerta Vallarta, Mexico, in 1938. There were also some wonderful stories written by a very special local guy, World War II pilot, fisherman, art teacher and harbor man, the late Ed Larson, that I tried to retell, but could never match his poetic prose. I only wish I had met him 20 years earlier.
I am also indebted to Bill Simpkins, a local sailor and waterman, who has on more than a few occasions, given me stories or information that he felt might make an interesting column or several in some cases. There have also been many columns describing how many local beaches and other coastal features got their names: Yellow Bank or Panther Beach, Moore’s Beach, Mitchell’s Cove, Castle Beach, Woods Lagoon and Schwann Lake, Johann’s Beach, Corcoran Lagoon and Moran Lake, Hooper’s Beach and Pot Belly Beach, to name a few. And for many of these histories I am indebted to the late Donald Clark, who was the University’s first librarian and spent years researching a wonderful resource published in 1986 – Santa Cruz County Place Names.
He painstakingly and meticulously researched the history of nearly every beach, stream, road, school, hill, grove, gulch, wharf, trail, park, spring, canyon, creek, camp, ridge, pass and a whole lot more. The 552 pages aren’t exactly a novel, but more like a very interesting local history encyclopedia. Clark followed this a few years later with Monterey County Place Names, another invaluable reference.
Both are fascinating reads although somewhat challenging to find copies of today. If you find one, grab it. The Seymour Marine Discovery Center at the University’s Coastal Science Campus has been kind enough to post every one of these columns on their website, so just in case you happened to miss one, there are all accessible at: seymourcenter.
ucsc.edu/ouroceanbackyard . The columns are arranged under several general headings: Climate Change; The Global Ocean; Energy and Power – Moving to Renewable Energy; Coastal Erosion, Protection, and Shoreline Change; Beaches; Coastal Geology; Waves, Currents and Sea-Level Rise; Natural Disasters; History of Monterey Bay; Sea Life; and “Other” for stories that didn’t neatly fit into one of the other categories.
In 2014, thanks to my talented wife and partner, Deepika Shrestha Ross, we assembled the first five years of Ocean Backyard Columns and published them as a book – “Our Ocean Backyard Collected Essays.” In 2019, we put together the next five years in “Our Ocean Backyard Collected Essays Volume 2.” Both collections are available at Bookshop Santa Cruz, the Ocean Discovery Shop at the Seymour Marine Discovery Center and not unexpectedly, on Amazon.
We have just completed publication of the 3rd volume of collected stories, “Our Ocean Backyard Collected Essays Volume 3,” that includes the last five years. The book is being printed now although it may take a week, but is available for preorder now through Bookshop Santa Cruz, the Seymour Marine Discovery Center and Amazon. Gary Griggs is a Distinguished Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at UC Santa Cruz.
He can be reached at [email protected]. For past Ocean Backyard columns, visit https://seymourcenter.
ucsc.edu/ouroceanbackyard..
