Author: Ruby Rodríguez

By Ana Beatriz Cholo

I had no idea what a National Park was when I was a kid. My family didn’t camp or hike. This probably sounds weird but I don’t think I even knew about the concept of walking up hills or mountains for fun until I was much, much older.

My experience growing up as a first-generation immigrant in the United States and not having done all of this stuff is not uncommon, however. It turns out a lot of my mostly Latino friends didn’t get into the outdoors until they left home.

My parents immigrated to the United States in their 20s; my dad from Colombia, and my mom from Brazil. They met at an ESL class in New York City in the mid-1960s. My mom had grown up in one of the largest cities in the world, São Paulo. The area where my father grew up, just outside of Bogota, the nation’s capital, was slightly less urban.  

When I think of experiencing nature for the first time, I think of ants. As a small child, I would quietly sit and watch all the ants that would scurry around on the sidewalk outside our gritty apartment building. Sometimes I would pick them up in order to examine them more closely.

When we moved to a pink house in Southern California, nature for me became the grass in our backyard, the orange, lemon and avocado trees and the occasional, but rare, beach outing. I was in Girl Scouts in fifth grade just long enough to get the green uniform. I dropped out shortly after I realized I would not be allowed to participate in most of the activities. My strict Latino father made it clear that there would be no sleeping outside on the ground for me when I could sleep in a perfectly good bed under a roof.

And there would be no discussion about it, either. “That stuff is for boys,” my father told me gruffly.

In high school, I took a Life Science class. I can’t remember if I even made it to taking a college course Biology class. I think I have fuzzy, painful memories of being bored to death and how bad formaldehyde smelled.

So how did I end up with a job writing and taking photos about the National Park Service? The answer, I would say, is a combination of fortune, fate, a willingness to make sacrifices, a strong desire to work outdoors and a commitment to service. My official title is Senior Writer and my employer is the Santa Monica Mountains Fund, a non-profit committed to supporting the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area. My first day on the job was February 13, 2018, and so far, I can attest to it being an adventure.

I work at the largest urban national park in the country. We’re located outside Los Angeles, a gigantic metropolis of 16 million people.

In a way, I feel like my most important task is to break down the great work that we do and share it to the public in an engaging way. In my former life, I was a news reporter for large newspapers and, in some ways, my current job is similar.

The perks of my job are many.

For instance, my colleagues are so smart, knowledgeable and nerdy in the best way possible. My cubicle is next to a biologist who researches mountain lions for a living. Out of all the study projects at our park, that is the one that garners the most attention from the media and general public. Next to him is the bobcat biologist and then the herps biologist. I regularly eavesdrop on all of their conversations and, by doing so, I am learning about science in a way that is more applicable to the real world.  

Part of my job entails explaining their work and taking lots of photos. Therefore, on some days, I get to play amateur biologist or ecologist or trail worker. We have almost 100 employees here!

It’s really cool to get up close and personal with the local wildlife. A few months ago, I held a California newt in my hand. This creature is a salamander that has toxins so poisonous on its skin that it can kill you if ingested. I thought it was super cute. Later that day, I found a tick embedded in my back and another one crawling around on my skin. That was creepy.  

I’ve handled snakes, lizards and California red-legged frogs in the wild and witnessed several necropsies of bobcats and coyotes. I’ve helped restore native plants and, as part of trail work, I’ve wielded a weed trimmer and helped tidy up part of the Backbone Trail, a 67-mile trail that spans our mountains from east to west.

One day, I spent hours taking data on how plants are coming back to life in an area that was impacted by a devastating wildfire. It was fascinating how my colleague was able to identify and rattle off the name of hundreds of plants (including their scientific names)!

Not every day is spent in the field, however. In fact, most days I’m sitting behind a desk. I write press releases, update the mountain lion profiles on our website and answer questions from the public on random questions like “Can you identify the bird in this photo?” to “why does a tarantula molt?”. Writing social media posts that engage is fun and challenging, like one that explained the odd habits of toe biters – weird, but fascinating insects – that live in our local streams. The news media loved that one. They picked it up and it made national news!

I’m still fairly new at this job and there’s so much more I want to do. I’m in my 40s and I’m living proof that it’s never too late to start a new career.  Even my youngest son Jude, who has special needs, is excited about my job. He recently experienced how rewarding it can be to work as an interpretive ranger when he shared our pet tarantula, Ozzy, with other young children during a tarantula hike and talked to them about it.

When I see fourth graders coming into our park, I know that for many of them, it’s their first time being out in the mountains and I see myself in them. That could have been me but those programs didn’t exist when I was a kid. I wonder – is there something we can we do to get their parents to come out here, too? And as someone who works in Public Affairs, what can I do to help make that happen?

I don’t know the answer and, perhaps, that’s a blog post topic for another day.

In the meantime, I’m living the dream by sharing information to a diverse public about our amazing public lands. In my mind, nothing beats being able to grab my iPhone, throw on a pair of hiking boots, get on a trail and call it work!

How lucky am I?     

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To learn more about Ana visit her Instagram:

Also just recently, an article Ana Beatriz Cholo wrote the Alpinist Magazine “The Accidental Mountaineer” was chosen for Notables List for Best American Sports Writing of 2017.

 

By Luis Villa

“Luis, ¿crees que estarás bien?” “Luis, will you be ok?”

I was asked this on several occasions as my time in Costa Rica drew to a close.  I had been living there for twelve years, immersed in its abundant natural beauty.  Around 25% of this Central American country’s land area is conserved as a national park or other nationally-protected area.  Tropical forests cover approximately half of Costa Rica.  Similar in size to the state of West Virginia, it hosts roughly the same number of bird species as does all of North America.

Many Costa Ricans inherently understand the wellness benefits associated with having close contact with nature and the outdoors.  The aforementioned question was posed to me with this in mind.  The people asking it understood that moving back to Los Angeles, meant going to a place that did not offer quite the same access to a trail, river, or forest as what I had grown accustomed to.  I probably reinforced this understanding shortly after returning to southern California.  From a pedestrian overpass, I snapped a picture of the L.A. River below me, sharing it with friends and family in Costa Rica.  They had never before seen a river with its banks and stream bed covered in concrete.  I tried in vain to highlight the lone sea gull in the image as evidence of a healthy, living riparian ecosystem, but folks simply responded with incredulous texts.

Despite unnatural looking rivers, my answer to all who ask if I will be OK in L.A. is “¡claro que sí!”, “yes, of course!”

More than a decade of total immersion in Costa Rica’s explicit, all-encompassing nature has made me more appreciative of the subtler instances of the natural world and outdoors beauty that occur in urban settings such as L.A. (including solitary sea gulls).  I have never been more aware of and enthralled by all the gorgeous trees lining southern California streets, the abundance of neighborhood birds singing in the mornings, and the San Gabriel Mountains National Monument, replete with exceptional outdoors recreational opportunities, serving as a majestic northern backdrop to the greater Los Angeles metropolitan area.  In fact, my first outing with Latino Outdoors was a hike in these mountains, a little over an hour’s drive for me. Thanks to my keen awareness that a trek into this wilder part of L.A. County is not an everyday thing for me, I savored it in the way that a famished backpacker relishes their rationed out meals.

So ¡claro que sí!  I know I’ll be OK as long as I maintain a deep appreciation for subtle nature and an outdoors that is not always readily accessible.

The rest of the LO team and I invite the support of everyone who shares our enthusiasm for getting diverse communities of people outdoors and doing away with real and perceived barriers to nature.  We thank all people and organizations who already contribute in many different ways.