#tehachapi mountains

CA 58, California

cougar by randomtruth

Excerpt from this story from The Nature Conservancy:

As the golden hour fades to dusk in the Tehachapi Mountains, Evan King, a wildlife biologist from the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, crouches behind a lichen-speckled boulder, eyes locked on a doe tottering around some blue oak trees. Within minutes, the deer is down on a dewy patch of grass, the result of a carefully placed tranquilizer dart.

The countdown begins.

King and colleague Abby Gwinn have roughly an hour before they must inject a reversal drug to rouse Bambi from her slumber. And they have a long list ahead of them. Administer oxygen. Register vital signs and body measurements. Extract DNA. Load her up on vitamin E and selenium for recovery and to address nutrient deficiencies. Affix a pair of ear tags for identification. And most importantly, attach a radio collar that will ping every few hours with location data.

Their work complete, mule deer #8372 bounds away, now one of dozens of deer that biologists will track across California’s Tehachapi and Southern Sierra Nevada region. The information gathered will help the state estimate population numbers, track home range and movement patterns, and log birth and mortality rates—all crucial drivers for managing deer and species such as mountain lions who prey on them.

Tagging wildlife is old hat for King and Gwinn, but this particular excursion is somewhat of a new experience. The Tehachapis, located at the southernmost end of the Sierra Nevada, are covered with a patchwork of generations-old cattle ranches, many of which have been out of researchers’ grasp. This area has been a massive scientific question mark of sorts. Now, biologists have a unique opportunity to fill in the blanks. “Being able to access and do work on this preserve is just phenomenal,” says King. “It really allows us to know information about deer that we’ve never been able to access before.”

King is referring to The Nature Conservancy’s new Frank and Joan Randall Preserve, named late last year after the philanthropists whose $50 million gift turbocharged a roughly 20-year effort by TNC to permanently protect this region—and crucial wildlife corridor—from the reaches of rapidly encroaching development. The preserve currently includes more than 77,000 acres located in the heart of the Tehachapis and at the intersection of four iconic California landscapes.

Ahundred miles north of Los Angeles, four ecozones—the mountainous Sierra Nevada, the grassy Central Valley, the arid Mojave Desert and the chaparral-clad South Coast—converge near the Tehachapi Mountains to form a biodiversity Shangri-La. Here lies the special sauce of Randall Preserve.

I have been reading Nan Shephard’s brief tome, “The Living Mountain”. Originally published in 1977, Shephard observes that more and more of us live more and more separately from contact with nature.  We have forgotten that our minds are shaped by the bodily experience of being in the world (along with our genetic traits we inherit and ideologies we absorb).  “This is the innocence we have lost,” she says, “living in one sense at a time to live all the way through.”  Her book is a hymn to ‘living all the way through’:  to touching, tasting, smelling and hearing the world.

Walking the PCT offers an opportunity to reclaim our relationship with the natural world.  She makes a case for total immersion . . . “I walk therefore I am.” It necessitates unlearning many behaviors including the preoccupation many of us PCT hikers have with making miles, with reaching the border, with staying connected with the outside world.  And, it is hard because there are increasingly few places that humankind has not touched.  You turn a corner on the PCT and:

Joshua Tree in the Snow by pjink11 on Flickr.