Pearl – by – Pearl
Restoring the forest one shrub at a time
We camped that night at the Coon Creek jump-off — a group campground that ends in a spectacular, unbarricaded drop of a few thousand feet into the canyon below. An open-air stone lodge housed the DJ’s equipment in preparation for an onslaught of kids with high-clearance vehicles, but the party wasn’t happening. With our host, Orlando, we waited and wondered, but it finally dawned on us that no one else was headed up. As the sun lowered into the mountains and we studied the blanket of white beneath us, we understood why: People on their way up the road were slogging through rain turning to snow and back to rain again, and giving up with the conviction that the weather would only get worse.
They were so wrong. At 8,000 feet, the weather would have cleared, and they would have been here, with us, looking down at what Thoreau called “an undulating country of clouds.” And so the one DJ who’d braved the weather played anyway, and we opened a bottle of wine and made a pot of pasta, and we danced. Under that mountaintop view of the stars and planets, we decided that the metaphor of the pearl didn’t apply to everything: It may have taken many hands to plant a hillside in the mountains, but we only needed each other to make a party.
The Big Bear Greenthumbs Native Plant Restoration Volunteer Program has several events scheduled throughout the year, including seed collection, cleanup and tree planting. For information, contact Linda Stamer at the U.S. Forest Service, (909) 866-3437, Ext. 3301.
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