Park Number: 10/63

First Visited: November 19, 2010

We stripped our clothes, bolting down the coast, our bare feet flapping and slapping against reflective sand. Everything flapping. But what did we care? This island, our island, was free from the haunt of any judger's judgement or any gazer's gaze. We were alone with only the miniature foxes and island scrub jays.

It was hard to imagine such solitude while being on a landmass still visible from the Los Angeles area, but this was a place the frontier forgot: California as it would have looked pre-settlement. We breathed it in, let the salt water breeze soothe our skin, and hiked back in the dark. There was nothing to fear, not out here, human or otherwise.

Channel Islands is ancestral lands to the Chumash Tribe.

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