Elk Rut

Rocky Mountain National Park, Colorado. Last weekend I had the wonderful opportunity of camping and filming within Rocky Mountain National Park during the elk rut. Here is a small teaser of the footage - more to come!

Beautiful Central California

Monterey, California. So, I've been a bit lazy in updating the ole' blog lately, but things have been good. My buddy Rob 'Rabbit' Schaffer visited a few weeks back and we had some great adventures hiking in the Ventana Wilderness, biking in wine country, surfing and kayaking. Here are a few ridiculous little video clips we threw together during the visit.

The story behind the first video "A Message to Boca" is pretty simple. Our buddy, Boca, was going to come along on the trip, but bailed at the last minute. The references for signs are due to the fact that, well, he makes signs for a living. The second video is pretty self explanatory. It's Death Rabbit. Unleashed.

An After Work Hike

Soberanes Canyon Trail, Garrapata State Park, California. Location of trailhead: Latitude 36.4387, Longitude -121.9203.

The signs at the trailheads in this region warn of mountain lions, rattlesnakes and poison oak. I seem to be impervious to the latter and am only exhilarated by the possibility of seeing the first two. I consider these types of signs to be more about the “best stuff to see” as opposed to any message of caution I should heed. A few years back, while hiking at Kenai Glacier in Alaska, I was amazed and amused by the bear warning signs posted by the National Park Service. Apparently, if at any times a bear “begins to feed on you”, you should “fight back”. Brilliant! To be fair though, the rest of the sign did give some pretty good advice as well as helpful information on the behavioral differences between black and brown bears.

Now, on the trails here in Central California, I did end up seeing one of those rattlesnakes. It was this past Easter, while on a hike through Garland Ranch Regional Park, in Carmel Valley. It was a small guy, for sure, but my very first rattler, so I was thrilled. Today, on the other hand, I had no such luck, but nonetheless was not left disappointed.

After leaving work at 5pm in Monterey, I headed down the PCH past Carmel Heights to a beautiful ocean overlook where the trailhead for Soberanes Canyon Trail begins. You enter Garrapata State Park as soon as you walk off the road, but this is evident only from a single sign post – there are no facilities or elaborate trail markers here. The trail winds up the canyon, following a stream along the way and , at this time of day, the air was buzzing with damselflies and stellar jays. After briefly passing through oak chaparral, the canyon winds through a valley of prickly pear cactus, through some riparian vegetation and then empties into a magnificent redwood forest a la the moon of Endor (minus any signs of Ewoks).

After spending some time among the redwoods, billows of fog began to roll in and the sky darkened with the approaching dusk. I had a mind to turn around, but noted that a few couples that passed me by while I stopped for photos had not come back this way. So, I guessed a loop trail and moved onward. I was greatly rewarded, as the best was yet to come. The trail eventually rises up from the redwood forest and onto the grassy slopes above tree line. From this vantage point, one can see how the redwood groves line the interiors of narrow canyons, and then quickly fade off as the slopes open up. The trail here rises high into the Santa Lucia Mountains, the slopes of which are alive with wildflowers at this time of the year. California poppies, composites and lupines were a few I recognized, but my recollection does not do them justice. It is a orgy of color up there and, as one climbs higher, a spectacular vista of the sea opens behind you, making the Pacific look like nothing more than a great, glassy pond.

Continuing upward, I feared that I had chosen wrongly as dusk settled deep on the backside of the mountain. But as I neared the summit, a still late afternoon sun greeted me, illuminating the rocky outcrops and flowered slopes in bright gold, scattered almost mystically through patches of fog. Although far above the sea now, the bellows of sea lions could yet be heard, their raucous barking radiating from an offshore pair of islets. I encountered a rabbit, a black-tailed deer and numerous western fence lizards.

The descent is on the front side of the mountain, exposed to the sun and ocean, so barren of trees. In one obscure spot, a carved bench sits on an outcropping. Through a friend I heard that on one night of every week, hikers meet here with bottles of wine to watch the sun go down. I had no wine, but the sun did set for me as I descended back down to the road. Funny, I kind of regret not having been caught up there past dark - I’d love to still be roaming those hills.

New Home in Monterey

Monterey, California.  Over the past couple of weeks I have been relocating my entire life from Los Angeles to Monterey by way of Florida.  I've also switched from a PC to a Mac.  Here is a ridiculous video clip of my new home.  It was my first attempt fooling around with iMovie, thus the overuse of transitions and silly sound effects... 

Back to Cali

San Francisco, California.  After a cross-continental flight from Florida yesterday, it seems I am back in California again.  And this time apparently for good.  In coming weeks, I'll be starting a new job on the Central Coast and will post an update here as that develops. 

In the meantime, if you are following this season of 24, keep an eye out for Rick Schimmelpfenneg and me (Arlo Hemphill) this coming Monday in the showdown scene at the Starkwood complex.

  Rick plays a Starkwood Op and I'm a Navy Seal, in camo and face paint.  If you want to pick either of us out, you may need to employ your pause button and a magnifying glass.  The scene is dark and judging from its beginnings in last week's episode, one guy in camo and face paint looks like them all...

Also, if you haven't yet caught the episode of Spike TV's 1,000 Ways to Die "Death Gets Busy" - you have another opportunity.  Watch me die of cocoa inhalation this Sunday night (April 5th) at 7:00pm.

On other fronts, I'm now on Twitter!  Follow me at: http://www.twitter.com/arlohemphill.  Finally, the Name Your Dream Assignment Contest is winding down. Your vote for Patagonia See is much appreciated before time runs out!

To Sea Patagonia

Melbourne, Florida. The Patagonia Sea (southwestern Atlantic), is one of the most spectacular marine ecoregions on the planet. What it lacks in biodiversity, it more 

than makes up for in productivity and immense aggregations of marine wildlife.  Elephant seals, penguins, sea lions, whales and other megafauna congregate in mass in what can only be referred to as wildlife spectacles. But like many parts of the ocean today, this sea is in trouble. Overfishing, harmful fishing practices, pollution and inadequate management measures threaten this unique area, much of which is still poorly understood.

As a means to raise awareness on and document the conservation status of the Patagonian Sea coast, I am proposing an expedition to traverse Argentina’s coastline from north to south by non-motorized means.  Traveling by kayak and foot (and possibly to a limited extent horseback, bicycle and sail), I plan take photographs, video,

 interviews and collect scientific data on water quality and biodiversity along the way. My proposed starting point for this journey will be the magnificent Iguaçu Falls at the intersect of Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay. From there, I will work my way by kayak down the Rio Paraná, important in terms of its role as the major source of freshwater discharge into the Patagonian Sea.

Upon reaching the Rio de la Plata, I will then set out by foot, from Buenos to Tierra del Fuego. And this journey is intended to be shared with you. As often as possible, I will upload blog/vlog posts here and on my wilderness blog Walk on the Wild Side. This will be the first stage of a dream to transform this blog from sideline reporting on wilderness news, to an actual day to day account of walking through the wild.

You can help make this dream a reality by voting online for Patagonia See at the Name Your Dream Assignment contest! Additionally, the expedition is in need of all kinds of support ranging from in-kind donations of website construction, to field gear, to actual monetary donations that will support the travel, science and subsistence costs. Please feel free to direct any inquiries or offers of support or collaboration to me, Arlo Hemphill: arlo@arlohemphill.com

The impetus behind this adventure stems from my belief that our oceans are in dire trouble. One means to combat this crisis is to address human activities on the ocean at the scale of large marine ecosystems, of which the Patagonian Sea represents a distinct unit.

But this adventure is also the culmination of a passion that was instilled in me for the wildlife and landscape of Patagonia. I first visited the region in early 2005 when, as a marine program manager for Conservation International, I was invited down to explore some of the wild coastline. It was love at first sight. And my first visit shortly turned into a regular relationship as a steering committee member on the Forum for the Conservation of the Patagonia Sea and Areas of Influence. The pictures of me included with this post are from that time.

One of my fondest adventures in the region was with Dr. Claudio Campagna, director of the Wildlife Conservation Society's Sea and Sky Program. I joined Claudio on the Peninsula Valdes and with him had the opportunity to track down a tagged southern elephant seal Mirounga leonina using radio telemetry. The young seal in question also wore a satellite tag and our quest was to remove this tag to access the invaluable oceanographic data collected over a season at sea. In the picture above the young female is temporarily incapacitated after being tranquilized for the removal of the device. The photo here to the right was taken on one of Patagonia’s Estancias, which are large shepherding ranches.

The animal in my company is a young guanaco Lama guanicoe, one of South America’s four species of camel. This particular individual was semi-domesticated, living in association with the Estancia. However, these animals range wild throughout this landscape and are bountiful.

Looking ahead, I see the most challenging portion of this trek to be the lower third of the Argentine coast. It is a wild, harsh landscape with low human population density and miles upon miles of trackless, near-desert wilderness. It is this, and the unknown that lies therein, that draws me more than anything. I appreciate your help in moving this adventure forward and I look forward to sharing this time with you through this blog.

Photo Credits: Arlo and elephant seal (Natalia Machain), Maps of Argentina (Forum for the Conservation of the Patagonian Sea and Areas of Influence, www.worldatlas.com, MSN Encarta), Iguaçu Falls (Wikipidia), Arlo and guanaco (Rodolfo "Bubu" Werner)

Take a Walk on the Wild Side

Melbourne, Florida. For the past week, I've been traveling around coastal California. First stop was Monterey, followed by Los Angeles and then returning north to San Francisco. Despite the trip back west and the momentum from the recent television appearances, it looks like I'm going to spend at least another month here in Florida. Life has been good on the sleepy Space Coast and I'm getting a lot of writing done. So, I'm going to stay put for a bit.

Recently, I was considering changing the name of this blog and reformatting it for a wilderness theme. I've always enjoyed posting about my travels as well as sharing thoughts on conservation, exploration and why wilderness is so important. My time here in Florida has really brought this back to the forefront and I thought it might make more sense to streamline the theme for a particular audience (sorry, I don't mean to offend any of you Arlo Hemphill acting/wildlife enthusiasts, but the two are generally distinct interests - lol!). However, Where is Arlo Now?? has also been a great place to share performance clips on my acting and update you on my life in general. Now how could I do away with that?

I couldn't, so I've compromised. I've created a brand new blog dedicated to discussing wilderness exploration and conservation:

Walk on the Wild Side

You can find this at http://walkwildside.blogspot.com or you can follow it via Facebook.

My camera has been busted for the past couple weeks, so at the moment the new blog is primarily story and newsfeed-oriented. However, I do intend to employ more of a vlog or vlog/blog format once the camera is repaired. Also, just as a heads up, there may be posts that I put on both Where is Arlo Now?? and Walk on the Wild Side. In particular, postings that focus on my personal explorations through wilderness areas might be relevant to both sites. Either way, I invite you to check the new site out!

Before I wrap this post up, I do want to comment on the above cheetah photo. I took this picture at the Nairobi Animal Orphanage in 2000. I had been visiting Kenya for a conference on mangroves, held in the coastal city of Mombasa. On the return trip, I spent a day in Nairobi and took the opportunity to visit Nairobi National Park. The orphanage is just outside the park boundaries and I was the only visitor that day. A friendly conversation started up with the facility's director and he invited me for a "special treat". The treat turned out to be a personal visit inside one of the cages where three cheetah cubs were being kept. Their mother had been shot on a local farm the week before and the orphans were brought here for care before hopefully being released back into the wild someday. I was able to spend some time playing with the cubs and this picture was my favorite from the experience.

Choke Patrica Arquette

San Francisco, California. Check out these recent television appearances of Arlo Hemphill on Medium and 1,000 Ways to Die. On Medium, Arlo briefly appears as the Assistant D.A. To view the episode, go to: http://www.nbc.com/Medium/video/episodes/#vid=1048870 . Arlo's scene is in the last "chapter" (or last 15 minutes if you are watching it on tv or via a different source). The scene is a party at the police station and D.A. Devalos (Miguel Sandovalis) is speaking with the medium, Allison Dubois (Patricia Arquette). Arlo approaches D.A. Devalos and leads him away for a phone call during the conversation.

On 1,000 Ways to Die, Arlo plays Karl, a dimwitted man who dies of asphyxiation during a cocoa powder food fight. Check out the scene via this clip:

Choke-A-Lot Movies & TV SPIKE.com

Pleistocene Park

Melbourne, Florida. It’s an early starry night on the Central Florida Coast. Venus sits off to the west, soaking up the last rays of the sun. Orion, my guardian, is directly overhead - forever chasing his Pleiades, while Sirius picks up the rear.

This past month has been a good time to think about Florida wildlife. I did an appliance commercial in Orlando last week and ended up driving there round trip from Melbourne for two days. Boca rode with me the first day and directed me along rural back roads he referred to as the “Cow Way”. Due to its remote feeling, I opted for this route for all four legs of my trip and was rewarded with some great roadside views of wildlife. There were raccoons, an armadillo, a bald eagle, and an entire flock of wild turkey, white-tailed deer and a team of sandhill cranes grazing in the roadside grass. One afternoon, back at home, I observed a mother osprey taking its fledgling out for a first flight. The young raptor was all screeches and manic flapping, while its elegant mother glided effortlessly below. I also saw a number of wild boars along the highway. And I don’t mean I saw two pigs. There were at least ten full size adults moving along with 20-30 tiny piglets that were running circles around their elders. Most of these were black as coal, but others were a shade of auburn that could almost be described as bright. I have a couple Florida friends who are big boar hunters – rifles, bows, ATVs, orange camouflage, the whole works. But I personally had not seen these animals before. It was somewhat of a surprise to encounter them grazing in the open, seemingly oblivious to human presence.

But wild boars are not native to Florida. They were introduced from Europe and in fact are a major pest. Ecologists claim that these animals are driving a localized extinction event as their pattern of uprooting vegetation is preventing sapling growth in South Florida’s last remaining tropical hardwood hammocks. I’d prefer to see them gone rather than to lose the native species of Florida’s natural heritage.

Now all this got me to thinking… While we might argue the European pigs shouldn’t be here, might there be animals that are not here and should be? During my undergraduate years at Palm Beach Atlantic University, I studied under a biology professor by the name of Peggy VanArman. Every year Dr. Peggy would take a few of us on a fossil hunting canoe trip along Florida’s Peace River. It’s your typical Central Florida waterway, lined with Spanish moss dusted cypress and littered with alligator. But this river hosts a bonanza of fossils – the remainder of animals both terrestrial and marine that roamed this part of the world in ages past. On a good day intrepid scavengers can scrounge up everything from camel vertebrae to the oversized teeth of Carcharodon megalodon - that monstrous pre-historic cousin of our present day great white shark. But what struck me the most back then was Peggy’s book on the fossils of Florida. The cover was an oil paint depiction of Pleistocene life in Florida. The landscape looked largely the same as today – sabal palms, palmettos, sawgrass and scrubby vegetation. But there was something unequivocally different about the Florida in this picture. Front and center in the landscape was a herd of giant pachyderms. Mammoths! And scattered about were other large mammals of the day, the relatives of horse, rhinos and camels that once roamed North America. It was an image that captured and has persisted in my imagination for years.

A few years back I had the pleasure of meeting a cool, young scientist by the name of Josh Donlan. Dr. Donlan published a fascinating, but highly controversial paper in the science journal Nature. The topic was on “rewilding” North America with megafauna - large land mammals. Such mammals, the likes of which are found primarily in Africa and Asia today, became extinct here in North America around 13,000 years ago, at the end of the Pleistocene. And the likely culprit? Us. Humans, upon entering North America for the first time, hunted them into oblivion. The basic premise of “rewilding” is that many of our existing plants and animals co-evolved with these large beasts and their absence creates an incomplete, somewhat less healthy, landscape ecology. The idea is to restore biological function lost to this continent millennia ago. Now, naturally, there is no way to bring back woolly mammoths, sabre-toothed cats and the other 60 some large mammals that went the way of the dodo. But what Donlan proposes is that we replace many of them with their nearest genetic (and theoretically ecological) equivalent. This would mean African elephants for mastodons, African lions and cheetahs for their American counterparts and so on. And the double-win for conservation would be providing a new home for these animals that are increasingly threatened with extinction in their modern ranges.

Although a thrilling prospect from my viewpoint, it is easy to see why this paper caused a bit of a stir. We’ve spent the past 500 years ridding the landscape of wolves, mountain lions, buffalo and grizzly bears to make way for the Wal-Marts and false sense of security of our sprawling suburban neighborhoods. The last thing the broader public wants to think about is how to deal with elephants and lions strolling up during a 4th of July backyard barbeque. But despite the improbability of gaining anything even resembling public support for this plan, I love it. It is the wilderness romantic in me. The concept somehow overrides any sense of precaution, common sense or otherwise “rational” thought I might loosely claim to sometimes have. It is beautiful, savage dream of a revived wilderness lost in time.

And this brings me back to the wide open land ranging between the Atlantic coast and Orlando. This is beautiful, wild Florida ranchland dotted with cypress domes, temperate forest and grasslands as far as the eye can see. Why not create a “Pleistocene Park” here? Why not test Donlan’s “rewilding” concept on a small, controlled scale? Conceptually, it would not be so different from the safari parks and game ranches that currently exist in both Florida and Texas. But this would be no microcosm of the Dark Continent created for the amusement of tourists or the trophy walls of middle class gunmen. This would be a replication of Florida – a Florida before Jimmy Buffett, before the Everglades were drained, before even the native Americans whose language persists in names like Okeechobee and Loxahatchee. This is the Florida before people.

African elephants and lions would be complimented by South American tapirs, guanacos, and capybaras (horse, camel and guinea pig relatives respectively, the ancestors of which all once roamed the Florida landscape). There might be herds of wild horse and, of course, the native alligator and Florida panther.
If a large enough landscape was bought up and fenced in so that these animals could range free rather than survive only in separated pens, it would be a fascinating ecological experiment. How would they interact with each other and with the native flora and fauna? Which species would thrive and which would become naturally “rare”? Would the landscape change under the influence of mighty pachyderms? Would social patterns become altered to adapt to the new (old) ecology?

But beyond scientific curiosity, such a park would be a valuable tool in better understanding this portion of the North American landscape. It could be an educational device for society, helping us better adapt to and co-exist with the natural world, rather than beating it into submission as has been our pattern over past millennia. Finally, it would be a genetic reservoir. A place from where, should anything unfortunately go wrong with us, nature in all of its majesty could spring forth again and repopulate. This is a wild dream in every sense of the word, but one I would love to see come true.

Images courtesy Carl Buell (Cornell University), Wild Florida and the Florida Museum

The Ibis and the Manatee

Melbourne, Florida. This past weekend, after spending some great time up in the wilds of the Santa Monica Mountains as well as working on a funny, new show called Party Down, I hopped on an airplane at LAX and headed to Melbourne, Florida. This is where Boca lives and where I’ll be spending the next couple of weeks, laying low and working on some writing projects.

Boca’s house, tucked off Route One in a forgotten hamlet alongside the Indian River Lagoon, is a throw-back to Old Florida; the Florida of Jimmy Buffet songs and wild, sometimes wacky pioneer spirits. How this hideaway has escaped the malignant condos and strip malls now universal along this coast, I don’t know. But there is a peace here, and in these first days of the Obama administration, there is hope – a green, sustainable hope.

Rather than condos, track homes, or the stately mansions of Palm Beach, the houses of Boca’s neighborhood are little more than wooden shacks, all built in the quaint Key West style with tin roofs, wide front porches and nestled within a bramble of subtropical vegetation. I’ve been taking a daily walk through the unpaved, limestone streets of the neighborhood. The road runs along the water, where abundant ibis, egrets, herons, wood storks and other water fowl wade in the shallows alongside the mangroves. Manatees are also common here. And yesterday, while exploring these wetlands, I discovered a man living among the trees. He has a tent, bookshelves and even paintings hanging from the entangled branches of the red mangrove. But these are not the stately mangroves of the Florida Keys – much less the towering giants one can see in Ecuador. But rather, they are squat, mushroom-like dwarf cousins, pushing the limits of their range into the colder north. Yet despite being nearly a two hour drive up coast from South Florida and its Caribbean-linked vegetation, the feeling here is still more tropical than not. Boca’s yard itself is a brambly, overgrown jungle full of strangler fig-encrusted sabal palms, live oaks adorned in Spanish moss, and a wiry maze of ferns, citrus, epiphytic cacti, a few subtropical hardwoods and rosary pea vines, which shed their painted seeds on my path as if taunting me with memories of tribal necklaces of the Amazon. There is also a kapok tree (Ceiba pentandra). Not a native or even usually found this far north; it is the only one we know of around here. It was grown from a seed that I took from its mother tree, a massive kapok giant on the island of Antigua. This was back in 1993 and now the sapling kapok is well on its way to rising above all else in the neighborhood. There are also little anole lizards darting around your feet, bromeliads on the branches of trees and a family of raccoons that has been known to grab steaks right off the grill if you don’t keep a sharp eye.

This is the Florida that once was and is rapidly disappearing. But the hope I mentioned is here. The city of Melbourne recently purchased a substantial piece of property just down the road and converted it into a waterfront green area, thus maintaining those fig entangled palms and the waterfront shacks that sleep in their shade. And just across the lagoon is Melbourne Beach, where citizens recently elected biologist Rita Karpie as town mayor, whilst running on a completely green platform. This is progress for a state better known for draining swamps and killing gators than for sustainability and forward thinking. All is not lost. The natural history and the old ways of Florida are still here, ready to expand out and repopulate the land once the people are ready. I will enjoy these next couple of weeks. I will enjoy these Floridays.

Hope in the New Year

Santa Cruz, California.