Today our guests make up the LA folk duo, Mapache. Songwriters Clay Finch and Sam Blasucci were just high schoolers when they first met at a local skate park in the Pasadena area of Los Angeles. After discovering a mutual interest in the music of artists like The Beatles and The Band, the two began writing their own songs and have continued to perform as Mapache ever since. We discuss their song "Song For A Seagull" as well as some performance advice they received from songwriter Jonathan Richman.

We visit two arts destinations in Redding. At Riverfront Playhouse, we talk with the director & the teenage cast from "The Outsiders," a stage adaptation of the popular young-adult novel about violent conflicts between poor teens and rich teens in the 1960s. At Armando's Gallery House, we talk with the proprietor of this art-venue/restaurant, about the range of artwork on display there.

In this episode Dave talks to Adam Frank. Adam is a regular contributor to NPR's All Things Considered where he weighs in on scientific issues with his expertise as an astrophysicist. He is also a writer. His latest book The Light of The Stars: Alien Worlds and the Fate of the Earth examines what role climate change must ultimately play in any technologically advanced extraterrestrial civilization. Frank argues that we should stop arguing about climate change, accept that it is just a part of being a successful industrial civilization and use the same intelligence that created it to adapt to and evolve past it. This wide ranging conversation covers a wide variety of topics as the host and guest engage in a lively exchange of ideas. Then Sheryl Hosler, YouTube's The Roving Naturalist takes to the trail to visit with folks out hiking to get their take on why being out of doors in a natural setting is important to them.

This week on Cultivating Place, we spend a little time revisiting our conversation exploring and appreciating the many gifts of darkness with the International Dark-Sky Association. 

This conversation is from December and the season of Winter Solstice, but I really wanted to revisit it now – in the season not too far past the summer solstice. The nights are short (but lengthening now) and they are warm and we have a tendency to want to stay up and out later than we do in winter. 

Many people in the North State have walked, or dream of walking, the medieval pilgrimage route across northern Spain to the Cathedral in Santiago de Compostela. Now over a million pilgrims from across the world travel to Spain to walk the Camino, and about a fifth of them receive their certificate of completion when they arrive in Santiago. Two such pilgrims are Nancy's guests today. Kurt Koontz wrote of his pilgrimage in his book A Million Steps. Terrence Callery also wrote about his 500-mile pilgrimage will tell us about his adventure on the Camino de Santiago.

We head up the road this week to another Spanish-era mission—Mission San Juan Bautista, or St. John the Baptist, California’s 15th mission. One of the most intriguing stories about San Juan Bautista is almost invisible. Tucked away in the mission museum are a couple of original choir books from Father Pedro Estevan Tapis, which demonstrate the Spanish technique of using colors or textures to teach polyphonic music. And teach it he did. The fame of the padre’s boys choir in the early 1800s earned San Juan Bautista the nickname “Mission of Music.”