The west's epic wildfire season shows no signs of letting up as one Red Flag Warning follows another and millions of acres burn. Dave talks to three experts from the University of California at Davis. Forest ecology experts Malcolm North and Andrew Latimer weigh in on the state of wildland ecosystems past, present and future as they respond to long-term mismanagement, drought, and a rapidly changing climate. 

 At just 35 years old, Kevin Kiley is one of the freshest faces of California’s Republican party.

The Rocklin-based, Yale-educated attorney represents the 6th District in the State Assembly, covering the Sacramento suburb of Roseville and the Sierra foothills — his childhood stomping grounds.

This week on Cultivating Place we’re joined by award winning landscape designer Judith Phillips of Albuquerque NM. Her Design Oasis, characterized by creative thinking, designing gardens, and growing plants born of her wider place in the high desert has been shifting ideas of beauty and meaning for other gardeners of the American Southwest since the 1980s. Listen in!

Just south of Bodie is Mono Lake. You could mistake this pale gray inland sea and its ghostly tufa towers for an eerie alien swimming pool on some other planet.

Back in the day, Mark Twain had much to say about Mono Lake—then known as the Dead Sea of California. “One of the strangest freaks of nature found in any land,” was one of his kinder comments.

“Mono Lake lies in a lifeless, treeless, hideous desert,” he wrote. “This solemn, silent, sailless sea—this lonely tenant of the loneliest spot on earth—is little graced with the picturesque.

Lennie Copeland and Tom Smith, owners of the property that used to be the Ono Store and International Café, are facing something that is becoming more and more familiar to residents of the North State.

“Not much is left,” Copeland said. “What didn’t burn melted. I see devastation. I see everything we ever had is melted or broken or twisted and not repairable. A lot of it is not replaceable. This was a historic store and a lot of this stuff dates back to the gold rush days. That’s irreplaceable.”