California Archives - Michael Kauffmann

May 10, 2025May 10, 2025

Blue Oak (Quercus douglasii)

An Old Friend in a New Light

I first met Blue Oak (Quercus douglasii) when I moved to California as a young educator, living and teaching at SCICON, a school nestled in the Sierra Nevada foothills above the Great Central Valley. The property was draped in a mosaic of oak woodland, and it was the blue oak—with its pale, ghostly bark and seasonally bare branches—that became a familiar companion during daily lessons with sixth graders. At the time, I didn’t fully grasp what I had stumbled into, but I knew it felt like home. As a kid raised in the deciduous forests of the Appalachians, these leaf-losing oaks whispered a comforting language.

March 22, 2025May 10, 2025

A Life Beneath the Canopy

How California’s Trees Shaped a Book, a Friendship, and a Calling

I first fell in love with trees as a high school student in the green underworld of the eastern deciduous forests near Williamsburg, Virginia. My teacher, Charles Dubay, believed we should know our world with both precision and appreciation. In his field biology class he taught us the trees twice—once in the fullness of leaf and light, when the crowns cast shade and shimmered in the wind, and again in the starkness of winter, when the branches and bark told their stories—bare.

I first learned about trees in swamps across the eastern piedmont of Virginia.

January 30, 2024January 30, 2024

Approaching 50 in the Desert

In my twenties, I basically lived in the desert — just outside of the Mojave at 6,000′ in the San Gabriel Mountains. I was minutes from Joshua trees (Yucca brevifolia) that define a particular charm in the Mojave Desert . I spent many winter weekends wandering the Sonoran and Mojave deserts of California and Arizona. It was dreamy.

After moving north to the temperate rainforest of Humboldt County to pursue a more stable career and more conifers, the desert has become a less common destination. I have been back a few times but, honestly, not enough.

With 50 on the horizon, a few of my friends decided to meet up in Las Vegas and get into the desert as fast as possible. We spent time in the Mojave-Sonoran transition zone south of I-40 and could not have been happier–walking washes and scrambling through canyons. We saw new plants, plenty of rain, and reflected on our first half century around numerous campfires.

April 3, 2023July 3, 2023

Five-Needle Pines Community Science Project

As a board member of the Whitebark Pine Ecosystem Foundation, I decided to help cook up this project because all is not well with the five-needle pines of western North America.

Five-needle pines along the Pacific Crest Trail include the sugar pine, limber pine, foxtail pine, whitebark pine, and western white pine. Crucial to the mountain ecosystems where they occur, these trees face an uncertain future, and scientists are trying to learn more.

You can help and are invited

Whitebark Pine Ecosystem Foundation has partnered with the California Native Plant Society and the Pacific Crest Trail Association to raise awareness about the plight of five-needle pines and conduct this community science project. The goal is to get thru-, section-hikers, and everyone who visits to the trail to map and inventory five-needle pines along the Pacific Crest Trail.

By participating, you will help increase awareness of the changes affecting our world while improving connections to nature. Working together to document what’s happening is a positive step toward recovery.

September 30, 2022July 3, 2023

The Klamath Mountains: A Natural History

I could not be more proud of our new book. It is, in reality, a project 10-years in the making. I first started cooking up the idea when I finished Conifer Country in 2012 based on the fact that a natural history had never been written for the Klamath Mountains. Around 2015, during a winter gathering, I proposed an outline to a group of friends and asked who wanted to help write the book with me. Justin Garwood raised his hand and the rest is now history!