April 2026: A Message from the CEO
Apr 3, 2026
This place takes a minute.
The coast doesn’t. The beaches don’t. They arrive fully formed. You see them once and you understand why people fall in love.
The rest of it takes longer.
If you come from somewhere green—somewhere the landscape wraps around you and insists on itself—this can feel muted at first. I felt that. I came from Colorado, where the mountains rise to meet you, where the seasons announce themselves, where you don’t have to work very hard to feel held by the landscape.
This is different.
Here, the palette is quieter. Dusky greens. Silvers. Dry golds. Nothing towering overhead. Nothing demanding your attention. It meets you more slowly.
You have to lean toward it.
And if you do, it leans back.
The smell of hot sage in the sun.
Salt in the air at the same time.
The ground holding dryness and moisture together.
Everything balanced right at the edge of what’s possible.
Not less alive—more specific.
This is a Mediterranean climate—found in only a few regions globally. These are among the most biodiverse and most threatened systems on Earth.
Here, that shows up as coastal sage scrub. Low, open, aromatic, adapted to live with very little water and very little margin for error. It is endangered and shrinking.
It doesn’t reveal itself all at once.
But if you stay with it—if you keep leaning in—you start to see what it’s doing. How it holds together.
We recognize places like that when we travel.
Laguna San Ignacio. The Galápagos. Yellowstone.
We arrive ready to pay attention. Ready to let the place be what it is.
At home, it’s easier to forget.
Familiarity flattens things. The extraordinary starts to read as ordinary simply because it’s always there.
But nothing about this place is ordinary.
The longer you’re here, the more you see how much has to line up for it to exist at all. How little margin there is. How quickly the balance could shift.
Which makes this place not just beautiful, but rare and fragile and worth knowing well.
Crystal Cove State Park is one of those places where people lean in.
Thank you for being part of protecting that.
See you around the park,
Kate Wheeler
President & CEO
Read the whole newsletter here: https://conta.cc/3MCPXSP