July 2026: A Message from the CEO
Dear Friends of Crystal Cove,
Every summer, our neighbors, the Anslyns, packed their van for the river.
I can’t remember if the van was green or orange or if they left for a week or a month – memory isn’t interested in those kinds of details. What I remember is that for a few days before they left, the side door was always open. The cooler sat propped open on its side and the tent got set up in the driveway, airing out after winter. Sleeping bags. Flashlights. Folding chairs. A driveway slowly disappearing beneath the checklist of an American summer.
The days before they left for the river, I think I was usually out waiting in the driveway before they were each morning so I wouldn’t miss it. I wasn’t going to the river, but I could hand someone a flashlight. I could restuff a sleeping bag. I could carry something from the garage to the van. I was labor, and that was fine.
I didn’t know where the river was. I wouldn’t realize until I was well into adulthood that “the river” was Lake Havasu. To me, it wasn’t a place on a map. It was a place their van took them every July. A mythic place for swimming and windsurfing and campfires.
Those days between when the van left and when it came back – they feel like they were just me lying spread-eagle in the rectangle of cracked asphalt where the van usually parked, staring up at the Colorado sky wondering what was happening at the river.
Eventually, the Anslyns would return in a dusty van with a few more stickers on the windows.
They were dirty and sunburnt. They had hat hair and raccoon eyes. And they had stories that made the world feel bigger than it had before.
Long before I ever thought much about parks, I fell in love with the people who disappeared into them every summer.
My dad had his own version of that.
He had a 1976 Jeep CJ – it was red, white and blue with broad stripes and bright stars strewn across its hood. We called it the star-spangled Jeep and it seemed to exist for one purpose: climbing mountain passes in July. Summer arrived and he’d take the doors off and say, “let’s go up Hagerman,” or Independence or Cottonwood or Kebler Pass. He just wanted to get above treeline – where the trees give over to the sky and the lakes only open up for a few weeks each year.
There’s something about the American West that has always invited ordinary people to test themselves a little. To sleep outside. To traverse one more switchback. To get above treeline.
Years later, I somehow inherited a beat-up forest green 1989 Toyota Land Cruiser. I can’t even remember how it became mine. I just know that it did.
And suddenly I was one of the people who disappeared into parks every summer.
The cooler came out to air. The tent got checked. My kids became the labor force that handed me flashlights and restuffed sleeping bags. We pointed the Land Cruiser toward Moab time and time again. When we moved to California, we pointed it at Joshua Tree. And that’s all it ever knew.
Imagine thinking the whole world is just Moab and Joshua Tree.
The Land Cruiser got my kids to places where they could hike to Delicate Arch and climb Skull Rock and to places where the Colorado River slows enough for lazy swims. It taught them about desert landscapes and weathered canyons and cryptobiotic soil. Except they called it cryptobionic soil, like it had bionic powers. They became convinced tiny invisible worlds lived inside every patch of it, and crossing the desert became a high-stakes game of the floor is lava.
When I think about July now, I don’t think first about fireworks: I think about driveways.
Old Jeeps. Volkswagen vans. Land Cruisers. Side doors open. Coolers airing out. Tents pitched in driveways. Kids hovering nearby, hoping someone will ask them to carry something important.
I think about the quiet optimism of packing a car and saying, “let’s go.” To the river. To Moab. To Joshua Tree or Anza-Borrego or Crystal Cove.
The gear has changed. The maps are in our phones. But the cooler smells the same and the sleeping bag is still hard to get back in its stuff sack.
Happy Fourth – I hope it takes you someplace wonderful.
See you around the park,
Kate Wheeler
President & CEO