I started the blog back in 2007 as John Wall's Natural California, touring California's nature spots in quick trips that I took on my three-day weekends. The Great Recession had put a strain on finances at the nonprofit I worked for, and we were given the chance to switch to a four-day workweek, taking a 20-percent pay cut. I couldn't pass up the chance, and I didn't go back to working full-time until 2012, and that put the kibosh on my longer trips.
When I began the Mt. Tam Journal in June 2013, the plan was to explore the excellent natural history of Mt. Tamalpais every weekend for a year, then call the blog "done." That's when I decided to delete all the previous posts up to that point. They would no longer be on the web, but I saved the posts and put them in books using Blurb's print-on-demand service. Later on I played around with creating a printed monthly magazine using another print-on-demand service called MagCloud.
After the Mt. Tam Journal was done I created another yearlong blog about exploring Point Reyes. At the end of the year I deleted the whole blog, and once again created a book around it for my own posterity. I didn't publish much on this blog during that time.
After the Pt. Reyes blog was done I still felt like posting stuff and continued for another couple of years before taking a break in 2018-2019. I started up again in December 2019, and by March 2020 we were all in the pandemic lock-down, working from home. The blog was called True Nature Stories during this time, and Mt. Tamalpais was still my predominant focus.
By 2024 I found myself posting more and more nature shots from the city, and at some point I decided to change the name of the blog again to Nature Where I Live: San Francisco.
Starting Jan. 1, 2026, the name expanded to Nature Where I Live: San Francisco (and Beyond). I like the feeling of opening things up in the name since I was already going outside city limits anyway.
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