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.
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.
As I write this toward the end of 2025 I've begun to feel like the San Francisco nature angle has run its course, at least as far as dominating the blog. We'll have to wait to see what it turns into next....
* * *
Posts
