Get Outdoors In Ventura
Just a 70-minute boat ride off Ventura's shore, the five islands of Channel Islands National Park offer precisely the wild silence you'd expect from one of America's least visited National Parks. They've been called the Galapagos of North America, but that sells them short; a wild and wondrous place where housecat-size foxes (you won't find the island fox anywhere else in the world) scamper through fields of Seuss-like flowers, and moon and sun shine down on the untamed and the empty.
Santa Cruz, Santa Barbara, Anacapa, San Miguel, and Santa Rosa islands offer magic and adventure on so many fronts. There's remote camping, hiking (picture seascapes that steal your breath), sea kayaking (paddling into a sea cave is like descending into the throat of some softly breathing beast), snorkeling and world-class scuba diving (Jacques Cousteau called the Channel Islands one of the world's best dive spots), and bird-watching (some of the birds on the Channel Islands -- the Island Scrub Jay, for one -- are found nowhere else). At night, from certain campsites on some of the islands, you can see the pinprick lights of civilization flickering like the campfires of some tremendous army. While you breathe in the sea, the stars, and silence.
Life-changing moments can be so quiet you barely notice them.
The closest islands (Anacapa and Santa Cruz) are only an hour boat trip away. Island Packers will take you there (to keep visitors safe, they are currently running at 40 percent capacity and requiring masks for everyone three and older). And with empty beaches and wild open spaces (some brand new), mainland Ventura offers more than its share of glorious social distancing solace too.
It's a wild world. Perhaps now more than ever, we need the wilds even more.
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