Mary Novaria

A week before the Woolsey Fire began, I hiked with my cousin Kristen in Topanga State Park. A doe and her fawn greeted us in the parking lot, as though someone had arranged it that way for a Hollywood shoot. The afternoon was warm and clear, offering sweeping views of the ocean and other peaks beyond the Santa Monica Mountains. As our elevation increased, we talked about the terrain — the scrubby chaparral (Was that sage we smelled?) and the parched grey-brown meadows below. “Was it ever green?” Kristen asked. Our landscape is intriguing for someone who lives in Alaska and still is for me, six years removed from the Midwest. “Yes,” I said, “after last spring’s rain. I can’t remember exactly when that was.” “Everything’s so dry.” I checked the humidity on my iPhone's Weather Channel app. Twenty-five percent. “Yeah, it’s a real tinder box,” I sighed, the reality of living in this region of Southern California. Little did we know the comm...

As seen in the Huffington Post.   I was careless with my skin as a teen and now I’m terrified of getting skin cancer like my father. Even though my fair, Irish skin would freckle and burn it didn’t stop me from trying to achieve that golden glow featured in glossy magazine ads for Hawaiian Tropic and Bain de Soleil. I envied my girlfriends who tanned so easily and were burnished and brown after just one afternoon at the pool or the tennis court. My mom brought what we used to call “suntan lotion” on family vacations. The smell of Coppertone still takes me back to Hampton Beach on the New England shore. In fact, those Coppertone billboards with a little dog pulling down a blond, pigtailed girl’s swimsuit bottoms were a staple of my childhood. Still, my mother was nowhere near the sunscreen police that I became with my kids. They’re fair like me—a blonde and a redhead—and I slathered them with SPF 50 practically from the moment they were born. I knew my vigilan...

Earth and sky, woods and fields, lakes and rivers, the mountain and the sea, are excellent schoolmasters, and teach some of us more than we can ever learn from books. --John Lubbock In honor of Earth Day, some of my favorite pics from beaches, trails and other places that inspire me. Enjoy! And let's take care of Mother Earth.   Farmer's Market Artichokes/Ojai, California My career is like an artichoke. People might think that the leaves are tasty and buttered up and delicious, and they don't even know that there's something magical hidden at the base of it. There's a whole other side of me that people didn't know existed. --Katy Perry Halibut Cove, Alaska John Muir, the famous naturalist, wrote in his journal that you should never go to Alaska as a young man because you'll never be satisfied with any other place as long as you live. And there's a lot of truth to that. --Tom Bodett Kenai Fjords National Park, Alaska To the lo...