Los Angeles World Con, 2026, Part 1

It’s hard to justify going to an exotic place (like L. A.) for world con.

 

I know that many of my friends make this as a sort of pilgrimage. I don’t have that desire. To me, WorldCon, while fun, is part of the business. I don’t say I don’t enjoy it. I say that travelling three thousand miles and spending a thousand dollars on hotel bills isn’t sufficient justification for me.

 

A couple of years ago, my wife suggested we glue a vacation to an adjacent locale along with attending WorldCon. This tipped the balance in WorldCon’s favor. 

 

Last year, WorldCon was in Seattle and we spent a week prior going through the Channeled Scablands—which I talked about here.

 

This year, WorldCon was in Los Angeles. I was born and raised in and around Los Angeles. 

 

Southern California has a lot to offer and we had to pare the trip down from what could easily have been a month to only five days. 

 

We flew into Fresno on Friday and were tired we didn’t do much. So the trip really began the next day.

 

Saturday: This had to be Sequoia National Park. My family rented a cabin there when I was six or so and some of my earliest memories was of the trees. Wendy had never seen them and there was a lot of talk of fires, Sudden Oak Death Syndrome, and the like that suggested they giant trees were not long for this world. So, we took a day and hiked as far as I was able.

 

It’s hard to get across the scale of these monsters. I mean, humans can look at a night sky, or a mountain, or the sea and recognize something greater than themselves. But these are not living things. A whale is about as big, I think, as a human can grasp that this is a living thing. And I’m not sure even that works with something like a blue whale. 

 

(Not that it kept us from killing them.)

 

But these make whales look tiny. 

 

They’re old and they look it. Many of them (like several in this picture) are scarred from fires. Some, like the one on the right died of one. But that even exemplifies their age. The dead stump on the right had clearly been consumed by fire. But there was no fire sign around it. There were some others that faced it that showed burn marks—implying the it did not survive but they did. Then, there were other trees with a different burn mark pattern—implying a subsequent fire.

 

And then there is this grove, near the burned ones, that has no fire marks at all. 

 

I think, in this area, there were (at least) two big fires. The first consumed the stump and burned its neighbors. Then, there was another fire that scarred some of the other trees but either skipped the older, burn victims or where the damage was not great. And since then, this other great grove has grown.

 

Sequoias are interesting in several ways. First, the bark is not hard like an oak. Instead, it is fibrous—feeling like a substantial short fiber carpet. Then, in the burn scars, pitched has been exuded and hardened. Some parts are as hard and shiny as obsidian. 

 

We hiked around the are for several hours and found, in that time, two young trees. We were happy to do so. We had seen many, many great giants and middle-aged giants—sequoias don’t taper much as they grow so these are much bigger for the same height than other trees. But we didn’t see any babies. We were getting a little despairing when we found first this one:

 

I think this is only a few years old.

 

 

 

 

Later we found this one. I expect this is less than two years old.

 

The future of the sequoias may not be bleak.

 

Sunday: There were two big reasons we flew into Fresno. The first is that it was only an hour away from the park. The other is Forestiere Underground Gardens.

 

We found this on YouTube about a year ago and was fascinated. Baldassare Forestiere immigrated here from Sicily in the early part of the twentieth century. He wanted to raise fruit trees. He bought some land in Fresno to do that very thing but found it was covered in hardpan—soil with a lot of embedded sedimentary rock. He could not grow a thing here. 

 

Fresno is hot in the summer. Brutally hot. It was over a hundred when we were there. It felt like being in an oven. Forestiere couldn’t farm his land so he had to hire himself out to make a living. Remember the brutally hot part? Now, imagine digging ditches.

 

The nights weren’t much better so Forestiere built a small cellar to escape the heat. Then, he extended it. Lo and behold, once he dug down a half dozen feet or so, he found topsoil. Well, he says to himself. I have water. I have soil. The heat is bearable. All a tree lacks is sunlight. So, he opened up a skylight and planted a tree. Which, over a hundred years later, is still there.

 

The gardens are still there. And it is somewhere between 10-15 degrees cooler. Forestiere worked on the place his entire life and, it is estimated, he may have dug out as much as 20 acres of underground garden. But he left without heirs. His brother finished some of the work Forestiere left but he could not maintain such a large structure. Over time, different sections were sold or filled in. Now, there is a bit over three acres left. It is still in the family and tours are given.

The entry walks you underground and you can feel the temperature drop. Then, they take you carefully through several different rooms, galleries, and tunnels. Here are a few highlights.

 

This is a sort of cathedral room. It has several fruit trees and one, great, grape vine. I couldn’t fit the room properly into a picture but I think this gives the sense of the thing.

The pattern is tunnel through an arch, then a growing space with a skylight or a functional room.

 

 

 

Some of the spaces were large enough to be actual courtyards. 

 

One interesting thing about the place is it didn’t smell musty or feel dam. Forestiere understood drainage and saved the water. He built a fish pond inside. 

 

I could go on for hours—I have on the order of a hundred pictures or so—but I have other things to talk about. 

 

We left Fresno and went west. The plan had two Spanish missions on it and we didn’t want to miss either one.

 

The missions were established between 1769 and 1833. There were 21 of them. Each of them was a city in and of themselves with churches, slaughterhouses, crops, etc. Pretty much all built on the backs of indigenous slave labor. 

 

I’d been to San Juan Capistrano when I was a child but that was too far away for this trip. Instead, we planned to visit San Miguel Arcángel  and La Purísima Concepción.

San Miguel Arcángel was our first stop. It is an actual, working church. The parking lot was filled with parishioners which we carefully avoided lest we give offense. This is a model of the place. 

 

Most of the mission was closed to the public. The church was occupied with a baptism. Almost all of the buildings were occupied with people on retreat. So, while we did spend a fair amount of time there, we don’t have a lot of pictures.

 

On the way to Cambria—the next place we were staying—we did run across an oil field. It was fairly large—perhaps 10 acres or so. It reminded me of when I was a child in Long Beach. These donkeyhead wells were everywhere. The place smelled like my childhood.

 

Monday: We spent the next morning looking for rocks on Moonstone Beach. This is a beach that appears dominated by Scotland: a cool, wet, foggy beach while we were there. People’s pictures of rocks are of no interest to anyone but themselves, so I won’t bore you with them. We did find one moonstone, we think, and some other interesting specimens.

 

But this was one geological feature that we saw over and over. This is called tafoni and the geologic origins of this is unclear. I thought I had stepped into a Roger Dean painting.

 

 

From Cambria, we proceeded south, stopping where we will.

One beach, of sorts, we found about half way to our destination of Goleta.  This layered rock was all over, and eroding mightily. We found bits everywhere. 

 

It was eroding so much that there had been some problems with the cliffs falling down. This was remedied by vast slabs of concrete. Which had been scored to look like the underlying rock.

 

 

 

 

 

Tuesday: It was on this leg of the journey that we stopped at Mission La Purísima Concepción. 

 

This is not a working church but a museum. The mission has been well restored and it is huge. Several vast buildings, major areas given over to crops and gardens. A tannery. A slaughterhouse. Stables. Paddocks. Corrals. Various church spaces. At its peak, there might have been better than two thousand people—mostly indigenous, and mostly slaves. 

 

I found this map here. It’s not a great map. Each of the buildings had a chapel. There was a lot more than weaving in the first building. We found a leather shop, carpentry, several kitchens, several meeting rooms, a library, and much else.

This is that first building.

 

This is the chapel in the first building.

 

 

Then, we visited the La Brea Tarpits on our way to Santa Monica—our last stay before Los Angeles.

 

Unfortunately, the museum and much of the park was closed. 

 

But we still could walk around the main pond. It bubbled and stank, as I remembered as a child. 

 

Wednesday: We had three Stations of the Cross I wanted to visit before we reached WorldCon.

The first was the baptism in the Pacific Ocean.

 

 

 

We hadn’t had much chance to just walk in the ocean since we got here. We had some time before the other two Stations, so we walked to the beach and just, well, walked in the water for an hour or so. I have some video but few pictures.

 

The second was the Autrey Museum of the American West. This was not because I had any love of cowboys but because the Autrey Museum had acquired the Southwest Museum of the American Indian. I’m very interested in indigenous pottery and this promised to be interesting.

 

I have to say I was disappointed. Several of the galleries were closed. The remaining ones that did have indigenous art was mostly modern with very little history of any depth. And, as I said, cowboy culture isn’t what I was interested.

 

The last Station was the Griffith Park Observatory.

 

When I was very young we lived in several parts of the L.A. area: Santa Monica, Long Beach, Anaheim, Thousand Oaks, etc. Going into L.A. was always a treat and going to Griffith Park was a special confection. I don’t have many pictures but I do have some video.

 

And with that, we drove down to WorldCon in the home of Disneyland, Anaheim, California, not a mile from where I had spent five years as a child.

 

But that is another tale.