Six thousand Western Gulls squawked across the heat baked crust of cliffs that was Anacapa. The day-trippers were leaving the island as we labored with our tent amid the relentless heat without a single shade tree. The island was less than a one hour boat ride from the Ventura coast, yet California seemed hazy and distant, a blurry line of something vague, somewhere we had been in the distant past. Anacapa was a small sliver of land, actually a set of four islets and a dozen smaller rocks on the way to the main islands. Santa Cruz and Santa Rosa stole the show, each easily fifty times the size of small Anacapa and boasting ranges of diminutive mountains, friendly island foxes, miles upon miles of hiking and long sandy beaches. But Anacapa was the gateway, the
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