About half a mile from my front door, there’s an extinct volcano. Most afternoons, after I shut my laptop at 2:30, I feel a draw toward it. Working East Coast hours from Carlsbad, in Southern California, leaves me with plenty of sunlight, the day still stretching ahead. One of the hiking trails begins at Tamarack Avenue, winding through coastal sage scrub and climbing toward the volcanic plug the Spanish named Calavera: “skull.” I like to think the name fits—that, from certain angles, the peak seems to stare back, hollow-eyed, like a watchful sentinel from an ancient time, keeping watch over the land with a timeless gaze. But to me, it just looks like a beautiful mountain with a barren cliff face.
The volcano last erupted 22 million years ago, back when the Farallon Plate was still colliding with North America. What remains now is 513 feet of cooled basalt—the core that once sealed the crater. The cone is long gone, but the plug has stayed put. There are only three volcanic plugs in Southern California, and this one sits quietly in Carlsbad, hemmed in by subdivisions and a high school, just barely visible from the few winding residential streets if you know where to look. Most people drive by without a second glance. Even after two years of living here, after leaving New Jersey behind, I’m still surprised by how few people know it’s here.
The perfume of crushed sage hangs in the air while I begin my walk, a place that has drawn me nearly every day for almost a year. Four miles, give or take, depending on how the afternoon unfolds. At first, I tried to fill the quiet with podcasts or music, but lately I’ve let the silence settle in, allowing my ears to pick up whatever the world decides to offer—shuffling leaves, distant birdcalls, a siren miles away, the crunch of dirt and rock underfoot. My mind wanders, then circles back, sometimes settling, sometimes scattering. I never learned meditation by sitting still. I learned meditation by walking.
*
The Lake Calavera Preserve spans 260 acres, making it the largest remaining natural area in coastal northern San Diego County. The Carlsbad Municipal Water District manages the 400-acre reservoir. A dam built in July 1941, just months before Pearl Harbor, retains Calavera Creek. The lake supplied drinking water to the community until the 1950s, when Carlsbad incorporated and began receiving water from the Colorado River. Today, the dam remains a relic of the war era—concrete and earth holding back 21 acres of water in the shadow of a prehistoric peak.
The preserve is home to 115 plant species, 49 bird species, and 10 mammals. Six of these are threatened or endangered, including the California Gnatcatcher, a small, gray songbird that relies on this unique ecosystem for nesting and feeding. Its call, a faint wheezy zee-zee, fades quickly into the soundscape of the preserve. Most of the Gnatcatcher’s habitat, the Diegan Coastal Sage Scrub, has been lost to development. This patch is among what remains. California quail burst from the underbrush in panicked clusters. Roadrunners hunt like they’re high on cocaine, chasing lizards and snakes with a speed that makes you understand how the cartoon got something right. As I come around the lake, I sometimes catch a blue heron lurking in the reeds, utterly still, waiting. I watch them, wondering how long they’ve been here and how much longer they’ll stay.
Since the wild rain this January, I’ve seen coyotes almost every day. They’re typically elusive. I’ll hear them yelp in the distance, especially near sunset. But lately, they’ve been active. The other day, on the far side of the loop, maybe two miles in, I turned around, and a coyote was sitting on the trail about a hundred feet back. Not threatening, just curious. We locked eyes. I kept walking, and when I glanced back, it had disappeared. These encounters feel like small gifts. The coyote doesn’t need me to see it. It allows itself to be seen.
*
The Luiseño people lived in this area for 10,000 years before Spanish contact. Their traditional territory extended along the coast from San Juan Capistrano, 50 miles north, to here in Carlsbad, and east 30 miles to the valleys of the coastal mountains and Mount Palomar. They called themselves Payómkawichum, people of the west. They built dome-shaped homes near fresh water, hunted deer and rabbits, gathered acorns and ground them into wiiwish, a mush high in protein. Mission San Luis Rey, in present-day Oceanside, four miles north of Carlsbad, was built in 1798. The missionaries worked to destroy the Luiseño way of life. The language. The religion. The culture. But the Luiseño are still here. Several bands remain in San Diego, Riverside, and Orange counties.
I think about this as I walk. What did the Payómkawichum see when they looked at Skull Hill? The volcano was already ancient by the time humans arrived in North America. It had been sitting there, eroding slowly, before anyone built a village nearby. The deep time of geology makes human history feel brief, and my own life even briefer. I don’t find this depressing. If anything, it’s a kind of relief. The mountain doesn’t need me to matter. I’m free to keep walking.
*
I’m in long-term recovery from alcohol, having struggled for a decade to get sober. There’s a particular memory that lingers from those days: a Sunday afternoon when the sun was too bright, and my apartment was little more than a cave, curtains drawn tight, the air stale with neglected meals and empty bottles. I tried to reach the kitchen for a glass of water, but it felt like crossing a desert. Each stride was heavy, the Mission Impossible theme song playing absurdly in my mind. A walk around the block seemed like a marathon. Now, I regularly do four miles a day, sometimes more, up and over an extinct volcano, and I hardly give it a second thought.
This is why Lake Calavera has become my church. Not because I pray here, though gratitude sometimes shows up and feels close to prayer. Not because I find answers, though clarity sometimes comes. It’s my church because I return every day, because the practice is the point, because showing up is the whole ritual. You arrive, tie your shoes, and feel the wind against your face. The trail welcomes you. The trail is always the same and always different. After rain, the black sage releases its scent into the air, earthy and sharp. The hillside’s green deepens. The light shifts, and the seasons move quietly forward.
*
My usual route winds around the back of the peak, where the trail opens to a view of the ocean a few miles away. The volcano rises to my left. Somewhere along this stretch, usually after two or three miles, the feeling arrives. Goosebumps. A quiet, overwhelming gratitude. Of being exactly where I should be. Of participating in something beyond myself.
I don’t manufacture this feeling. I can’t summon it on demand. It comes when it comes, and when it doesn’t, I walk anyway. That’s the practice. You show up. You put one foot in front of the other. You let your mind wander and return as it will. Sometimes gratitude arrives. Other times, you just walk.
When I stop at the top, I look out over the city where I live and think about how far I’ve come. The version of me who could barely make it to the kitchen. The version of me who thought that was normal. The volcano has stood here for 22 million years. I’ve been sober for a fraction of a second in geological time. But I’m here. And for now, that’s enough.
*
The columnar jointing on the west face of the volcano formed as the lava cooled, shrinking into six-sided columns. The quarry exposed them. Devils Postpile in the Sierra Nevada, where I hiked over the summer with my fiancée near Mammoth Lakes, shows the same phenomenon. But here, tucked between tract homes and strip malls, the columns feel improbable. A cross-section of the volcano’s throat is visible to anyone willing to walk a couple of miles to find it.
The hardest part is what remains. The plug resisted weathering while everything around it wore away. Twenty-two million years of persistence. I wonder what will remain of us. Maybe the dam, for a few hundred years. The trails will fade once maintenance stops. The homes will crumble. The roads will crack.
But the volcano will still be here. Some version of the basalt plug will remain. Maybe it will erode further. Maybe it will be buried. But it will be here. The hardest part is resisting time.
I walk back down as the afternoon light softens. Tomorrow I’ll shut my computer at 2:30 and do it again. The trail will be the same and different. The volcano will be there, waiting for no one, indifferent to whether I show up. I’ll keep walking. That’s the practice. That’s the whole of it.
