Bill Everett

Rumors abound about Guadalupe’s future, but very likely it will continue to slowly deteriorate.

For hours after dawn there is nothing visible but the gray sky and the wide, gray sea. At evening yesterday the swell from the northeast settled in at around five feet, “finally made up its mind,” as someone remarked. But by sunrise the wind had picked up, churning up whitecaps that shine now under the overcast sky with an almost metallic glint.

Bill Everett: “It’s like a little Galapagos, right in our back yard. ”

Photo by Jim Coit

It is nearly eleven o’clock before Guadalupe Island comes into view, its steep sides silhouetted in the distant fog. Suddenly, the two albatrosses that have been trailing our wake all morning disappear. We hold steadily to our course, and soon we can see rather than sense the island’s twenty-mile length, and the cloud bank hanging low along the ridgetop. Even the ship’s crew members seem excited, and come out on deck to watch.

Reid Moran: “Each of the local islands is unique, but Guadalupe is the most unique."

Photo by Jim Coit

The sun breaks through the clouds and the sea turns the color of blue obsidian. And we draw ever closer to the island, until at last we can see a few ragged trees near its summit and gulls soaring across its desolate cliffs.

Goats chewed the shrubbery down to the roots. What had taken thousands of years to evolve was all but destroyed in a few decades.

Reid Moran

Guadalupe Island — Mexico’s westernmost possession, 250 miles southwest of San Diego and about 160 miles off the coast of Baja California — has been called a classic ecological tragedy. Once a sort of natural laboratory for the manufacture of unique birds, plants, and seals, it is now dying in nearly every sense of the word. In spite of the island’s considerable size, it is only part of the original massive volcano, and it is slowly crumbling into the sea.

Except for this weather station run by the Mexican navy on the southern end of the island, it is uninhabited.

Reid Moran

Five of its endemic bird species were wiped out at the beginning of this century, and another could now be facing the same fate. At least twenty-four species of plants have disappeared from its rugged hills and canyons. Even the Guadalupe fur seal is endangered; only a small number survive along the island's rocky southeastern shore.

Elephant seals are one of Guadalupe’s few success stories.

Bill Everett

The culprit behind all this is, of course, man. Sometime during the last century cats and goats were introduced onto the island, probably by whalers. (The cats were pets that ran wild, but the goats were deliberately released to serve as a meat source for future whalers.)

The landscape around us is barren except for a few low plants: red and green iceplant, yellow daisies, Guadalupe’s own white forget-me-not.

Reid Moran

The newcomers hit Guadalupe’s unusual and fragile ecosystem like a bomb. There had never been any land mammals on Guadalupe, so none of the native birds or plants had developed defenses against them. The cats literally tore apart thousands of birds, while the goats chewed the shrubbery down to the roots. What had taken thousands of years to evolve was all but destroyed in a few decades. Meanwhile, sealers were decimating the fur seal population; by 1900 the animals were considered extinct, and it wasn’t until 1954 that Carl L. Hubbs from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography confirmed that a few seals had in fact survived.

The Mexican government declared Guadalupe a nature reserve in 1922. But while this has protected the island from man, it has done nothing to protect it from the introduced animals. Most of the cats have long since died, their food sources gone, but the goats continue to roam the island in uncounted thousands, finishing off virtually every green thing that grows. It is a bleak situation on a lonely, rugged island that is considered by many scientists and naturalists to be the most unusual island off the U.S./Mexican coast.

“There’s not another island off the Pacific coast of North America, including Alaska, that ever evolved five of its own bird species.” points out Bill Everett, a local ornithological consultant and former president of the San Diego Audubon Society. “It’s like a little Galapagos, right in our back yard. ” Says Reid Moran, curator of botany at the San Diego Museum of Natural History and one of the world's foremost experts on the plants of Baja California. “Each of the local islands is unique, but Guadalupe is the most unique. Being an oceanic island far off the coast, it certainly has the most unique flora.”

Moran and Everett have studied Guadalupe extensively (Moran has been there nineteen times, Everett six), but they are only the latest among scores of scientists and naturalists to visit the island. In the last one hundred years it has attracted experts from Scripps Institution of Oceanography, the California Academy of Sciences, UCLA, and the Hubbs/Sea World Research Institute, among others. To the public, though. Guadalupe remains a little-known and seldom-visited place.

Except for a weather station run by the Mexican navy on the southern end of the island, it is uninhabited. Long-distance sportfishing boats out of San Diego occasionally drop anchor off its shores, but to land on the island you need permission from the Mexican government, and that permission is difficult to obtain.

Other than an occasional research vessel, the only people to visit Guadalupe with any regularity are crews from H & M Landing, a sportfishing and tour-boat outfit in San Diego that two or three times a year includes Guadalupe on its natural history tours of Baja California’s islands. It was on one of H & M’s boats, the ninety-five-foot sportfishing yacht Finalista, that I visited Guadalupe Island in early May of this year. Bill Everett was also on board (as an ornithological guide), along with twenty-five other people who had made the trip for various reasons. Anyone looking for a wilderness experience in one of the world’s remote corners would have been bitterly disappointed by most of these traveling companions; some were interested only in yellowtail and sea bass, others in basking in the Baja sun. The provisions on the Finalista, too, weren’t exactly what one usually associates with expeditions to far-off places; fried chicken, chocolate cake, coffee and beer.

But the island's stark beauty overwhelmed these mundanities, and those who looked found Guadalupe’s history etched into its shores like carvings in stone.

Fifteen million years ago the ocean in this part of the world went crazy, and Guadalupe Island was bom. A volcano erupted on the ocean floor, pouring out flow after flow of molten rock until at last a new mountain projected above the surface of the sea. About six million years later a second volcano erupted a few miles to the north, forming another huge cone. These two ancient mountains, which have been largely covered by subsequent lava flows and piles of volcanic ash and rock, today form the base of the island. From a depth of 12,000 feet Guadalupe rises steeply out of the ocean to a height of more than 4000 feet, a massive, 16,000-foot-high ridge that exists in utter isolation, a full day's sail from the nearest land.

We can see all this as we round the northern end of the island and cruise slowly through the calm water on the leeward side. Rough gray lava towers above us, in some places hardened into weird and seemingly impossible shapes that recall the Galapagos Islands. We can see, too, the remaining part of the northern (and younger) volcano, a sheer and semicircular wall of rock. At some distant point in time the rest of the mountain apparently blew apart in an explosion that would have dwarfed the recent eruption of Mount St. Helens.

It is early afternoon before we anchor off the mouth of Twin Canyons, about a third of the way down the island’s eastern side. Because of Guadalupe’s rugged shoreline, there are few places to land, but Twin Canyons — a deep gorge that cuts westward toward the island's main ridge — is one of them. Even here the steep rock-strewn beach provides a challenging landing for the rubber skiffs that ferry us from the Finalista to shore. We scramble out of the skiffs between swells, past a small group of northern elephant seals that eye us warily but lethargically.

Unlike the fur seals, elephant seals are one of Guadalupe’s few success stories. Hunted mercilessly for their oil in the last century, they were thought extinct until they were rediscovered on Guadalupe Island in 1912. Protected by law since 1922, the elephant seals have made an extraordinary comeback; some 20,000 live on Guadalupe's beaches alone, and they have begun to expand their breeding range northward to California's Channel Islands. They are big animals — a full-grown bull can reach seventeen feet and weigh 1600 pounds — but they are not very bright. As we stand on the beach at Twin Canyons, Everett tells me that a lone man or woman can walk through an elephant seal rookery during the mating season, when the bulls are at their orneriest, and scare them off simply by taking two steps in their direction and threatening them with a stick. The bull will always back off. Of course, it takes a little concentration to confront them this way, since there is absolutely nothing an unarmed human could do against the attack of a bull elephant seal. On paper, the elephant seal would win every time.

Everett is a native San Diegan (or more accurately. Lemon Grovian). and one of the few who never surfed as he was growing up. Instead, he got into the Boy Scouts and went on camping trips to the desert and the Sierras. At college (Sonoma State, class of ’75), a friend got him interested in bird watching, and now, as one of San Diego’s top field ornithologists, he can catch a glimpse of a bird-shape streaking into the distance and announce, for example,.'“Vaux’s swift,” As we make our way up Twin Canyons he points out the Guadalupe junco and finch, and the incredibly bold little rock wren that will march right up to you if you sit still long enough. Not because it's hungry or anything; it just wants to check you out.

The landscape around us is barren except for a few low plants: red and green iceplant, yellow daisies, Guadalupe’s own white forget-me-not. The canyon floor is covered with huge boulders, and we make our way around and over them as best we can. It doesn’t rain much out here, just three or four inches a year, but when it does, the water pours down Guadalupe’s parched hills, dislodging rocks from the slopes and heaping them up at the bottom of canyons like this one. The rocks themselves, spewed out of volcanos at various times and with different chemical compositions, are a brightly colored assortment: some are purple, others brick red, still others green, black, or gray. Here and there bleached goat bones, or in some cases entire rotting carcasses, lend additional charm to the landscape.

As the canyon gets steeper most of the members of our original group fall back, until finally there are just a few of us, including Everett and myself, still pushing on. We gaze up with enormous misgivings at boulders sitting precariously on the slopes above us, reassuring each other with comments like, “There’s a lot of kinetic energy in those rocks,” and, “Keep your voice down.” Halfway through the afternoon we find that the canyon narrows and ends at a twelve-foot-high rock ledge. Undaunted, we take to the slopes, scrambling across the loose red soil and trying to ignore the obvious fact that we are idiots to do it. Nearly every step sends a shower of rocks down to the canyon bottom below. Now and then we can hear goats bleating, and twice I see their heads outlined against the sky, looking down at us from the canyon rim. They know we’re crazy, but what the hell — according to Everett, there are a couple of the last few Guadalupe palms growing somewhere farther up the canyon. It’s a tree that grows wild nowhere else in the world, and if we don’t see it now, we may never get a chance to see it again.

Guadalupe Island was discovered in 1602 by the explorer Sebastian Vizcaino. As far as anyone knows, he was the first person to ever lay eyes on the island, since the coastal Indians probably weren’t even aware it existed. It was much too far from the coast for them to see, and well beyond the range of their boats anyway.

After its discovery, Guadalupe was essentially unvisited for nearly 200 years. But in the early 1800s, American, Russian, and Japanese whalers and sealers began to call at the island occasionally while searching for their prey. It was sometime during these years that cats and goats first got ashore, and with no predators to check their population growth, they quickly spread over the island.

The first naturalist to visit Guadalupe was Edward Palmer, an itinerant plant collector who made his living collecting new specimens and selling them to various museums, particularly the Smithsonian. Palmer first journeyed to Guadalupe from San Diego in February of 1875, and must have found the island to be something of a personal bonanza. After spending nearly four months there (during which his provisions gave out, and he became violently ill from a diet of goat meat and little else), he brought back samples of previously unknown forms of cypress, pine, palm, poppy, mallow, coreopsis, and many others. Palmer also collected what were later classified as eight new types of birds. (A ninth new bird, the Guadalupe storm petrel, was discovered twelve years later. One of the peculiar things about some of Guadalupe's birds was that they seemed unusually tame; as on other isolated islands, in the absence of predators the birds apparently never developed the trait of wariness. One turn-of-the-century visitor to the island reported that Guadalupe’s rock wren was “so tame that some will occasionally attempt to alight on the barrel of a gun aimed for their destruction.”) Palmer reported that thousands of goats lived on the island, but although the animals were thriving, they had not yet damaged most of the native flora and fauna irreparably. Since 1870, in fact, the Mexican government had encouraged goat hunting on Guadalupe. Thousands were killed each year, their hides, tallow, and meat taken to San Diego and from there shipped north via boat to San Francisco. But in 1873 three Californians got it into their heads that Guadalupe was going to make them rich. Their scheme was a simple one: since the island was so good for goat raising, why not replace the existing ones with purebred Angoras, which would bring a higher price for their thick, woolly hides? The three men hired a former Mexican solider to serve as nominal head of the company, and applied to the Mexican government for exclusive rights to raise and harvest goats on the island. (In their letter of application, they also pointed out that the island’s 4500 acres of pine and cypress trees could produce high quality wood “in great demand” in San Diego for railroad ties, building materials, and firewood.) Their application was accepted, and the Guadalupe Island Company was off and running. Within a few months, more than 1000 Angora bucks and ewes were brought to the island, while at the same time an effort was mounted to wipe out their wilder and less profitable cousins, estimated to number about 12,000. The following year the head of the operation boasted to a newspaper reporter that the breeding success of the Angoras had been enormous, and that the total number of goats on the island had risen to 35,000. Unfortunately, only about 1200 of the 12,000 wild goats had been captured, he said, but he was optimistic that the rest would soon be rounded up.

There is no record of when the Guadalupe Island Company ceased operations, but in the end it must have failed miserably. It is easy to imagine that the hunters found the steep volcanic terrain more than they bargained for, and gave up the idea of killing or capturing all of the non-Angora goats. As nature took its course, these would have then weakened the purebred strain, eventually making the whole enterprise unprofitable. It is also easy to imagine that the scarcity of water on the island (there is only one dependable spring, at the northern end) made raising domestic animals rather difficult. At any rate, the only tangible result of the venture was that by the mid- 1800s there were more goats than ever on the island, and they had Angora blood in their veins.

Naturalists continued to visit Guadalupe every few years, but they all returned with the disheartening news that it was rapidly deteriorating. The Guadalupe wren was last seen in 1892; the Guadalupe towhee, in 1897. Meanwhile, the island's cypress, pine, oak, and palm trees were being steadily reduced by old age as goats ate their seeds and saplings along with everything else. (One of the two cypress groves was eventually completely destroyed.) The Guadalupe storm petrel declined over a period of several decades; a bird that nested in ground burrows, it was torn apart by cats. “The mortality among these birds from the depredations of the cats that overrun the island is appalling — wings and feathers lie scattered in every direction around the burrows along the top of the pine ridge,” wrote the ornithologist W.W. Brown in 1906. By 1922, when the California Academy of Sciences mounted a week-long expedition to Guadalupe, the petrel was presumed extinct. The head of the expedition, G. Dallas Hanna, also speculated that as many as one hundred species of plants might have been exterminated in the fifty years since Edward Palmer had visited the island.

“The main damage to the island was already done by the time I arrived on the scene,” Reid Moran told me. Moran is a tall man with a long, large, in every way spectacular nose that dominates his features. At sixty-four he has been studying the plants of Baja California for nearly fifty years, collecting and classifying more than 20,000 of them, including several that subsequently were named after him. Guadalupe has been something of a special project for him, and his nineteen visits there “add up to a total of about three months on the island, ” he said when I visited him recently at his office in the Natural History Museum. “It’s a very wild and desolate place. And I’m just the type of person who likes to go to places where people seldom get, and climb to the highest spot and look around.” He smiled almost apologetically.

Moran, of course, was eager to investigate the peculiar biology of the island. Nearly all of the islands off the west coast of Mexico and the United States, including the Coronados and the Channel Islands, were once connected to the mainland. Guadalupe never was. It is a true oceanic island. Every living thing on it, except for the few species that man has introduced, was either blown to the island on the wind, washed to it by ocean currents, or carried onto it stuck to the feet or feathers of birds. No snakes or lizards ever made it, for instance, and no terrestrial mammals. Only one species of spider is thought to live there. Because so few plants and animals ever made it to Guadalupe, the ones that did had room to adapt and change. In fact, they had to; the climate and competition were totally different from the places they originally came from.

So now, as Moran points out, “You find that out of 168 native plants known from Guadalupe, thirty-nine are endemic. That’s a very high ratio. On Catalina Island. which is much closer to the mainland, there are 398 species of native plants, but only seven endemics.”

Moran, who was working at the Santa Barbara Botanic Garden at the time, first visited Guadalupe with George Lindsay (now director of the California Academy of Sciences) in 1948. After exploring the main island for a week, the two men decided to attempt landing on the outermost of two islets that lie off Guadalupe's southern end. (They had earlier found the inner islet completely inaccessible due to steep cliffs.) To them it seemed likely that some of the main island's extinct plants would be found on these islets, where no goats had ever been (and probably no people, either). The outer islet is nearly ringed by a sheer, 700-foot-high cliff, but at the northern end the cliff curves downward to a rocky slope, where, Moran told me, “you can land on a smooth day.” After scrambling up the slope, Moran and Lindsay found themselves in a small volcanic crater covered with plants. Among them were four unknown species that had probably once existed on the main island, including a new type of Indian paintbrush and a giant form of buckwheat with stems four inches thick.

After leaving Guadalupe, Moran visited several other Mexican islands, then returned to Santa Barbara and eventually went on to Berkeley, where he received his Ph D. in botany in 1951. In 1957 he was named curator of botany at the San Diego Natural History Museum, and he has held that title ever since. He told me that Guadalupe has changed very little since his first visit, but he admitted that over the years it has given him a few surprises. In 1970, for instance, after hiking up the lone path to the ridgetop (a torturous climb by all accounts), he found a jeep, some goats in pens, a small landing strip, and four Mexicans waiting for a plane. The Mexicans told him that their company, Pescados, Mariscos y Carnes, had a concession to capture goats and ship them to the mainland for meat. They were in radio contact with Ensenada, but told Moran that if the plane didn’t show up soon the goals they had captured would have to be freed. There was no water to give the animals, and without it, they could survive in the pens for three days at best. The Mexicans also said that the total population of goats on the island was about 20,000.

Moran returned in May of the following year, and near the island's summit found numerous goat heads and entrails scattered about. Some Mexican fishermen told him that a new company (Pescados. Mariscos y Carnes having dropped out of the picture for some reason) had paid seventy Indians from Sonora to capture and slaughter goats at the scale of two pesos for each goat; in the last few months they had killed 8700 animals. “And I never would have missed them,” Moran added, "there were so many left!”

The new enterprise apparently met the same fate as all the others, and since then the goats have had Guadalupe Island more or less to themselves. “In the lush years the goats increase, and in the dry years they starve to death,” Moran explained. “Then the plants get ahead of the goats for a while — the ones confined to cliffs begin to establish themselves on accessible slopes again — but then they disappear from the goats eating them.” Moran said that if the goats were to be killed or controlled. some of the plants that are now rare or thought extinct would very likely make a comeback. A few have probably survived along inaccessible cliffs, where neither man nor goat can find them. Even the cypress, pine, and palm trees, which have not reproduced successfully for more than a century, still produce seeds that could take root and grow.

It is impossible to put a value on Guadalupe's dead and dying plants — an extract from one might benefit mankind directly as a medicine or food; a study of another might reveal what made it successful in the first place, and thereby shed light on evolution or some other process. But there is also the argument that they have a right to exist, and even to become extinct, free from man's troublesome influence. “If someone doesn’t think it’s important to preserve unique plants, you can’t convince them it is,” Moran said with an air of resignation. Then he told me about the time a visitor to Harvard asked to see the university’s extensive shell collection. The curator showed him specimen after specimen, but in the end the visitor’s only comment was. “What are they good for?” The curator replied quickly, “What are you good for?”

After finding the palm trees, we return to the floor of Twin Canyons and sit where the late afternoon sun cannot find us, resting. There were just two trees, old and twisted, growing out of the side of an eroding slope. It is more than one hundred years since young Guadalupe palms were seen, and judging by the precarious location of these two, the species is not long for this earth.

We make our way slowly back down the canyon to the rocky beach, where we find we are among the last few of our group still on the island. Someone suggests swimming back to the Finalista, anchored a few hundred yards off shore, but the captain (who has been waiting on the beach for us) vetoes the idea. Later I learn this is partly because Guadalupe is known for big sharks — particularly great whites — that cruise the waters near the seal rookeries looking for unwary pups.

At night we anchor off a cliff near the northern end of the island, rocking gently in the swells. The night is warm, and the stars seem to come and go in a drifting haze. A Xantus' murrelet — a small black and white ocean bird — flutters by the aft deck like a huge moth, then dives into the water and swims underneath the boat, only to resurface a few minutes later and fly away. There is something unsettling about seeing it go so easily from air to water and back again, and it seems part of the island’s mystery. Perhaps this is only what draws us to places like Guadalupe in the first place, so distant and different from San Diego or New York or Washington, D C.; or perhaps there is some deeper meaning in it, the kind of thing that touched Walter Bryant in 1866 when he heard the cry of the Guadalupe petrel in the darkness of a March night and described it as, “Here’s a letter, here’s a letter; for you, for you.”

The next morning we land near the fur seal rookery, at the southeastern end of the island. A few stone huts still stand on the shore, reminders of the sealers who once stayed here and went about their brutal business. Weathered graffiti on a few of the stones bears testimony to the long history of man’s impact on the island; the oldest we find is an elaborately etched “W. Chandler, 1824.” While the others look for more signatures, I wander off on my own, down to a cove that was once one of the main fur seal haul-outs. Not a single seal is to be seen on this morning, but in places the lava has been worn smooth over the years by their countless bellies as the animals mated, sunned, and slept here. I reach my fingers out to touch the shining rock — it is as smooth as glass.

Since Guadalupe fur seals were never completely wiped out, someone would have rediscovered them living on the island sooner or later, but the way it happened makes for an intriguing tale. The last commercial catch was taken in 1894, and for many years afterward no seals were seen anywhere. Then in 1926 two fishermen, William O. Clover and Harry Fisher, saw what they believed to be a small group of fur seals near Guadalupe’s southern end. They reported their find to San Diego Zoological Society president Dr. Harry Wegeforth, who asked the two men if they would consider trying to capture live specimens for the zoo. Clover and Fisher agreed, and two bull Guadalupe fur seals were actually delivered to the zoo on April 25, 1928.

Unfortunately, the captured animals died within a few years, and that was the last anyone saw of live Guadalupe fur seals until 1949. That year a marine biologist from UCLA, George Bartholomew, saw what he thought was a bull fur seal among a group of California sea lions on San Nicolas Island. The bull didn’t appear the following year, so Bartholomew and Carl Hubbs, then with the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, decided to search for the animal on its traditional breeding grounds. In January of 1950, Hubbs tracked down Harry Fisher, who was a patient at the naval hospital in Balboa Park, and heard him describe in detail the spot where he and Clover had sighted the seals twenty-four years earlier. As if to heighten the drama of the situation, Fisher died the next day. A few weeks later Hubbs and Bartholomew sailed to Guadalupe, where, as Hubbs later wrote, “We closely examined the bold shores all around this volcanic island, but found no trace of fur seals.” However, Hubbs returned in November, 1954. and at sunset on the final day of his trip sighted one bull, two cows, and three pups near the mouth of a small cave. They were, fittingly, close to the spot Harry Fisher had described.

The Guadalupe fur seal has been seen every year since then. A relatively small seal with a pointed, doglike snout, it favors rugged caves and coves along the southeastern shore of Guadalupe. The inaccessibility of this terrain, combined with the seals’ remarkably effective camouflage (when they are dry they look like dry rocks, and when wet they look like wet rocks), makes them extremely difficult to count, but several people who have made the effort report about 1000 in all, allowing for bulls at sea. Considering that it hasn’t been hunted for more than eighty-five years, this is a small number indeed, and scientists are still trying to determine why it hasn’t recovered as well as. for instance, the elephant seal.

As I sit contemplating all this on the seal-worn rocks, Bill Everett ventures down past me in search of a close-up photograph of a fur seal. Making his way out one of the many narrow ledges of rock, he is surprised by a sudden, terrific roar, and nearly throws his camera into the air — just about the only time I have ever seen him lose his composure. From a nearby crevice a previously hidden fur seal glares out at him; a formidable but unaggressive foe, it just wanted to warn him not to come any closer. Small restitution for having been nearly exterminated.

In the afternoon we sail around Guadalupe’s southern tip and drop anchor in Melpomene Cove, near the Mexican weather station. We are anxious to investigate the hills above the station for plants; because the personnel here occasionally shoot goats for food, the animals tend to avoid the southern end of the island, and a few plants are reportedly making a comeback. It is ironic that this human settlement is now probably the most beneficial influence the plants have on the entire island.

Reid Moran told me that the weather station was first established in 1946. “It was just two men and one wife back then. ” he recalled, “and it just didn’t work out. One guy eventually killed the other.” Since then the settlement has had up to thirty people at a time, all navy personnel and their families. Everett, who speaks a little Spanish, says he has talked to the inhabitants once or twice. and got the impression that they would rather be anywhere but here. Because of the wind that hammers the island almost constantly, temperatures are often low, and Everett says he has heard a few of the men jokingly compare the island to Iceland.

The captain of the Finalista takes a skiff in to shore to make initial contact .and after a short discussion, two Mexican servicemen wearing thick blue jackets come aboard to inspect the ship’s papers. They eventually agree to let us land, and soon about fifteen of us are trudging up a steep path past the station’s cluster of houses to the hills above. We are accompanied by Pedro Ruiz Guzman, a young geology teacher from the University of Baja California in Ensenada, who happens to be here with a dozen of his students on a field trip. It is a strenuous climb, but once on top. the view is almost indescribably bizarre and beautiful. Low, windswept shrubs are everywhere; Guadalupe poppies, spice bush, bright green Palmer’s tarweed. others that no one even recognizes. To the south the two main islets rise like stone towers out of the sea. while to the north barren red hills — each one a cinder cone — screen off our view. We can see. however, the windward side of the island, where the cliffs drop a thousand feet or more straight down to wave-battered rocks. “You feel,” Reid Moran once said of Guadalupe, “as if you’re really in another world.”

We walk around quietly, a little dazed by the view and the bright sunlight. Seeing me stare down at tiny fragments of volcanic rock, Pedro Guzman comes over and asks in English, “You are a geologist?” No, I assure him, just interested. In answer to my questions he tells me he is visiting Guadalupe for the second time, having been here several years earlier with an American graduate student who was studying the island’s geology. Guzman and his students came out from Ensenada two weeks ago on a shrimp boat, and they are planning to return aboard a Mexican naval destroyer.

I ask him about the weather station, and he says there are about thirty residents — four families and a few single men. They occasionally shoot and eat goats, and catch lobsters, fish, and the small black abalone that are found close to shore. But as for water, he says, “Here water is a very big problem.” Since there are no springs at this end of the island, the Mexican navy brings in water and other supplies on a destroyer “once in a month. Now we are getting low. The destroyer was supposed to come on the third [of May); now we are hoping it will come on the eighth.” Suddenly realizing it is the fifth of May, I lamely wish Guzman a happy Cinco de Mayo. He smiles.

I ask him if he has been to the cypress grove, and he tells me that a few days earlier he and two men from the weather station set out for the main ridge, where the trees are found, but that they had to turn back after half a day because they found the steep canyons impassable. He adds that in one of the canyons he saw a large spider — “Maybe a tarantula, I don’t know spiders” — which, if true, would be the first of its kind ever reported on the island.

We walk slowly toward the path that leads back down to the weather station, pausing here and there to look at the rocks while Guzman identifies a few of them for me: black pyrotitc, clear piagioclase, green olivine. Seeing my interest, he finally turns to me and says, “Why don’t you stay with us? My students and I are sleeping in an unused storage building — just sleeping bags on the cement floor, but. . . . You could return on the destroyer in a few days. ...” For a moment I am overwhelmed by his kind offer; the prospect of roaming the island at will for a few days is almost tot) good to be true. But the dream is invaded by visions of customs agents, visas, endless explanations and paperwork. I politely decline.

“What would I like to see happen to Guadalupe?” Reid Moran repeated when I put the question to him a few weeks later in his office at the museum. “I would like to see all of the goats die. Possibly a disease could be introduced, but I haven’t heard of one that might work. I would like to see the goats hunted again, but you could never get them all. and killing even half of them might not reduce the problem.” This last point is echoed by Bill Everett, who told me recently, “I don’t think there’s any way the goats can be got off the island. It’s physically impossible to lay eyes on every one — the terrain is just too difficult. And the only alternatives are very expensive.

Moran has suggested fencing off the lone spring — which would kill many of the goats in dry years — or putting a fence around crucial areas such as the cypress grove. It’s among these last old trees that a few Guadalupe kinglets still nest, hovering near extinction. According to Everett, they might hang on for another century, but if the trees continue to die without reproducing, the birds will inevitably follow. Even so. Everett isn’t convinced that fencing the grove off is a workable solution. “How would you get the fence up there? Your first thought is a helicopter, but once you’ve seen the island and the wind up there you realize how difficult it would be. You could probably do it if you got a hotshot pilot, but again, at that point you’re talking about big bucks.” Moran says perhaps materials for a fence could be packed up by burro, but he admits that it would be difficult to organize such an expedition, and there is always the final problem of who would maintain the fence once it was up.

Rumors abound about Guadalupe’s future — everything from resort hotels to a national park — but very likely it will simply continue to slowly deteriorate. An official at the San Diego office of the Mexican department of fisheries, which issues permits for landing on Guadalupe, said recently that his department was not aware of plans of any kind for the island. And as Everett points out, “Look, the Mexicans at the weather station do eat the goats, after all, and so do the Mexican fishermen who stay there from time to time, so maybe they don’t even want them off.” Reid Moran, too, is pessimistic about anything being done. “I don’t know of any government officials that are worried about it,” he said. “I don’t think most of the Mexican government even cares.”

We leave Guadalupe at sunset, heading east toward the Baja peninsula across a restless sea. I sit at the back of the boat, watching as the light fades over the island and fog creeps in over the ridge. In a few minutes Guadalupe is no more than a shadow in the twilight; above it, low cirrus clouds turn pink, then orange, and soon Venus appears, the evening star, white and sharp as crystal.