Saw my first bear of the season this morning on a walk down near Skylandia Beach in Tahoe City—quite a strange place for an ursine encounter as the industry on Lake Forest Road was bustling, and the bear (a big, honking coffee-colored guy) was not even an eighth-mile from the road.

In other bear news, Li’l Smokey, the cub rescued from last summer’s Moon fire in Shasta County and rehabbed by South Shore’s Lake Tahoe Wildlife Care, has been reported alive, well and out of hibernation by the California Department of Fish and Game, who picked up a signal from the bear’s transmitter last month. Li’l Smokey was released in the Klamath National Forest in February. Another happy ending for Lake Tahoe Wildlife Care!

For more info, check out Smokey’s rehab blog.

For my work as an editor at a regional magazine, I rarely have a chance to write in first person. Unfounded thoughts, quick opinions and good-old fashioned biases certainly don’t make it passed an editor’s cuts, or even onto the page in the first place. And that’s where this blog steps in… I look forward to bringing you more of an unfiltered me, and to keep you updated on my writing career and life along the way.