Huntington Lake

There's nothing easy or predictable about the 40-team Southern Section Division 1 baseball playoffs that begin Tuesday with eight wild-card games. "The Division 1 games are a juggernaut," Coach Matt LaCour of No. 3-seeded Studio City Harvard-Westlake said. "Single-elimination playoffs are about a team getting hot at the right time and having a little luck. " Santa Ana Mater Dei (24-2) ended the regular season as the best team in Southern California and received the No. 1 seeding for the Division 1 playoffs.

They were up in the high country, floating across the lake in a houseboat. Nicholas Eischen wanted to know what his family thought he should do with his life. He had worked at a pool service and at a few other short-term jobs. "All of them were things that didn't have a future to them," said his grandfather, Bob Pinion. "He was looking for a future."

Late summer in the Sierra Nevada, and the days are filled with the premonition of fall. Nights have gone past being nippy, and at noon, shadows cast by fir trees have the feel of early winter. We had rented an aluminum skiff with a small outboard, the type often used by fishermen who troll for trout. It was the second summer at Huntington Lake for my wife and me, and we don't fish.

When my 10-year-old nephew returned from summer camp with tales of adventure, his 8-year-old cousin Lauren wanted much of the same. She was too late for summer camp, though, so I promised her the next best thing: a fall weekend camp, just for her, at beautiful Shaver Lake. Here in the Sierra National Forest, south of Yosemite and 50 minutes northeast of Fresno, we could ride horses, go boating and walk in the woods.

Mammoth's second ski area could open in the fall of 1987. At least that is the intention of the Dempsey Construction Corp. and architect Allan O'Connor, partners in a $536-million joint venture involving a golf course, condominiums, hotels and other facilities. First studied in 1965 as a potential ski area, Sherwin Bowl has since been the subject of 40 additional investigations. But while the U.S.

HUNTINGTON LAKE, Calif. - Comanche has one pale blue eye, one deep brown and a prancing gait that has cowboy Morgan Austin suspecting this mystery horse once paraded around an arena. Until two weeks ago, Comanche wouldn't let anyone in the saddle. It took Morgan, 17, two months of talking to him "real quiet-like," slipping on a saddle blanket, then the saddle, before he could hoist his own lanky frame onto the brown-and-white quarter horse. Now, on a day when the sky is pale with heat and ragged breaths of wind kick up thick, sticky dust, Comanche and Morgan lead the way down a boulder-strewn Sierra trail.

The family of a Newport Beach doctor killed in January is accusing the suspected gunman of defrauding them in the weeks after the deadly shooting. They have filed two lawsuits in the span of a week against Stanwood Elkus, the Lake Elsinore man accused of killing urologist Dr. Ronald Gilbert on Jan. 28. In addition to a wrongful death claim, the family accused Elkus of giving away real estate he owns in order to shield it from the Gilberts if they win damages, the Daily Pilot reported.

Clear-eyed wisdom comes easier from a distance. Consider, for example, wildfires. Almost every summer a big fire will light up some California mountain or sea canyon. People in the fire's path grab what they can and bolt, stopping only to stammer into the microphones about the treasures left behind to burn. "That was my life in there," they moan, pointing for the camera as their house blazes away. Eventually the fire is extinguished, the firetrucks roll out and the insurance adjusters roll in.

This is a big weekend for the San Diego sailing community, and not simply because of Dennis Conner's efforts off the Australian coast. Through Sunday, the Mission Bay Yacht Club is playing host to the 16th annual Thistle Midwinters West, the top regatta in the western United States for an unpretentious class of sailboat that emphasizes teamwork and tactics over technological innovation.