Santa Cruz Ca

Santa Cruz It's been more than 20 years since I moved to L.A. from New York City, but certain things about wild California never lose their exoticism. Joshua trees. Hummingbirds. Migrating whales. Redwoods. And then there are monarch butterflies. Starting every October, thousands of monarchs from the northwestern U.S. and Canada make an epic journey down the California coast to spend the winter, their numbers peaking in November and December.

At a reception in the mountains above Santa Cruz, dozens of surfers of a certain age, balancing wine glasses and pizza slices, basked in their closeness to a little piece of their sport's history. The celebrants at the San Lorenzo Valley Historical Museum had known the basic story for a while: In 1885, three Hawaiian princes visiting Santa Cruz on a break from military school wowed the locals with, as a newspaper report put it, "interesting exhibitions of surf-board swimming as practiced in their native islands."

Pull up to the Babbling Brook Inn, and you wouldn't necessarily know this is where Ohlone Indians lived centuries ago, fishing in a nearby stream and hunting elk in the hills. But soon the past begins to appear -- remnants of an old Spanish adobe, a gristmill, a tannery and a 1909 log cabin. The property was turned into an inn in 1981 and renovated a few years ago. Thirteen rooms are built around a natural waterfall.

A shop on the Santa Cruz wharf will stop selling T-shirts marked "Surf City, Santa Cruz California, U.S.A.," ending more than a year of litigation with the Huntington Beach tourist bureau, a lawyer for the agency said Sunday. The suit became a proxy debate over which California beach town could call itself the nation's surf capital. The Huntington Beach Conference and Visitors Bureau registered the "Surf City U.S.A."

The accused in the murder trial is a pop psychologist whose unorthodox methods intrigued the CIA. The victim was a hooker who specialized in kinky sex. The prosecution's key witness is a former cocaine dealer. The trial, which goes to the jury today, has packed spectators into the courtroom every day. This city "has its flaky side," conceded Assistant Dist. Atty. Gary Fry, who is prosecuting the case, and the murder trial has revealed that side to the fullest.

Tuesday's earthquake, the strongest on the San Andreas fault since the San Francisco quake on April 18, 1906, came in a place that had been identified by scientists just last year as the most likely spot for a major jolt in Northern California within the next 30 years. The epicenter of the temblor, eight miles east-northeast of the city of Santa Cruz in the Santa Cruz Mountains, was at virtually the same spot as earthquakes in the 5-magnitude range that occurred on June 27, 1988, and Aug.

California has three of the best urban beaches in the United States, according to a new report by the Surfrider Foundation, despite water quality woes. Newport Beach in Orange County, East Beach in Santa Barbara and Main Beach in Santa Cruz rank among the country's top 10 urban beaches--spots where there is a "peaceful coexistence" between healthy shorelines and urban development, according to the advocacy group's first State of the Beach Report.

No doubt about it, Robin Ortiz had a big heart. The homeless, who hung around the open air downtown mall in Santa Cruz where she had worked her way up from server to production supervisor at a coffee shop and retailing outlet, knew her as a soft touch for a free cup. In her spare time, she passed out free contraceptives in the mall as part of an AIDS awareness project.

As another summer day fades, the sick and dying begin to gather. An elderly woman leans unsteadily on her walker. A hip young paraplegic fellow glides his electric wheelchair past a dapper old man clutching a cane. Men wiry with AIDS sidle into folding chairs in the cramped meeting hall. A blind man hunkers at the edge of the throng. There is talk of housing and finances, discussions of dipping health and impending death. They finish by flouting federal law. Marijuana, deemed illegal by the U.S.

On its first day of business here, Borders Books and Music got the full Santa Cruz treatment. Hundreds of tourists and curious locals browsed and bought. Scores of protesters beat drums, hung banners and set off stink bombs inside the store. The "Bare-Breasted Ladies," a masked group of topless women whose previous chain store targets include Starbucks and the Gap, roamed the aisles. The commotion is not likely to abate any time soon.

SANTA CRUZ -- The Santa Cruz County Health Services Agency has closed a restaurant and opened an investigation after at least 80 diners and employees got sick in the last week. Bob Kennedy, the county's director of environmental health, wouldn't name the restaurant because the investigation is incomplete. More than 1,000 people may have been exposed to a gastrointestinal virus, which is spread through fecal-oral contact. Kennedy blamed transmission on failure to wash hands.

Even in a city famed for its liberal policies on marijuana, police in Santa Cruz had to wonder what a robbery victim must have been smoking before he called them this week. A 20-year-old resident of nearby Felton, he complained that two men pointed a gun through the window of his parked car and made off with four ounces of marijuana that happened to be sitting in his lap. At first, he claimed it was for medicinal use only, according to police.

There's no shortage of movie theaters in this university town, but there's also no shortage of out-of-the-way patches of scrub. Guerilla Drive-In prefers the latter. At Guerilla Drive-In screenings, you don't shell out $12 for tickets or stretch out in stadium seats. Instead, you join a hundred or more cinema fans draped in blankets and hunkered down amid the weeds, watching films projected onto random walls. Guerilla Drive-in has been a semi-underground summer diversion here since 2002.

THE screams of the happily terrified filtered down as the Giant Dipper thundered above us. We were beneath the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk, where the Dipper's 75-horsepower engine (the 1924 original) was pumping away. The 83-year-old Dipper is the most popular of the boardwalk's 35 rides. But it's not the oldest. The carousel, with its intricately carved and painted horses, dates from 1911, four years after the birth of the "modern" boardwalk.

On the continuum of things that make no sense to me, spitting good wine into a tin bucket falls somewhere between intelligent design and every David Lynch film I have ever seen. And so, even though "spitters" would crucify me for it during my eight-hour speed-tasting tour of Santa Cruz Mountains wineries, I was determined to drink up. A rising blood alcohol level would help me deal with my friend Rod, who had yet to apologize for abruptly blowing off my East Coast wedding three years earlier.

At his independent bookstore in this famously left-leaning town, Neil Coonerty offers bestsellers from both sides of the political spectrum. But there's freedom in owning your own shop: You can make fun of those you don't like. Over three decades, the 60-year-old former Berkeley radical has skewered his share of conservative authors and politicians -- along with others whose ideas he didn't think were worth the paper they were printed on.

The owners of two Santa Cruz beachwear shops filed a lawsuit Thursday challenging Huntington Beach's trademark of the nickname "Surf City USA." The suit came in response to cease-and-desist letters the Huntington Beach Conference and Visitors Bureau sent last month advising Noland's on the Wharf and Shoreline Surf Shop to stop selling T-shirts with the words "Surf City Santa Cruz California USA."

Transportation When the 6.9 temblor struck, it sent a 30-foot piece of the Bay Bridge crashing into its lower tier, and made the columns supporting the Nimitz Freeway portion of nearby Interstate 880 crumble like dominos, virtually paralyzing the entire Bay Area. The San Mateo Bridge also had to be closed after the quake. Those traveling by subway had to grope through darkness to get out. The system was shut down until morning.

The city's Conference and Visitors Bureau has asked a judge to dismiss a federal lawsuit challenging its "Surf City USA" trademarks, officials announced Wednesday. A Santa Cruz company that runs beach shops filed suit in Northern California last month after the bureau told it to stop selling Surf City T-shirts. The bureau has asked for the case to be dismissed or moved, in part because a Northern California jury would be "hostile," officials said. A hearing is scheduled for Jan. 9 in San Jose.

Voters in three California cities will decide Tuesday whether to require their police departments to make the private use of marijuana by adults the lowest law enforcement priority. The ballot initiatives in Santa Barbara, Santa Cruz and Santa Monica are direct descendants of Oakland's Proposition Z, which passed overwhelmingly in 2004, and of a similar measure approved by voters in Seattle a year earlier.