Jack English, a Ventana Wilderness outdoorsman, dies at 96.

Jack English, who found respite from society in a remote cabin in the Ventana Wilderness for 13 years, died on March 3. He was 96, and had been living with his son, Dennis, and Dennis' family in Soquel.

The Soquel native first visited Pine Valley with his parents at age 11, then returned in his 50s, when he bid on a piece of land in a government auction and proceeded to build a modest cabin with his late wife, Mary, utilizing wood from the area and hauling in cement and hardware on their backs. 

The cabin, located in the Santa Lucia Mountains off the Pine Ridge Trail near the headwaters of the Carmel River, is accessible only by foot—a rugged 12-mile hike from Los Padres Dam in Cachagua, or a steep 6-mile descent from dusty Tassajara Road. 

It was the Englishes' weekend home until Mary died of ovarian cancer, and Jack moved there full-time for 13 years. 

"She knew I always wanted to live there. She told me, 'Go ahead.' But without her, it's just not the same anymore," English told the Weekly in a 2013 interview.

Anyone who's hiked through the Ventana Wilderness knows there's not much that's hospitable in that region—there are steep ascents, dense patches of poison oak, and fickle water sources that run only sometimes.

English's cabin in Pine Valley was a welcome stop in an already inviting place, a wide, grassy meadow flanked by rocky outcroppings.

He'd invite people in and offer up stories of the old days. 

He told stories about being stationed in the South Pacific during World War II, about his life working in Alaskan gold mines before and after the war, about hunting big game in Alaska, about watching the Basin Complex Fire scorch his backyard in 2008. 

Mostly, he talked about Mary. He called her Scrumptious.

"I saw that girl and couldn't believe my eyes. She was the prettiest girl I ever saw, and I still think so," he said in 2013.

"She was the brains of the outfit. I made a living [as a contractor], but she handled all the paperwork, investing, she watched everything."

They'd been married just six months when he went overseas in World War II; when he returned, they adopted Dennis, a violinist and violin restorer. 

Jack got into violin bows because of his son's interest, and started making them. You could find him sitting outside his Pine Valley cabin working away on meticulous details and beautiful inlays with materials like ebony, red abalone, ivory, walrus ivory, tortoise shell. 

Despite severe gout, which slowed his work, English continued making violin bows as he aged. 

"It interferes with my work because I can’t hold anything," he told the Weekly in 2013. "Now it takes 40 hours per bow."

English said he spent a lot of time thinking, especially late at night, reviewing memories of Mary and also big issues like life and death. 

He'd long been a hunter of big game—moose, caribou, mountain lions—then one day decided he was done. 

"I shot so much big game, I’ve killed everything in North America practically," English said. "I just don’t want to kill anything anymore. I think, ‘What did I kill all that stuff for?’

"I don't want to kill anything. But you've just got to face reality: Your life is based on death, you've got to eat, you've got to drink. Something's got to die. We all do. None of us go on forever.

"This planet, and my philosophy is based on death. Without death you can't survive. It's a brutal fact, but it's true."

English offered up this as a possible explanation for his long life: "Both my wife and I didn’t drink, we didn’t smoke, we didn’t use drugs. We do not believe in it. We believe in clean. One of my philosophies is, if you don’t tell the truth it catches up with you."

When he spoke to the Weekly in 2013, English was already living with his son Dennis as his health declined, and making occasional accompanied visits to the cabin. A heart attack had been followed by the flu, then a broken shoulder and pneumonia. 

He was already talking about what would come after the end for him. 

"My wife wanted her ashes scattered in Pine Valley, in the meadow and around the cabin. I’ve told my son, mix us together and then scatter it. To me, that’s very important. We were partners in everything."