Kim Kuska is going to need four hours to explain. Eight hours would be better, he says, but he will need four hours minimum. He’s made the two-hour drive to Seaside from his San Mateo home and his car is loaded down with all he’s brought – the maps and the documents and the seemingly endless pages of correspondence – to help him.
“You have to see all the information I have,” he says on the phone. “Once you see all the information I have, you’ll say, ‘Oh my God!’”
He arrives the next morning and starts lugging file boxes into the Weekly’s second-floor conference room.
“I narrowed it down to the essentials,” Kuska says as he carries in the first of three boxes overflowing with notebooks and binders. The boxes contain what’s become his life’s work – the Monterey County permits and letters that have flown back and forth between Kuska, various environmental groups and officials from the Boy Scouts. His car is crammed with even more boxes, as are two spare bedrooms rooms back at his home.
All of that paperwork centers on a tiny and rare plant that grows in only three places in California, or really, three places in the world. It’s called Dudley’s lousewort, or Pedicularis dudleyi. The plant, a lime green, fern-like hemiparasitic found growing at the base of Douglas fir trees, relies on the tree’s fungal network to obtain water, nitrogen and phosphorus.
More than 50 percent of the Dudley’s lousewort that grows anywhere grows in a patch at Camp Pico Blanco, the Boy Scout reservation on the north fork of the Little Sur River watershed in the Big Sur Wilderness.
It’s a place that has played host to generations of boys and young men who immerse themselves in the world of scouting. It’s also the place where – for decades – Kuska, a lifelong naturalist who became a high school biology teacher, felt most at home; first as a scout, then as he worked to achieve the rank of Eagle Scout and then as a popular instructor.
But now that’s over.
His relationship with the scouts is in shambles. He’s been banned from ever stepping foot on the Pico Blanco camp property again.
• • •
Former camp counselors and friends remember Kuska as an excellent staffer, full of energy and always excited when teaching scouts about nature. He was a big entity around Pico Blanco, literally and figuratively, a tall man with excitable eyes and a crooked smile that always seemed to be on his face. He has an encyclopedic knowledge of the flora and fauna that were at the center of the scouting experience.
As an Eagle Scout myself and former camp counselor at Pico Blanco, Kuska was in many ways a legend to me. He helped originate program activities staffers taught the boys in the summers I worked at the camp from 1997-2007.
Kuska’s legacy was nature education taught in a fun, lighthearted manner. But he is less lighthearted when he turns to a passage from the council’s first executive Alfred Young, serving from 1933 to 1961, in his Pico Blanco Scout Reservation leadership book called Men in the Making:
“Today, Pico Blanco Scout Reservation stands on this land, set aside to the sole end that it be preserved as a primitive area where the American boy can have the inestimable experience of untouched wilderness and unspoiled natural beauty. It is a reservation for boys, away from civilization, intended to offset the softening influence of our modern social life, and to help in development of America’s future men to be self-reliant, of strong character, and physically fit.”
That’s why the defense of Dudley’s lousewort is so vital to Kuska – it’s the poster plant of what he feels is the Boy Scouts’ decades-long destruction of that primitive and pristine environment. That’s why he took his story to the prestigious Center for Investigative Reporting. CIR identified violations including scout officials and camp staff “threatening [lousewort’s] existence” by harvesting old-growth trees the plant needs to survive.
Under state law, CIR reports, it’s illegal to harm a plant classified as rare.
“[The scout council] has to admit their mistakes. Someone has to say they did a lot of things wrong,” Kuska says. “I am the only and foremost authority on the plant.”
Ron Schoenmehl, director of support services for the Silicon Valley Monterey Bay Council of the Boy Scouts, says there’s no quarrel over that authority, or Kuska’s deep history with the scouts and his 35 years of expertise on Dudley’s lousewort. But he adds that Kuska’s actions have become so unreasonable that the council can no longer work with him.
• • •
Kuska arrives for the interview at the Weekly in a partially untucked, button-down short-sleeved shirt, his greying reddish-blonde hair mussed and his shoes looking hastily tied. He’s been in the conference room for less than 15 minutes before he riles.
“Haven’t you been listening?” he says in a raised voice as he pounds his fist on the table, jostling the pens and highlighters in his ever-present pocket protector.
He grows most intense when describing the perceived environmental sins of the Boy Scouts, starting with unlawful felling of Douglas firs.
“They were illegally cutting them down for money,” Kuska says. “I actually wrapped myself around the trees. I was trying to save the habitat… lousewort only lives on old growth Douglas firs and without me being involved, the chances of that plant being saved is nil.”
Kuska says this was done often more than noted in a court file.
Yes, there’s a court file.
That’s because in 1990, Assistant Council Executive Robert Lambert pleaded no contest to four violations of the Department of Fish and Game code. The charges included allowing alterations to the Little Sur River without a permit in an area where the camp sets up a swimming area every summer by using a removable dam. Other violations included knocking down trees in the process.
In a document-cum-manifesto called “My Struggles to Present My Lousewort Plan to the Council’s Executive Board Appendix,” Kuska lists in very specific detail – the appendix clocks in at 18 pages – a timeline history from Feb. 24, 2011 to present with his attempts to show his 46-page “Dudley’s Lousewort Recovery and Restoration Plan” to the Monterey Bay Area Boy Scout Council’s executive board.
Kuska quotes emails and in-person meetings, and notes missed phone calls. He talks in statistics and quotes, and with an accuracy that’s almost scary, from hundreds of pages he has written, much of which is bolded, italicized and underlined.
“I can whip their arguments to little shreds,” he says in response to any effort the council claims to be making toward environmental stewardship. “Their plan is lie and deny.”
• • •
Pico Blanco Scout Reservation sits tucked in along the Little Sur River, surrounded by soaring coastal redwood trees. Access to the secluded camp starts from a left turn off Highway 1, just south of Rocky Point Restaurant, and slithers up eight miles through rustic cabins, past the Mid-Coast Fire Brigade station and up to Bottcher’s Gap, named for the late-1800s homesteader John Bottcher. The campground overlooks the vast, rolling mountain ranges of the Los Padres National Forest, including the white, granite mountain called Pico Blanco, the camp’s namesake. From there, a steep and curvy three-mile dirt road reaches camp.
The “Recovery and Restoration Plan” explains the history of the plant in Big Sur. It was first found in the mid-1970s in Pico Blanco by the late-Big Sur botanist Jeff Norman, a friend of Kuska’s and member of the California Native Plant Society (CNPS) Monterey Bay Chapter.
In 1971, Kuska’s first year on camp staff, he started leading nature hikes up the Redwood Memorial trail, which rose above the riverbed away from central camp.
“It was rare and only in this one watershed in Monterey County and I wanted to know why,” he says. “It’s a detective novel how this thing got there. These things just excite my brain!”
Kuska’s interest was passed from a mutual friend to Susan Cochrane, a staff biologist with CNPS. She heard he was very familiar with the Little Sur River watershed and wrote Kuska a letter asking for help in a field survey on the plant. He measured “every single leaf and flower stock,” counting 1,220 louseworts in 31 sites along a 2.5-mile stretch of the Little Sur River. The majority of the fern-like plant exists behind the central kitchen at camp.
• • •
Schoenmehl, the council executive, has his own in-depth relationship with the Boy Scouts, 50 years all told, 33 of them as an employee of the scouts. He says in the spring of 2012, before the council merger happened, the Santa Clara Council made considerable efforts – costing more than $42,000 – to address environmental concerns at Pico Blanco, even getting the National Council involved for evaluations.
“As a result, the decision was made to focus a bit more on the biological and botanical ecology of Pico Blanco,” he says. “We asked for proposals to assess whether the plants and scouts could coexist and were well-aware the Dudley’s lousewort was a rare plant and had a due diligence to help it.”
On Dec. 31, the merger of the two councils created the Silicon Valley Monterey Bay Council. With the Little Sur River ecology in mind, Schoenmehl says they decided to make the lousewort a conscious priority.
“It was important to us,” Schoenmehl says, “so I contacted Kim Kuska and invited him to camp and asked him to tell me everything he knew.”
Schoenmehl says they met for a supervised site visit in April 2013 with hopes of better understanding the lousewort and to give Kuska a chance to share his side of the story.
Things didn’t go so well.
Kuska, he says, went ballistic over a pile of hay behind the kitchen. He thought it could blow over near the lousewort and propagate an invasive species into the lousewort habitat.
“He was shaking mad and really out of control at that point,” Schoenmehl says. “He was livid I was not removing a small pile of decomposing hay.”
In a letter to Kuska on May 1, Schoenmehl wrote: “Unfortunately, instead of finding common ground, our full day together was marred by a number of incidents and outbursts from you of a very disturbing nature.” He described Kuska tipping off the Center for Investigative Reporting as evidence of further hostilities.
And then Schoenmehl ended the letter saying Kuska was no longer welcome at the camp.
Kuska in 2011 received a permit from the Department of Fish and Game to help replant lousewort seedlings on public property in the Los Padres Forest. The permit, though, did not allow Kuska to plant on the private scout land of Pico Blanco without permission; he did so anyway.
According to Schoenmehl, Kuska was planting seeds in high-traffic areas around camp near the power generator and the health lodge. If a rare plant sprouted there, that would mean the Boy Scouts would have to avoid and protect it.
“I have no doubt he knows far more about it than I do, but we decided we shall take responsibility for our property and the lousewort, and determined it is not in our best interest to continue to work with him,” Schoenmehl says. “I’m convinced it is the right move and we can find other local experts whom we like to work with.”
Former camp staffer Mark Ellis agrees, contending Kuska is stuck in the past, when Ellis shared Kuska’s original frustrations with a badly managed council in the 1980s, known by many former staff members as “The Dark Decade.”
“The challenge with Kim was that he maintained the same political pressures on this new council as he did on the old council,” says Ellis, who was on staff in the 1980s and considers himself a friend of Kuska’s. “His level of frustration hit a point where he got very impatient, and by submitting very abrasive measures to the new council, was not diplomatic.”
Ellis, currently a member of the council’s properties committee, agrees the two biggest steps by the new council were to acknowledge Dudley’s lousewort as an asset for camp and scheduling environmental impact studies.
“That area, in spite of everything else, has flourished,” says Ellis. “Now it’s essentially an uncountable number.”
According to Kuska’s notes, he counted just over 1,000 plants in only 16 sites during his last survey between 2009-2011.
Kuska still claims the Boy Scouts made a total of 539 violations since the late-80s, many of which involve illegal milling of rare, old-growth Douglas firs behind the kitchen in the lousewort habitat. It’s a conspiracy he says has been going on for decades.
“We have had four administrations in a row that have damaged the environment. That can’t be a coincidence,” he says. “With the people we have right now, they’re in on the cover-up. They need to be removed from scouting. They could have done a great job.”
• • •
Matt Fleming walks through Pico Blanco during staff setup week in July 2013. He uses a walking stick as he meanders over a log bridge and around a trail by the swimming area.
“The fact is there is a very unique ecosystem down here,” he says. “We are focusing on ecology and conservation of this area. There is a lot of focus on researching plants, like the Dudley’s lousewort.”
Fleming has been camp director for the last three summers at Pico Blanco. He has three sons in scouting. He says ecology preservation is a major goal of his counselors this summer.
“This camp makes less of an impact on the environment than most camps I’ve been to,” he says. “What nobody can touch down here is the ecosystem. We are 12 miles away from Highway 1 and it’s a totally different world.”
Fleming argues that the Boy Scouts and the environment must coexist for the survival of plants like the lousewort.
“If we can’t bring youth into the wilderness where they can see it, how is a kid in Salinas going to care about the Dudley’s lousewort?” he says. “Outdoor education is important, but it doesn’t happen in many schools anymore, because of budget cuts.”
As we walk through the waterfront area, Fleming introduces Abraham Wolfinger, the camp’s resident naturalist for the summer. Wolfinger is a biologist and Big Sur native and worked at Camp SEA Lab at California State University Monterey Bay. He is also a Palo Colorado Canyon resident. He says in June 2013, Schoenmehl reached out to the local community and invited them down to camp.
“It was always just closed doors between the residents and the scouts,” Wolfinger says. “This is a pilot summer to try and create better relationship with the residents. It’s refreshing to work with this new council.”
Wolfinger says so far the scouts have been nothing but welcoming, and native plant gardens labeled with historical and biological information are in the works.
“Our natural resources have been exploited and someone needs to step up and help. Who else better to help than the Boy Scouts?” he says.
Brian LeNeve argues this change doesn’t fully make up for a history of bad environmental stewardship. LeNeve is the current president of the Monterey Bay Chapter of the California Native Plant Society and has been a member of the organization for nearly 20 years.
According to him, the Boy Scouts have made too many mistakes – including the illegal stream bed modifications in 1990 and tree cutting without proper permitting.
“Currently, we are reluctantly optimistic,” says LeNeve. “We are more than willing to work with the Boy Scouts if they were willing to work with us, but we are very reserved since we’ve seen many leaderships that haven’t made any efforts.”
On June 8, 2013, Schoenmehl invited LeNeve and other members down to Pico Blanco for a site visit. It was a start.
“They seem to be reaching out to a lot of different organizations and right now, it’s an improving relationship,” says LeNeve. “What did happen in the past does have a bearing on what happens in the future. It’s a very short leash as far as CNPS is concerned. If [the council] doesn’t stand by their word, we’ll take them to court.”
According to LeNeve, Dudley’s lousewort is protected by the California Native Plant Protection Act and the California Environmental Quality Act and the Little Sur River Protected Waterway Management Plan.
LeNeve might be one of the few people who agree with Kuska, but that comes with a caveat.
“Frankly, that plant is probably still there because of Kim, but you never win with the extreme he has gone to,” LeNeve says. “He has put himself in a position where no one wants to work with him.”
Though, LeNeve says, Kuska’s intentions for the lousewort are in the right place.
“There is an individual plant growing right outside of the dining hall and it has zero chance expanding its population due to where it’s located,” he says. “You can count sites of the plant and the number of sites have been reduced and we would like to have what remains be protected.”
With correct planning and careful monitoring, LeNeve says Dudley’s lousewort should continue to return and the Boy Scouts should be at the forefront of that effort, rather than contributing to the environmental problems, and adds, “Every time man screws with nature, we tend to make it worse.”
• • •
The man banned from Boy Scouts thinks a primary reason his expulsion took place – an act as rare as the lousewort – is he’s too good of a boy scout.
“I am living up to the [Boy Scout] Outdoor Code I swore to when I was 10,” he says.
And he doesn’t think the plant will survive without his continued help. He writes letter after letter to Congress and county politicians for help to uncover what he considers decades of foul play by the Boy Scouts.
When asked if his efforts might have gone too far, Kuska becomes flabbergasted and can barely string a sentence together.
“I will sacrifice my life to save a species,” he finally stutters. “I wish there were 100,000 of me to do something about this.”
Kuska could be seen a tragic hero in some Shakespearean play, but he says his fight is more like a Dr. Seuss book. He suddenly recites at least several verses from The Lorax.
“I am the Lorax for the lousewort,” he says. “I speak for the lousewort, because the plant has no tongue.”