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It also is home to marine fossils and Chumash paintings considered among the most impressive examples of Native American rock art.

Long before Europeans settled in Los Angeles — and even before the Chumash tribes inhabited the land and engaged in controlled burning — the Santa Monica Mountains and its landscapes of chaparral, oak woodlands and coastal sage scrub were no strangers to fire.

She recounts the time an aunt surprised her family by disclosing their Chumash heritage through an email that contained old maps and newspaper clippings of an ancestor’s obituary.

“Even though we grew up in the concrete suburbs east of East LA,” Mora Hidalgo writes, “the rolling hills and valley oaks and wine country roads up there feel like home to us because maybe, as Chumash descendants, it once was.”

And just this month, Biden announced the creation of the Chumash Heritage National Marine Sanctuary — a 4,500-square-mile national marine sanctuary to be “managed with tribal, Indigenous community involvement.”