In September, 2025, I visited the small central coastal California town of Pacific Grove on the Monterey Peninsula. While checking out the local natural history museum, I learned that the town had a monarch butterfly sanctuary. Displays about this grove where some monarchs overwinter included pictures of town butterfly parades and festivals during the 1960’s and 70’s. The exhibit cautioned that monarchs rarely arrived in the area before late October, so I wouldn’t be able to see them this visit. The museum’s graphics also showed how severely monarch numbers had plummeted in recent years. Bummer, double bummer!
Nevertheless, I was intrigued that there was a California town where some monarchs came to spend the cooler months. Several years earlier, I’d seen videos and read instructional materials about a massive monarch butterfly migration that winds up in the Oyamel fir forests in central Mexico. Turns out, it’s the monarchs spawned east of the Rocky Mountains in the U.S. and Canada who overwinter in Oyamel.
Until my Pacific Grove visit, it hadn’t occurred to me that not all monarchs follow the same migration path or that wintering monarchs could be found in California. Smaller migrations of monarchs leave their late summer quarters west of the Rockies and congregate for the winter in some coastal towns in California and further down the Baja Peninsula in Mexico. Unfortunately, these Western monarchs are under even more severe environmental pressure than their Eastern cousins. Their overwintering numbers have declined by about 95% since the 1980’s, due to a variety of factors. Eager to find a monarch grove before the butterflies entirely disappeared, I did a minimal online search and mistakenly concluded that Pismo Beach State Park was the closest California monarch overwintering site to my home in San Diego.
In early December, I cajoled my somewhat reluctant husband into joining me in a “mini-tour” of the area near Pismo Beach in search of overwintering butterflies. I promised to share at least some of the driving chores involved in getting us past Los Angeles. The trip started out poorly. The rudimentary driving instructions on our phone app took us right through the heart of L.A., amid smog, congestion, and other stressed out drivers. When we finally got to the butterfly grove at Pismo Beach the following day, the number of wintering monarchs was only in the low hundreds. We never saw more than a few butterflies at a time.
The trip was not a total bust, however. We had a chance to sample some “Julefest” holiday displays and merriment at nearby Solvang, a village founded by three Danish educators in the early 20th century. With its half-timbered structures, plus more candy and pastry shops than any one town should have, Solvang combines a strong Danish flavor with the presence of a Chumash casino complex nearby. We also spent a magical evening at a lights festival at the Santa Ynes Valley Botanical Garden, where I snapped a no-flash photo of the guy who’s made my heart flutter for nearly sixty years.
Once home, I did a somewhat more extensive internet search (better info at https://westernmonarchtrail.org/) and discovered that there is at least one monarch wintering grove in California south of L.A. With a bit of luck and advanced planning, I may get to see some closer-to-home monarchs in January, before the spring’s northward migration begins. In the meantime, I’m nurturing a few milkweed plants at my community garden plot, hoping to provide a slightly better chance for these stately butterflies to avoid extinction.
Perhaps with time more of us will join efforts to help preserve these denizens of insect royalty, and perhaps fewer of us will remain fixated on their human counterparts and wannabes.
Jinny's Occasional Poems 