I am sitting in our rental in Borrego Springs, deep in the Colorado Desert, two weeks into an expedition with my partner Merry. It is before dawn. Idyllwild is only two hours to the north, a straight shot up Highway 74 through the Santa Rosa Mountains and over the grade, and every afternoon when the desert heat builds past 100 degrees I think about the cool yellow pine forests and the granite boulders draped in moss up on the mountain. But I am resisting the temptation. I will be in Idyllwild in May for the Earth Fair, as I have been for years.

This morning I opened the wonderful weekly Good Morning Idyllwild newsletter my friend Chris Perreault compiles, and learned that Bruce Edward Watts has died.

The lead photograph was of moss-covered boulders in the forest — the kind of image Bruce would have taken, might well have taken. Chris noted that Bruce was a bryologist — someone who studies mosses — and wrote a lovely appreciation of the organism itself: over 400 million years old, the precursor to all other land plants, the first thing to grow back after fire or eruption. There were close-up photographs of sporophytes rising from cushions of bright green gametophyte tissue on granite. It was exactly the kind of thing Bruce would have stopped on the trail to show you, kneeling down, pointing with a finger, waiting for you to really see it.

I first met Bruce in the late 1980s when he was the manager of Nomad Ventures, the venerable outdoor and mountaineering shop in Idyllwild. Nomad was a crossroads. If you were a climber headed for Tahquitz Rock or Suicide Rock and needed gear or a replacement cam, you went to Nomad. If you were a Pacific Crest Trail through-hiker coming off the trail to pick up your mail drop at general delivery and realized you needed new boots or a replacement stove, you ended up at Nomad. Bruce knew the backcountry. He had almost certainly been a climber in his younger days, and he could talk the language — routes, ratings, conditions, the quality of the granite. The Los Angeles Times quoted him in 2000 as the voice of the local climbing community, interpreting Tahquitz and its risks for a wider audience.

But I knew a different Bruce. The Bruce I knew was the ardent naturalist — not professionally trained, not credentialed, but as serious and as deep as many of us who were actually paid to be biologists. Bruce jumped into self-taught fields with a kind of joyful intensity that I recognized immediately. Seahorses. Rare plant species. Butterflies and their host plants. Mosses. He didn't dabble. He committed. And he shared what he learned with anyone who would listen — garden clubs, the public library, the Idyllwild Nature Center, anyone.

Every year for more than a decade, a number of us field naturalists would collect wildflowers for the Memorial Day weekend wildflower show at the Riverside County Nature Center in Idyllwild. This was one of the quiet rituals of spring in the San Jacinto Mountains, and it was a joy. We would go out in the days before the show and collect live specimens from the roadsides, starting at the desert elevations where the ocotillo and brittlebush were finishing their bloom, then working upward through the chaparral, through the transition zone, and into the yellow pine forest around Idyllwild, Mountain Center, Garner Valley, and down toward Hemet. The whole elevational gradient, compressed into a day of driving and walking and bending down to dig carefully around roots. Several times I was the invited speaker at the event, but the real pleasure was the collecting itself — the road botany, the arguments about identification, the satisfaction of building a transect of living plants laid out on tables for the public to see and touch and smell.

Bruce was one of us. He was out there contributing specimens, and then back at the Nature Center helping with identification and labeling. He had the eye. He knew what was blooming where. He knew which roadcuts had the interesting things. And afterward, Bruce and I would stand around and talk — seahorses, flowers, butterflies, mosses, whatever odd corner of natural history one of us had recently fallen into. Those conversations had the quality that the best naturalist talk always has: unhurried, encyclopedic, moving freely between taxa and ecosystems, driven by nothing but genuine curiosity about living things.

What the public record shows, and what I only fully appreciated this morning with a bit of Internet searching, is that Bruce's contributions went far beyond local talks and flower shows. Tom Chester's authoritative San Jacinto flora project lists Bruce as a key contributor on multiple species accounts and site floras. In the late summer and fall of 2016, Bruce systematically surveyed Garner Valley for Tetradymia comosa — cotton-thorn, a rare shrub endemic to southern California and northern Baja — over eight days of targeted fieldwork. He mapped 159 individual plants, the most comprehensive census of the species ever conducted in the San Jacinto range. He contributed bloom surveys to the flora of Idyllwild Park. He botanized the Hub and Strawberry Creek Gorge with Chester and other collaborators. His name appears on the copyright lines of multiple flora pages, alongside the professional botanists.

This was not casual observation. This was structured, repeatable, methodologically sound fieldwork — the kind of citizen science that actually advances botanical knowledge. Bruce developed what Chester described as a search image for Tetradymia comosa, learning to spot its distinctive whitish woolly foliage from a distance against the darker tones of sagebrush. He walked the transects. He recorded the coordinates. He went back. That is what field biology looks like, regardless of whether you hold a degree.

His photography earned recognition too. In 2018, Bruce won both the Blue Ribbon for photography and Best in Show at the Art Alliance of Idyllwild's "Eye of the Artist" exhibition for a piece called "Marine Blue on Buckwheat." That title alone tells you everything about the man — not a landscape, not a sunset, but an individual butterfly on its host plant, observed closely enough to be named precisely. The Art Alliance named him their 2018 Artist of the Year. His "Outside Idyllwild" column ran in the Idyllwild Town Crier for years, combining his photography with natural history writing that interpreted the mountain for his neighbors and visitors.

The last time I saw Bruce was at the Idyllwild Earth Fair in May 2025. The Earth Fair has been a fixture in Idyllwild since 1990 — a day-long celebration of environmental stewardship held each May at the Town Hall, with educational exhibits, local musicians, and booths run by people who actually live close to the land and care about what happens to it. I have been involved with the Earth Fair for decades, as a supporter and participant. Last year's theme, "It's Time to Give a Shift!," was designed by my daughter Caitlin, who grew up in Idyllwild, graduated from Idyllwild Arts Academy, and carries the mountain in her bones the way all of us who lived there do. Bruce was at the fair, and we had a chance to talk and catch up, standing in the shade at Town Hall, doing what we always did: trading notes on what we'd seen, what was blooming, what was new.

I will be back in Idyllwild on May 16 for the 27th Earth Fair. Bruce will not be there. And something will be missing that cannot be replaced — not just a friend, but a particular quality of attention. Bruce spent four decades on one mountain range. He learned its butterflies, its wildflowers, its rare shrubs, its ridges and canyons and weather. He counted the Tetradymia one plant at a time. He photographed the marine blues on their buckwheat. He gave talks at the library about fire-follower wildflowers. He wrote columns and led walks and answered questions at the Nature Center. He did all of this without institutional support, without a salary for it, without a laboratory or a grant. He did it because the mountain was there and it was alive and it deserved to be known.

The Good Morning Idyllwild newsletter called Bruce a bryologist — someone who studies mosses. Bryology at the professional level is a deeply technical science, requiring lab equipment and systematic expertise that Bruce would have been the first to say he didn't possess. But he was an amateur bryologist in the finest sense of that word: someone drawn to mosses for their intricate beauty and endless variation under the macro lens, someone who knelt on granite to photograph sporophytes the way a portraitist studies a face. That is its own kind of knowing. And Bruce was more than a moss lover. He was what the older tradition would have called a natural historian — a person who pays sustained, careful, loving attention to the living world of a particular place, and who shares what they learn. Every community needs such people. Most communities, if they are lucky, have one or two. Idyllwild had Bruce Watts for forty years.

Moss is one of the oldest plants on earth. It is the first thing to grow back after catastrophe. It asks for nothing — no roots, no vascular tissue, no special soil. It simply persists, green and patient, covering the granite with life. There is something fitting in the fact that this is the organism Bruce loved, and that the newsletter announcing his death opened with photographs of moss-covered boulders in the forest he called home.

I will think of Bruce when I drive up Highway 243 in May. I will think of him at the Earth Fair and on the wilderness trails above Idyllwild. I will think of him when I kneel down to look at moss on a rock.

Rest in peace, Bruce. The mountain knows your name.