Camp Soul

Naturalist and artist is on a mission to help us all get back to the land.

You know you’re in the right place when Obi Kaufmann begins to describe the surrounding landscape as “generous.” Spend enough time, and in the right place, with this modern-day John Muir and you’ll start to see the world around you differently, more vividly.

For the California native, the Earth, and the animals and plants on it, are indeed generous—if you know where to look, when to look, and how. Today, he’s taken the editors of Sunset on a camping adventure in our own backyard. We’re hanging out in the juniper, sage, and pine trees near the top of Mount Diablo State Park, just 30 miles east of San Francisco. “I cut my teeth as a naturalist in this wholly singular place,” says Kaufmann, who was born in Hollywood but spent his childhood exploring this mountain. “Surrounded by suburban development, this is an important jewel of local wilderness. I have a deep relationship to it. It’s not that it’s my mountain, in fact I am sure it is the other way around. I belong to it.”

Ten years ago, Kaufmann, now 46, walked away from a burgeoning career as a gallery artist and hit the trail full-time with his watercolors. The sketches began to flow, as did the hand-painted cartography that would become Kaufmann’s opus, The California Field Atlas. Published in 2017, the book is Kaufmann’s thesis writ large—a 552-page volume of heirloom-quality heft with hundreds of hand-painted maps and renderings of the state’s flora and fauna.