In the quiet hours before dawn, when Idyllwild still sleeps beneath its blanket of pine, Bruce rises at 3 a.m. for his spiritual practice. At 75, he has spent half a century on this mountain, learning its secrets one butterfly wing at a time. His magic ring—found in an eighth-grade gym locker and lost and found again across decades—circles his finger like a talisman of all the lives he's lived and shed like snake skin.

"I don't choose to be known," he once told a friend. "I've done a pretty good job of that."

Yet here he is, the man everyone calls when a wildflower needs identifying, when a butterfly lands on an unfamiliar bloom, when the mountain reveals something it's kept hidden for millennia. His photographs line the walls during the annual Wildflower Festival, his voice fills the nature center during Saturday talks, his presence moves through the forest like something between monk and scientist, artist and mystic.

The Boy Who Couldn't Stay Still

Bruce was a Navy brat, born in Camden, New Jersey, moving through Maryland and San Diego and San Pedro before landing in Hawaii in 1959, just as the islands became a state. "It's the greatest place in the world to be a kid," he says, and you can still hear the wonder in his voice six decades later. He spent his days in the water, learning the language of waves, becoming part of the ocean's rhythm.

When his family moved to Huntington Beach during his sophomore year of high school, he became what every California teenager dreamed of being: a surfer. Every single summer day at the beach. No exceptions. He teased his friend for missing a day to get his driver's license. "Slacker," he laughs, remembering.

But paradise has a shadow side. As Orange County grew, as the crowds pressed in, Bruce fell into the undertow. Drinking. Smoking. Drugs. The party scene swallowed him whole. At 21, he fled back to Hawaii for a year, trying to find something he'd lost. When he returned at 22, everything changed in a single day, one of those moments that feel less like decision than transformation.

He quit drinking. Quit smoking. Became vegan. Started practicing yoga.

This was 1972, when yoga meant you were strange, when veganism meant you were stranger still. He checked into a motel, started reading Autobiography of a Yogi, and began cleaning up his life, piece by careful piece.

The Long Road Home

At UC Irvine, playing pickup basketball, he saw a sign: "Vegetarian roommate wanted." A woman named Sky answered the phone: 19 years old, vegan, exactly the new world he needed. She taught him how to cook without animal products, back when a salad bar with Italian dressing was the only option in restaurants. They became lifelong friends, setting up croquet in the front yard, creating a little paradise in the midst of the city.

But cities never suited him. So Bruce packed his car, which wasn't much, and drove. Up through California, through Oregon, Washington, over to Idaho, cross-country to Maryland, down to Key West. He spent the whole winter there. Then Jamaica. Then back to California. A year on the road, a year of searching.

His next stop was Lake Arrowhead, living with friends who made airbrushed clothing. Bruce became their salesman, driving around with his all-airbrush car, long beard, really long hair—he kept both for five years—finding little boutiques in Santa Monica and beyond. But even the mountains felt wrong when you couldn't walk down to the lake anymore, when everything was fenced off.

Then his mom called. "We're living in Idyllwild now," she said. "We bought a bar. You're coming to work for me."

Bruce hitchhiked from Lake Arrowhead to Idyllwild. He was 23 years old. He immediately knew: this mountain was different.

Paradise and Its Demons

Burley's Bar sat across from where the Forest Service office stands now. Bruce's parents had bought it only to discover the staff was giving away booze to friends, pocketing tips instead of ringing up sales. They were hemorrhaging money. So Bruce tended bar, probably the only vegan, non-smoking, non-drinking bartender in California in 1973.

"At first, I hated the drunks and the weird people," he admits. "Then I realized that's wrong. I'm a yogi. I just didn't fit with what I was supposed to be feeling toward other human beings."

He learned to accept. To treat people with kindness even when they made it hard. To recognize that judgment—especially the judgment that comes with being vegan when hardly anyone else is—creates its own kind of prison.

His rent then: $125 a month for a three-bedroom house shared with his brother and another guy. He stayed three years. Then, at 26, he moved back to Maui, chasing the Hawaii of his childhood.

"You never know how many friends you have until you move to Hawaii," he says wryly. Everyone suddenly wants to visit, even people you barely know. They stay at your house, eat your food, want you to drive them everywhere while you work two full-time jobs, gardening at a hotel by day, cooking in a restaurant by night. "They're out partying and having fun, and I'm working."

After a hurricane destroyed the island's infrastructure in 1980, Bruce left with just a tiny backpack containing two pairs of shorts and his magic ring. That and nothing else. All his possessions in the world.

He swore he'd never live in Idyllwild again.

He returned in January 1980, at age 30, and never left.

The Relapse and the Reckoning

Back at Burley's Bar, back living with his parents until he found his own place, Bruce had a complete relapse. Working at a bar when you're an alcoholic isn't a good mix. This time it wasn't a brief stumble—it was six years deep.

"I tell people I got drunk once," he says. "It lasted six years."

He made the decision again. Quit drinking completely. Quit smoking. Quit everything. And this time, it stuck. More than four decades sober now, the past dissolved like morning mist.

He worked his way through Idyllwild's restaurants—fry cook at a coffee shop, eventually chef at the Gastrognome, then manager at the Uptown Coffee House. Sixty to seventy hours a week. No days off. Every weekend, every holiday, always inside, always working.

At 49, he decided to retire from cheffing. "It's a young man's game."

His first job after: lifeguard at Idyllwild Arts. After all those years trapped in kitchens, it felt like liberation: outside, in the sun, watching kids swim instead of cooking for them.

The Accidental Artist

Bruce had never been a photographer. If anyone gave him a photo, he'd throw it away—didn't want to carry it around. But when PCT hikers started coming through a store he worked at, he began taking their pictures, printing them on a printer he bought himself, hanging them on the wall.

One day, he took the camera home. Started photographing nature.

He was 62 years old.

A friend took him during peak spring bloom, started naming flowers: blue dicks, buttercups, goldfields. Bruce began photographing them all. Then a butterfly landed on one.

"This is even better," he thought.

That was 2013. Since then, he's gone out over 3,000 times. His record: 62 consecutive days. He's taken more than 100,000 butterfly photos, 150,000 wildflower images. He knows where everything grows, when each species flies, which host plants they need. He has a photographic memory for photographs: show him any image from the last decade, and he'll remember the day, the location, what else he saw.

"My knowledge level is really deep," he says simply. "I've done nothing else for 13 years."

When another photographer gave him a 62-pound photo printer, Bruce began printing his work. The first several hundred were mediocre. Then they became art.

He entered a photo of a quail standing on a snowbank—ethereal, the snow like clouds, shadows creating mystery—in an Art Alliance show. Best of Show. Blue ribbon. Artist of the Year for 2018, his first year showing work.

"It validated everything," he says. "I realized what I was doing was good."

The Winter Prophet

For the third year, when butterfly season ends, Bruce has become a bryologist, a student of mosses. It's where no normal botanist wants to go because it's too hard. Most experts can't identify species without a microscope, examining leaves one cell thick. 

Naturally, Bruce dove in.

Now he has his own microscope, goes out on rainy days like this one (he's already been out this morning), watches the mosses bloom from brown to green the instant water touches them. They're 350 million years old, the first thing that came onto land, producing natural antifreeze, capable of surviving 400 years under a glacier.

"They're kind of a miracle," he says softly.

He's also counting. It's what he's famous for—finding rare endemic plants and counting every single one. The Munz's Mariposa Lily: 43,037 plants over two months. California Penstemon: 18,884 plants. "These are things no sane person would ever do," he admits. But the data matters, the documentation matters, the proof that these species exist and in what numbers.

"It's more important than the books," he says. "It's what I'm leaving behind."

The Books That Live in Drawers

Bruce is a prolific writer who never publishes anything (his words). He spent two years writing a screenplay, never showed it to anyone. He photographed over 600 species of wildflowers, created a book with 30,000 photos—too massive for any publisher in this age. His butterfly book is finished, complete, up-to-date, but waiting for an editor and someone to do layouts.

He spent three years watching classic film noir during the COVID pandemic—1,095 consecutive days, one movie every afternoon at 4 p.m., eventually seeing every film from the genre's golden age, 1941 to 1958. Now he's writing 500 Days in the Dark, 80,000 words deep, learning everything about every actor, every femme fatale, every shadow on every wall.

"When I get interested in something, I just go deep," he explains. "For good and bad."

That obsessive nature explains both the alcohol years and the sober decades, the surfing and the butterflies, the way he can't do anything halfway. Five years without cutting his beard or hair. A year spent driving across America. Fifty years on one mountain, learning its secrets.

The Man in the Margins

Bruce lives on SNAP benefits now, fighting against a landlord who wants him out. After he pays his bills, there's nothing left. He has no bank account. The talks he gives at museums pay cash, which helps.

He's severely dyslexic, always has been, though he didn't have a name for it as a kid, he just knew he couldn't spell anything with more than three syllables, that he was either getting A's and B's in classes he loved or D's in classes he didn't. He read the dictionary as a child, teaching himself to understand words. He flunked out of college after one year, unable to fake it anymore in an English class where any spelling error meant an automatic F.

"I realized I just couldn't do it," he says.

He lost his girlfriend Juliet to cancer when he was 55. She was only 42. They'd been together nine years. Two weeks later, his best friend died.

"You just muddle through," he says. "Eventually the sun comes out again."

He never married, never had children. The butterflies are good company. So is his spiritual practice, the yoga that got him through everything, the meditation that taught him the only thing that matters is right here, right now.

"There's no past to worry about," he explains. "No future you can do anything about. You're here. Accept that."

The Gift of Presence

A few weeks ago, Bruce mentioned on Facebook—just in passing—that he wasn't going to get his SNAP benefits this month. Two vegan friends showed up at his door with curry, with bags of food, with a box filled with donations from the Idyllwild Vegan Club. He hadn't asked for help. Hadn't expected it.

"Just grateful," he says. "Being grateful is a major thing."

When asked what he wants to be remembered for, he doesn't mention the butterflies or the 92 species in his book or the thousands of plants he's counted or the photographs that won Best of Show.

"Kindness," he says. "Just being a good human."

What does that mean?

"Don't be judgmental. Project kindness, friendship, love. Don't try to change other people. Accept them the way they are."

It's the yogi talking, the man who learned these lessons tending bar at 23, who had to shed his judgment of meat-eaters and drinkers and everyone living differently than he chose to live. Who realized that his choices were just that: his choices, not a measure of superiority.

Bruce will be out again tomorrow if the weather holds, camera around his neck, walking the trails he's walked thousands of times, seeing something new because he's fully present. No past, no future. Just this butterfly, this flower, this moss turning green in the rain. Just this moment, this mountain, this life he's built from nothing but attention and love.

The sun will come out again. It always does. And Bruce will be there, camera ready, waiting for whatever lands.

The magic ring circles his finger, lost and found and lost and found again, just like Bruce himself.