Stephen has lived in Long Beach for 27 years and on a mountain for nine. He splits his time between Bluff Heights in Long Beach and eight acres of raw land in Idyllwild that he hasn't fully built yet and isn't in any rush to. He sells real estate in both places, gives tours of Idyllwild, and lectures about its history to anyone who will listen. He runs a potluck group that has been going since the 1980s, builds bat boxes, leads garden workshops, and carries a CB radio wherever he goes. He believes, without reservation, that Idyllwild is one of the strongest communities he has ever known.

The first thing that told him he had found his place wasn't the pines or the altitude or the particular quality of the silence. It was a hardware store.

Within weeks of buying his land, he walked into Forest Lumber — Idyllwild's answer to a Home Depot — and started an account. A few weeks later he came back. Someone behind the counter looked up and said: Mr. Sutton, do you want that on your account?

"That's when I knew I was in a small town that I loved" he says. He grew up in New Palestine, Indiana, where his mother went to the hardware store and they called her Mrs. Sutton and helped her. He hadn't felt that in 27 years of city life. He felt it here, buying lumber.

The Historian

Stephen's icon is Ernie Maxwell, the man who founded the Idyllwild Town Crier in 1946 and ran it for 25 years with his wife Betty — every word written, every photograph taken, every illustration drawn by hand. Maxwell galvanized the environmental movement that stopped the Palm Springs Aerial Tramway from turning the San Jacinto Mountains into a ski resort in the style of Big Bear. Stephen and Ernie Maxwell share a birthday: July 7th. Not the year, just the day. He mentions this with quiet satisfaction.

For the past several years, Stephen has given lectures for the Idyllwild Area Historical Society on figures like Maxwell, the people whose decisions shaped the mountain, for better and worse.

He also gives private tours built around whatever the visitors care about. A couple from San Diego, both teachers, wanted to know about Cahuilla Native history and geology, so he took them to the mortar site, walked them through the deep history of the land, and ended with a picnic in the park. A bridal party came once, the bride a nature lover, so he took them to the nature center, the Historical Society, a chocolate tasting at El Buen Cacao, and left them in their Airbnb with a pile of baked goods from Sunflower. The tour is called the Idyllwild Experience. He has a signature candle by the same name — cedar, pine, white sage, bergamot, and a few other things he won't disclose, made exclusively for him by a local wax apothecary. He gives one to every client.

The Potluck

Every third Saturday, a close-knit group from Idyllwild's LGBTQ+ community gathers at someone's cabin for a potluck. No assigned dishes. Someone agrees to host, Stephen sends word to the people on the list, and they show up with food. It has been happening, more or less without interruption, since the 1980s.

The origin story is one he loves to tell. A couple on the mountain had a gay son who was struggling to form connections in a community where bigotry was common. They had no tolerance for that. They knew their friends did too. And so they started a potluck, a simple recurring gathering where their son and people like him could find each other. The son eventually left the mountain. The potluck didn't. The couple became presidents of PFLAG in Palm Springs. They are no longer around, but the thing they built is.

"That's my tribe," Stephen says.

He became the administrator a few years ago — someone younger, they decided, who wouldn't need to hand it off again too soon. He manages the list, coordinates the hosts, and plans out the calendar months in advance. They already have hosts booked from April through October of this year. January through March tend to stay open. "The old guys," he says with a laugh, "don't want to get out in the rain. They've lit a fire."

Advisor to the Flatlanders

He describes his real estate practice in four words: coastal to mountain covered. Long Beach is where most of his business lives — he works with the Ocean Boulevard team along the coastal corridor — but his favorite transaction is finding someone a place in Idyllwild. He knows what it means to live between two worlds. He knows what people don't think to ask.

"A lot of people take Idyllwild for granted," he says. "They'll use a local agent and forget what it's like to be a flatlander living in two places — what it requires as an adjustment." He knows which roads get plowed and which don't. He knows that 20,000 square feet is the minimum lot size for livestock in Pine Cove. He knows to ask whether you've lived through a winter before he shows you anything.

He also does something he is proud of: he gives back part of every commission to local nonprofits. His three preferred partners are the Friends of the San Jacinto Mountain County Parks, the Idyllwild Area Historical Society, and the Garden Club. His last client got a lifetime membership to the Historical Society as part of the deal. If a client has a particular passion — the arts, say — he'll redirect the donation to the Idyllwild Arts Foundation. The only condition is that it stays local.

"If you want Starbucks and stoplights, go to Big Bear," he says. "You want music and nature, you come to Idyllwild."

Eight Acres

In 2016, Stephen bought eight acres of raw land in Idyllwild. He is still deciding what to do with it. There is a well head and a shed — anything under 120 square feet without water or electricity is a shed, by Riverside County standards, and he is careful about that distinction.

He was, before real estate, the global sustainability advisor for a large corporation for many years. He was also a docent for the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation for three years, giving in-depth tours of Taliesin West — 90 minutes of architecture, 90 minutes of botanical garden. Organic building, sustainable materials, structures that belong to their landscape rather than sitting on top of it. These things matter to him.

What he keeps coming back to is the PCT hikers. The Pacific Crest Trail passes close enough to Idyllwild that hikers come into town to rest, resupply, and breathe. They are, he says, serious people — well-educated, purposeful, on a pilgrimage. And when they arrive, there's nowhere that really receives them. He imagines something small and sustainable on his land. Solar. Hemp construction, which is fire-retardant and a natural insulator. Maybe a place to sleep, get a massage, learn about the mountain they've been walking through. An eco-retreat, not an Airbnb.

"I don't believe in having any debt," he says, "so I need to figure out how to make it work." He's looking into state grants. He's in no hurry. The mountain has been here a long time.

If Birds Are Singing

Stephen is the kind of person who stops strangers on the trail when they have binoculars. He wants to know what they found. And he will tell you, with the enthusiasm of someone who has looked this up and never gotten over it, "Bird sounds lower human blood pressure," he says. "It's in our DNA." Thousands of years of evolution have wired us to know: if birds are singing, it's safe. The forest is safe. You can relax. Your parasympathetic nervous system, without you asking it to, begins to unwind.

He loves the woodpeckers. The flickers. The nuthatches, with their lovely sound. The covey of quail passing through, making their small chirps. Even the Steller's Jays, though he admits they are not particularly pleasant. In the spring, he spotted violet swallows nesting right in town.

He quotes John Muir the way some people quote scripture: In every walk with nature, one receives far more than he seeks. He found that out somewhere between Long Beach and eight acres of mountain, between a hardware store tab and a third-Saturday potluck, between a candle called Idyllwild Experience and a shed that might one day become something worth staying for.

He just needs a little more time to figure out what he's building.