The six accessible Channels include the remote San Miguel Island, to the north and west, where some twenty thousand sea lions live; Santa Rosa and Santa Cruz, two large and hospitable islands graced with beaches, gentle coves, and small forests of oak nestled in twisting canyonlands; Anacapa Island, the closest and most visited, lying just eleven miles from the mainland and little more than a long spine of volcanic rock; Santa Barbara Island, which sits alone farther south; and the domesticated island of Santa Catalina, which has the only real town in the whole chain, Avalon, where urban California has been reproduced on a subatomic scale, down to traffic jams consisting entirely of golf carts.

Catalina is well trodden, easy, and indulgent. But it is in the Northern Channels—the five islands at the top of the chain that together form the Channel Islands National Park—where the pleasure is earned. Surrounded for some two decades now by a twelve-hundred-square-mile marine reserve called the Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary, these islands gained an additional measure of protection in April 2003 through a network of Marine Protected Areas. Here, indeed, is an incomparable slice of wild California. The Channels, however, are not accessible from one another, so surveying them as I did meant doing frequent stints along the happy stretch of mainland coastline from Santa Barbara in the north down to Los Angeles. The Spanish priests who built the mission stations here called this land la tierra adorada, "the beloved country," and the region remains a sublime American Riviera, with the azure vistas of Greece, the red-tile inheritance of Spain, and the gastronomic revolutions of California.

Blessed with an unlikely mixture of proximity and isolation, the Channels are a study in complementary opposites: It is possible to go from a picnic lunch on an island that cannot offer even a glass of water to supping in a mainland restaurant featuring five hundred local wines. I was able to swim through a kelp forest, trailed by a harbor seal, and then find myself, five hours later (and still wet behind the ears), settling into a box seat at the Hollywood Bowl. Here is the ultimate synthesis of rugged and refined, the place where pristine and pampered meet.

Darwin wrote of the Galápagos that "It would have been a strange fact if I had overlooked the importance of isolation." In the Channels, too, isolation is the deciding factor in life—both curse and blessing. It makes access difficult, but then difficult access is exactly what has preserved these islands.

For my first overnight in the Channels, I appeared at Ventura Harbor at 7 a.m., where staff from the Channel Islands Kayak Center loaded my rental boat and paddle onto the Island Packers catamaran (this Ventura-based company offers the principal ferry service to the Channels). An hour later we were at Santa Cruz's Scorpion Harbor, an anchorage with a national park campground located beneath a grove of oak trees, and offering easy paddling to a series of arches and unnamed islets jutting from the sea.