Les Braund, 1944-2025. Good-bye Friend, Colleague
By Mike Kelly
Leslie “Skip” Braund
Les Braund, a longtime leader of the Friends of los Peñasquitos Canyon Preserve, passed away Friday, June 27, in his home in Mira Mesa. He died of complications due to heart disease. A celebration of his life is scheduled for July 15. He leaves behind his daughter and other relatives.
Les was active with the Friends for 37+ years, including serving as our president for a number of years. Mary Lueking, our newsletter editor, researched our archives and unearthed some information about his activities with the Friends. Here’s what she found.
Les was elected Secretary for the Friends in September 1989, only a few months after being elected to the Board. Beginning in 1990 he wrote 18 articles for the newsletter. In December of the same year, he led his first of 148 hikes. His last hike was in September 2023. His favorite hike was the Camino Ruiz Rim to the Creek. He loved the diversity of plants along this trail. Even after several heart attacks he insisted on leading this hike down a steep slope. He just told participants he would be taking his time going back up! Les was elected President of the Friends in early 2012 and reelected until replaced by Beth Mather in May 2022.
Other Volunteer Causes
Project Wildlife was another organization he volunteered with. He served on their Board for several years. Les was quite active and nothing was too dirty or beneath him. He built flight cages for rescued birds, cleaned the raccoon pre-release cages, and more.
One of his most recent and favorite activities was his involvement with the Antique Gas & Steam Engine Museum in Vista. He loved working on old machines and engines. Even when he was failing in health, he went to the museum only to find out he ran out of energy too quickly to continue volunteering.
One of his passions was surveying, collecting and studying fungi such as mushrooms. He served as president of the San Diego Mycological Society for several terms. He loved leading hikes of fellow enthusiasts to find mushrooms. Many times, when we were hiking, he would show me a mushroom and identify it. One time he held two mushrooms up. In one hand he held one of the most poisonous mushrooms in the county, in the other he was holding a close relative mushroom from the same genus, but completely edible. He was teaching me how dangerous it would be to collect mushrooms without being well trained. At one point he was someone the old San Diego Poison Clinic folks would call if they had a patient with a suspected case of mushroom poisoning. Relatedly, I was in a neighborhood meeting at a resident’s house with some residents and Les. The husband of one of the participants came home, walked in and told his wife he was sick. The conversation quickly came around to what he might have eaten. He said he had eaten some mushrooms in the backyard of the people he was visiting. After a few questions Les was able to tell them he needed to go to the ER and have his stomach pumped!
PLAN and Navarro
Managing the growth of the city and the county to conserve open space for future generations was a high priority for all of us in the environmental movement: Les was no exception. After some failed ballot measures and candidates Les was attracted to a new initiative call Prevent Los Angeles Now (PLAN), led by a Peter Navarro. Navarro is now famous (infamous) for his association with President Trump. He’s now an economic advisor to Trump. He has a bad reputation with the media for his very aggressive attitudes and actions. But Les, I, and many others thought this PLAN initiative was the way to go. Les threw himself into cold call fundraising for PLAN, raising some $300,000, if I remember correctly. But, on the ballot that $300K was up against more than $3 million spent by the developers. After that loss, Navarro launched a campaign for mayor against Susan Golding. Les threw himself into the campaign as an advisor to Navarro and was active in the fundraising and more. Les told me the following anecdote several times, so I feel comfortable sharing this. Les told me that polls showed Navarro neck and neck with Golding or a little ahead, heading into the final debate of the campaign with Golding. Les said he implored Navarro not to be too aggressive with Golding, not to make her cry. Navarro couldn’t help himself and she did cry, whether genuinely or acting. Les said he knew then that they were going to lose the election and then stormed out of the office, fed up with Navarro. Soon we all parted ways.
Encyclopedic interests in nature…
I’m amazed at his voracious reading habits in a great variety of subjects, but usually connected to nature. Book purchases were a high priority for him, more important, I think, than the quality of the food he was eating. I chided him about this a couple of times, in good humor of course. His desire is that his nature books find a good home at a local nature center.
He also had a collection of decoy ducks, some quite valuable, lining the floor. A few of his paintings he bought are also valuable. His collection of microscopes, numbering about 13 at one point, if I remember well, is finding good homes. He often used those microscopes in his studies of lichens, mushrooms, slices of different tree woods, pollen, liverworts, bryophytes, grasses, ferns, and who knows what more? It’s hoped his collections of some of these items will find a useful home.
GSOB Survey & Dog Vomit Slime Mold?
One of my favorite memories of being with Les was when we were doing our Gold Spotted Oak Borer surveys. This insect is devastating mature Coast live oak trees in many places, including Peñasquitos Canyon. Neither Les nor I or other Friends’ members could let this go by. As part of the campaign to save the oaks Les and I helped survey hundreds of our biggest, oldest live oaks. That meant a lot of bushwhacking off trail which was fine by us! Hiking around I’d suddenly hear a cry “Kelly, Kelly, look at this one!” He’d found another giant oak, 300-400 years old probably. Then another time, it was, look at this, pointing at a cylindrical white thing, almost big as a Campbell’s soup can, sticking up from a trunk. It’s “Dog Vomit Slime Mold!” What a treat, that’s its actual name! He would share other fungi, mushrooms and lichens with me.
Careers
From this story to date you’d probably be thinking that Les was working full time for a conservation group, but this was not the case. Les was usually working at one of his many careers. He wanted to go into biology as a career but couldn’t pass his Organic Chemistry class, if I remember correctly, and dropped out of college. His conservation work was after his daily work! What were his careers/jobs?
Les was a veteran of the U.S. Navy. He served in Vietnam, at least part of the time on a gunboat in the Delta. We talked about his time there, but he claimed it wasn’t much to talk about. I don’t know if this was true or the lack of communication typical of many veterans who were in theater, in combat. He was a typical sailor in many ways, not the least of which was at least one time in the brig in Japan! He indicated alcohol was involved. As a veteran he used the VA hospital and loved his level of care. In fact, he was pissed at times when he was taken by ambulance (one of the times from my living room) to non VA hospitals during his 11 (more?) heart attacks. EMTs won’t take you to your hospital of choice. That’s one reason he chose to drive himself (or asked others to drive him) to the hospital when he knew he was having an attack.
Another career was working as a financial officer for a financing company. He told me more than once the names of several companies that succeeded using that financing. He was proud of this work. Would you believe he was a repo man for 11 years? His beat was some of the toughest neighborhoods in San Diego, but he was fearless about it. He claimed not to have had many adventures doing this except the time one of the irate car owners he was trying to repossess took exception and drove off with him hanging on the hood, trying to shake him off. He lived of course.
His last career was as a master carpenter, working for several companies over the decades. One company specialized in repairing your business or home after a catastrophic accident such as a car crashing through your front door or a fire or a flood. That required a variety of high skills. I was lucky enough to have him do some work for me in his retirement. He was great. But one of the reasons he had some heart attacks, I think, is how intense he was about his work. He seemed to have only one speed, hard and fast, to the point of exhaustion. I don’t think it was a coincidence his first heart attack was on a job. He felt exhausted, felt bad and decided to lay down in the back of a truck. Another worker saw this and suggested he might be having a heart attack. It was. A stent later he was back at it.
Smokey and the bandit
Les was a bit of a “wild child” as a young man. He was a real-life character out of the movie “Smokey and the Bandit.” More than once he reminisced about his love of speed. He had a souped-up car and love to outrace the police, which he did successfully. However, there was a small problem. The police knew him and his car and where he lived. So, the next morning, he said, his dad would answer the door and there would stand the police. His dad would say, what have you done now?!! Even as an adult he still loved a bit of speed. I went for a ride in his old, beat up truck one day and it was pedal to the metal. It was a bit scary for me actually, because he was also a bit erratic by then.
Politics and Les
I don’t know what Les was at the end politically, except he hated Trump with a visceral passion. So much so he mouthed off a couple of years ago with a couple of friends present that he wanted to kill Trump. Someone ratted him out. Well, a few weeks later came a knock at the door and there stood two tall, serious looking men in suits that screamed “government.” They showed him their secret service badges and asked if they could come in and talk with him. He said sure and they sat down for what he described as a friendly talk. They probably knew this was one of those many “empty” threats we often make from time to time, but they had to go through their routine list of questions. Afterwards he showed them around the house and his grandfather’s old shotgun that he had never used. They were satisfied and left. No hand cuffs that day!
Politically Les had come a long way. When I first knew him, he was an old time Republican, the type we don’t see anymore. He worked on a number of political campaigns, was even campaign manager for at least one, maybe two campaigns (they lost). They were always people fighting for saving the land or he hoped they would. He even ran once for our City Council, losing of course. He and his good friend, Aurie, even set out to try to reform the Republican Party when it came to conservation, back to Teddy Roosevelt’s roots. They were indefatigable, traveling here and there, organizing other republicans, but, ultimately to no avail. The party was too far gone, even before Trump. At the end I think Les was a small “d” democrat, if not a card-carrying Democrat.
Les contributed both his expertise and memories to the Friends in video form as well, you can see him leading interpretative hikes and talking about his early times in conservation and PLAN here:
