Many people, including Doug McConnell himself, would say he led a charmed life. And he did, but it came to a close in January 2026 after nearly four years of effort to recover from a debilitating stroke in April 2022. Doug spent the better part of his 80 years doing exactly what he most loved to do: explore the world around him, sharing his boundless enthusiasm for its wonders and its people with a large and adoring audience. As Kathy Taft, his wife of 46 years, told me, “He really enjoyed his life.”
Doug was best known as the host of a series of decidedly upbeat and informative TV programs that took viewers to interesting places around the San Francisco Bay Area, the state, and the West, starting with Mac and Mutley in the 1980s, continuing with Bay Area Backroads for 15 years in the 1990s and 2000s, and culminating with Open Road with Doug McConnell from 2015 to 2023. Along the way, he inspired generations of Bay Area residents to get outside and explore the natural wonders of the Bay Area and the West, while introducing legions of viewers to the organizations and agencies that manage and safeguard these special places.
With his rugged good looks, trim physique, golden-blond hair, ease with words, and relentless “gee-whiz” positivity, Doug was the very type specimen of a TV host. According to his fellow TV production crew members, he was the same person off-camera as on-camera: unfailingly generous, genuine, curious, caring, and perpetually enthusiastic. His generosity extended to the many nonprofit organizations for whom he served as volunteer master of ceremonies at galas and fundraising events. (In 2011, Doug was the MC at Bay Nature’s 10th anniversary celebration. Later, Bay Nature recognized his contributions to spreading the gospel of Bay Area open space with a special Bay Nature Local Hero award in 2021.)
In 2015, Doug invited me to film a segment about Bay Nature for the first season of Open Road. I suggested we do the shoot on the jetty and rocky outcrop at Cavallo Point in Fort Baker, with its spectacular views of San Francisco Bay, the Golden Gate, and the city, as well as frequent sightings of harbor porpoises, harbor seals, and sea lions. Doug agreed, and we met there on a sunny, late winter morning. Accompanied by his two-man production crew, Doug was his usual gracious, effusive, and eloquent self, putting me at ease, singing the praises of Bay Nature, and feeding me gentle questions that allowed me to explain what makes that place on the edge of the Bay so special.
A winding path
Doug’s path to his fabled TV hosting career wasn’t exactly a straight line. He was born in Santa Monica, California, in 1945, the youngest of three sons, but grew up in the small Central Valley town of Gridley after his father, a former airplane mechanic, bought a used car dealership there. As a young boy, his appetite for outdoor adventure was awakened by the family’s occasional trips to Yosemite and beyond in the family camper van.
Doug’s second wife, Kathy, explains that while his father and older brothers were mechanically inclined, Doug was most emphatically not. But he was a writer and a talker. As she says, “Doug couldn’t fight his way out of a paper bag, but he could talk his way out!” He was also a voracious reader and jumped at the opportunity to attend Pomona College after graduating from Gridley High. He graduated from Pomona with a BA in political science in 1967 and soon got his first taste of working in broadcast media. His ability to write quickly and persuasively landed him a job as assistant to a news anchor at a local Los Angeles TV station. But, according to Kathy, the anchor was an unbearable boss, so Doug left after just a few months and spent the rest of the year teaching high school on the Navajo reservation in northern Arizona.
Then he headed east to further his education, earning a master’s in political science at Rutgers University in New Jersey. Contacts there led to his being hired onto the team of young organizers, based in Boston, planning the first national Earth Day in 1970. His next stop was Madison, Wisconsin, where he found work at the University of Wisconsin’s Center for Limnology (the study of inland bodies of fresh water), combining his developing interest in the intersection of local politics and the environment. From there, he was recruited by one of his professors to join a team in Ketchikan, Alaska, tasked with establishing that town’s first-ever planning department.
Doug jumped at the chance to explore this new frontier, and he loved the rugged country. But after two years, he had grown weary of living in a small log cabin through the long, cold, damp winters, and moved to Anchorage. There, he landed a job at Alaska Public Forum, a two-year project out of the University of Alaska that engaged the state’s residents in discussing solutions to Alaska’s major policy issues. That job took him all over the state and introduced him to many of Alaska’s political players.
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Then, over the next seven years, he worked at various contract jobs in the public policy arena, including two stints for federal agencies. The second of those involved a temporary relocation to Washington, D.C., to assist in the writing, editing, and production of the final report of the Presidential Commission on the Coal Industry for the Carter administration. Clearly, he was an intelligent young man with wide-ranging interests and a willingness to try out a variety of jobs and locations. According to Kathy, “His real loves were history and geography and the machinations of politics and their intersection with the environment. He was curious, made a lot of friends in the public sector and also in broadcasting.” It was in this period that he started getting freelance TV reporting assignments for Alaska Public Broadcasting, focusing primarily on environmental issues. Those assignments were his first venture into the craft of creating stories for a television audience.
But, Kathy told me, “He was starting to get antsy in the small-market, incestuous environment of politics in Alaska.” So when he was recruited by a locally owned TV station in Seattle in 1981 to work as a reporter covering local and regional issues, Doug jumped at the opportunity to work in a larger market. He worked at KING-TV for two and a half years before he got another offer, this time from KRON-TV, at that time the NBC affiliate station in the Bay Area. Excited by the opportunity to report stories in an even larger market, while living closer to his parents in northern California, Doug moved to the Bay Area in 1983 with Kathy and their first son and never left.
Rise of a local TV icon
Firmly settled in the Bay Area, Doug eventually became a fixture on local TV, specializing in upbeat stories about interesting people doing interesting things in beautiful places, generally outdoors.
His first big break into the world of hosting his own show was Mac and Mutley, a weekly half-hour program that paired handsome, rugged Doug with an adorable, adventure-loving dog who could ride a motorcycle, go scuba diving in coral reefs, and even sit still when required. The show first aired in 1986 on KPIX, the local CBS affiliate, and was soon picked up for syndication by the Discovery Channel. Wide-ranging and decidedly hokey, the show took Doug and Mutley to a variety of locations, from the Bay Area, north to Alaska, south to Belize, and west to Hawai’i. There were occasional mentions of threats to wild natural areas or wildlife, but the show was mostly intended as light entertainment, and it succeeded. (One of Doug’s colleagues on Bay Area Backroads, Carl Bidleman, recalls filming a segment in Zion National Park with Doug in the late 1990s when they ran into a couple of German tourists who approached Doug and asked, “Where’s the dog?”)
When Mac and Mutley ended in 1990, Doug freelanced as an environmental reporter and landed a job with the Goldman Environmental Foundation, which had just started its prestigious Goldman Environmental Awards the year before. Doug was brought in to help produce the videos of the award recipients, which became a key element of the annual awards ceremony.
At the same time, KRON-TV had been running a popular local travel show featuring local TV personality Jerry Graham. Bay Area Backroads had started in 1985 as an occasional short segment on an afternoon local news magazine show, but soon graduated to a half-hour program with its own weekly time slot. The show’s premise was to follow Graham as he traveled Northern California and came across quirky characters, who would then be the focus of a segment on the program. According to Bidleman, longtime Backroads co-producer, when Graham decided to retire in 1993, the show’s producers tried out several possible guest hosts before picking a permanent replacement. They brought in Doug to do a show on Yosemite—one of his favorite places. Right away, says Bidleman, they knew that Doug was their guy, and he was signed to a full-time contract shortly thereafter, in September 1993.
Bidleman says that Doug wasn’t just the on-air host; he was also the co-producer, coming up with story ideas and places to visit and co-writing the scripts. Jack Uhalde, the show’s primary cameraman from 1995 to 2005, emphasized Doug’s central role in the creation of the segments for each show. “The architecture of the show, that was Doug’s. He was well-read and well-traveled, with an encyclopedic memory, and he just had a knack for storytelling.”
Doug served as the show’s host for 15 years, covering an astounding array of interesting places—both natural and cultural—around Northern California, the West, and occasionally beyond. The show, while continuing to feature colorful characters in places both local and far-flung, gradually shifted its primary focus, in line with Doug’s core passion for exploring and protecting the natural world.
By 2008, it was becoming increasingly difficult to pull together the level of advertising sponsorship necessary to support such a highly produced regional travel show, so Backroads came to an end. But by then, Doug had established himself as a Bay Area icon and on-air personality, and he was in high demand as a speaker and host at nonprofit organization fundraisers, particularly for groups working in the environmental, conservation, and animal welfare fields. He was, always, exceedingly generous with his time and talents, in support of these great causes.
Heading down the Open Road
In the meantime, Doug and former Backroads producer Bidleman had formed a media production company that held the rights to all of Doug’s Bay Area Backroads’ episodes, while KRON retained the name and the commercial broadcast rights. Doug and Bidleman put together 10 programs using Backroads footage, focused specifically on Northern California parks and public lands, rebranded it as Open Road TV, and aired it on KQED public television in 2009 with underwriting from Kaiser. But the underwriting dried up after one season. The show died, but the idea remained.
Several years later, Doug and Bidleman were having dinner with a friend who had become the president and general manager of NBC Bay Area. He mentioned that the station had a Sunday evening time slot during the National Football League off season (February through Labor Day) and asked if they had something to fill it with. Bidleman recalls, “It took Doug less than 11 minutes—using his beloved pencil and reporter’s notebook—to write up his idea for a new show about Bay Area parks, open spaces, and public lands.”
They received a small amount from the station to launch the show, but Doug had to find a sustainable source of funding to keep it running. So he reached out to the large network of contacts at Bay Area park agencies and conservation organizations he had nurtured over the years and pitched them on the concept of a show that would highlight their properties and their work. The list of founding sponsors included the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy; East Bay Regional Park District; Save the Redwoods; Peninsula Open Space Trust; State Coastal Conservancy; and half a dozen others. With ongoing funding secured, Open Road with Doug McConnell debuted in 2015, producing 10 half-hour segments annually. According to long-time co-producer and cameraman Dan Herz, prior to each season, Doug would meet with the groups he wanted to highlight to discuss potential stories. He kept firm editorial control of the content for the show but offered the original video footage to the organizations to use as they saw fit.
Doug continued with the show, as host, co-producer, and senior editor until his stroke in April 2022. Since then, Herz and writer-cameraman-co-presenter Jordan Plotsky have kept the show running as Open Road with Doug McConnell and Friends. The team prepared a special tribute show about Doug’s fabled career that aired April 11, 2026.
One of the last segments of the show in which Doug appeared on camera was particularly poignant. The massive hemorrhagic stroke he had suffered the year before left him unable to walk without the assistance of a walker or wheelchair. The segment (filmed in July 2023) centers on a visit with Doug to a newly constructed fully accessible section of the Bay Area Ridge Trail at Solano Land Trust’s Patwino Worrtla Kodoi Dihi Open Space near Fairfield in Solano County. Doug, accompanied by colleague Dan Herz and Ridge Trail Council executive director Janet McBride, travels along the half-mile All Peoples Trail while—in typical Doug fashion—he waxes poetic about the beautiful oak savanna, the spectacular views of Suisun Valley, and the healing powers of nature. He clearly relishes the opportunity to use his diminished physical state to demonstrate how this new trail would make the joys of being in nature accessible to all. “For me this is an epic adventure … a gift from the gods … to be in this spot, on this beautiful trail with great people.” No one could ever accuse Doug of lacking in appreciation, enthusiasm, or superlatives, even in the face of serious health challenges.
McBride filmed quite a few segments about the Bay Area Ridge Trail with Doug over the years, going back to Bay Area Backroads. She described how, prior to undertaking work on an upcoming season of Open Road, Doug would approach organizations such as hers to find out what might be the most interesting stories to feature. She recently reflected on her long working relationship with Doug. “He was an amazing storyteller, a master at his craft, with a joyful sense of adventure. He gave you confidence that he was going to tell your story in a way that exceeded expectations. And he was always genuinely interested in not just your work, but also in you as a person. His deep inquisitiveness about the natural world extended to the people he encountered in his work and along the trail.”
Over the course of the 85 half-hour shows that Doug filmed for Open Road, he succeeded in showcasing the breadth and depth of outdoor adventures and natural wonders available to a large audience of Bay Area residents. That’s why Annie Burke, the executive director of Together Bay Area (a coalition of nonprofit organizations, tribes, and public agencies that protect, steward, and manage the region’s open space) says, “Doug played an outsized role in promoting the region’s parks and natural areas. His enthusiasm for exploring our natural heritage was unbridled and contagious.”
Burke goes on to point out Doug was also dedicated to making sure that the people who did the work to protect these areas got their due recognition. “Doug made the work involved in creating parks and stewarding natural areas understandable to people who don’t work in the profession. And for the professionals he interviewed and profiled, he was a friend and colleague and tireless champion.”
In November 2025, I had the opportunity to visit Doug at the skilled nursing facility where he was receiving the professional care he needed by that stage. While his body was failing him, his mind was sharp, and his way with words was as delightful as ever, as he reminisced about his amazing career and many of the wonderful people he had met along the way.
It was painful to see a man who was such an enthusiastic champion for—and participant in—active outdoor adventure robbed of his mobility. But it wasn’t Doug’s style to complain. As he said in a direct-to-camera message from his wheelchair at the end of one of his last shows, “I’ve never been more grateful for the preservation of these healing places than I am right now… I am, in every way, a very lucky guy … Please go outside and enjoy these open spaces of ours. And do what you can to take care of them … and provide opportunities for everyone to explore them. For me, I’ll continue to be out here however I am able. And I truly hope to see you sometime along one of these trails … along the open road.”
