All posts by Steve Stern

Easter in Death Valley

California, Camping, Death Valley

Easter morning, we all slept in and then after a traditional Easter breakfast of instant oatmeal, we went for an Easter hike. The plan was to drive to the end of the Hole in the Wall Road and then hike up to the mysterious Red Amphitheatre. We started by hiking up an intimate side canyon to a hill overlooking a large fan that spilled out of a open valley behind the nearby ridge. Along the way, we saw lots of fossils and probably the only blooming Mojave Aster – Xylorhiza tortifloria –  in the park (it was a very dry year).

 

Also along the way, my beloved camera started acting up with the shutter not firing or staying open too long. As we walked, I went through the five stages of grief: first was denial – well, maybe this is a one time only failure, OK, maybe two times, three? – anger – shit! this can’t be happening, what is wrong with this stupid camera – bargaining – maybe if I turn it off and let it cool down, maybe if I change the battery – then depression which was pretty short and, finally, acceptance – well, this is an incredible place and the weather is great; I’ll just put my camera away and enjoy the trip. We soon stopped in the shade and had a leisurely Easter Lunch while I returned to bargaining by turning the camera off and then back on to get a shot.

When we got back to camp, I tried several shots of Gina and Courtney in their Easter finery but my camera was committing Hara-Kiri before my eyes.

 

After much Lightroom work when I got back home, I was able to semi save one shot.

Then acceptance set in. On Easter Monday – Egg Nyte – we spent the morning hiking in the badlands below our campsite. In the afternoon, we went to the Mesquite Flat Sand Dunes to watch the sun get low where Michele used her iPhone to get a short video.

The next day we drove home where it was raining.

 

 

 

 

Easter in Death Valley: Holy Saturday

California, Death Valley

 

 

Or, more accurately, Easter in Death Valley National Park, because we spent most of the time outside of the Valley itself. Or, even more accurately, we spent most of the time near a graben known as Death Valley. A valley is eroded by water, like the Mississippi Valley or the Ohio Valley; a graben is a low area, formed by a chunk of the earth’s plate, that has dropped. Because of its plant life, Death Valley is considered in the Mojave Desert – show above as the little blue line in the north western part of the Mojave – but, geologically, it is in the Basin and Range Province.

The Basin and Range Province is an area where the land is being pulled apart in an east-west direction. In other words, each year Reno, in the western part of the province, is being slowly pulled further away from Salt Lake City just east of the province. Not each year, actually, but in fits and jumps over a period of millions of years. As the land is pulled apart, it is split into blocks, one side tilting up and the other side tilting down. The up sides are mountains and the downsides are graben. The deepest graben is Death Valley.

Along with Gina Matesic and Courtney Gonzalez, Michele and I drove south and then east and then north on Good Friday and camped just off of  the Big Four Mine Road in the Panamint Valley (another graben). The night was chilly but we we woke to clear skies and no wind on Holy Saturday.

The plan was for Gina, Courtney, and Michele to spend the day walking to the Panamint dunes while I went up to the end of the road and then hike the canyon behind the Big Four Mine (a lead and Silver mine that was last mined in 1952). Their hike would be somewhere between seven and eight miles with a elevation gain of about 1,000 feet and my hike would be much shorter with a bigger elevation gain.

On my way up the canyon, I had passed the Big Four Mine which, apparently, had its heaviest usage during WWII when it was renamed the War Eagle Mine. According to a report done for the BLM – Bureau of Land Management for those of you who haven’t spent much time in the wilderness areas of the west – 370 tons of ore was extracted from the war Eagle between 1944 and 1945 averaging 16.6 percent lead, 12.5 percent zinc and 2.6 ounces of silver per ton. If my math is right, that is about $160,000 at today’s prices, for two years of hard work – in a very inhospitable place – for more than a few men and enough equipment to haul it 150 miles across the desert. It doesn’t seem like as much fun as we were having.

On my way back down the canyon, I stopped to wander around the mine site. There wasn’t much there and I was struck by how unlevel everything was. Just walking around was a balancing act.

Then it was time to ogle the local cacti, check out the view and drive back to meet Gina, Courtney, and Michele, and on to downtown Death Valley.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

San Francisco Flower and Garden Show

Around home, San Mateo County

 

When I was a kid – say about 10 – the San Mateo County Products & Floral Fiesta was a big deal, only we – we being everybody I knew in about 1950 – called it The Fiesta. Our parents would leave us alone in a temporary mini-midway, five dollars worth of coupons in hand, to go on the sleazy rides and eat all the bad food we could while they went next door to the Bay Meadows Race Track to watch, and bet on – I guess – the horses. At the end of the day, rejoined by our parents, we might even wander into the buildings where the local farmers showed their flowers, or bushels of fruits and vegetables, or prized animals.

As an aside – On one wander into a county products building, I even saw a mother pig give birth to a bunch of piglets – on a, now unknown but vaguely remembered, bedding covered concrete floor – in a pool of amniotic fluid, as I stood, fascinated, next to my equally fascinated but horrified mother. End aside.

Now the Race Track is gone and the Fiesta grounds are called the San Mateo Event Center. Then San Mateo County seemed more rural than suburban with a population of  235,659  (205,748 Native White, 24,453 Foreign- born White, and 1,110 Chinese according to the Census – now the population is 718,451 with 383,535 White and 178,118 Asian). It is obviously a much more interesting place to live.

For some reason, the San Francisco Flower and Garden Show is now held thirty five miles south of San Francisco at the Event Center, so, for the first time in over 50 years, I went back. There was no midway and there are no pigs and we never got to the flower section, but there were lots of temporary gardens. The picture above is one of the winning gardens and is a little – a lot? – idealized: when we walked in, my first imprssion was of a dark barn with dim tungsten lighting. Sort of like this:

(the camera compensated for the exposure and I went back and corrected the white balance in the first picture.)

We went with Eileen and Aston Pereira who are definitely garden aficionados and had actually got there early to get in more face time with all the displays (such as the Dahlia bulb emporium and the hanging succulent garden seller).

They had saved the gardens to tour last when we got there. The theme was something around small spaces which worked perfectly for the venue. Aston didn’t think the gardens were as good as last year, but I thought a couple were at least very good, one was bizarre but interesting, the rest were above average, and some of the plants were spectacular.

All in all, it was a great way to tour gardens on a crummy, rainy, day.