California is burning and I want to blame somebody, maybe those climate change deniers or Congress. But it really is all of us. None of us wants to get rid of our toasters. Including me. It is not just so called Global warming or that sea level is rising, we are running out of water – here in the west, atleast – and we are polluting the oceans as well as the atmosphere. To protect communities built where they shouldn’t be, we have national policies that results in bigger fires (don’t forget, those fires are adding CO2 to the atmosphere and they are going to get bigger and the season is going to be longer). We want to think we can still do something to stop the change but the change is here. Maybe we can do something to stop it from getting much worse, but I doubt it. Maybe, just maybe, we can stop the climate from getting catastrophically worse, but there is no particular reason to think we have the political will to do that. It really is time to look at how we are going to mitigate the changing climate. I am not saying that we should stop thinking and talking about improving the way we live and what we are going to leave future generations, but we should also adjust to the reality that we have already trashed the planet. Maybe our policy should be that when an area gets devastated by a natural disaster, we don’t try to restore it. Including the Fifth Ward in New Orleans, the New Jersey coast, and the areas burned by this fire. Maybe we should admit that our hubris is part of the problem and it is time to admit that we can’t go mano a mano with nature. 
Category Archives: California
A pitch for walking in Tuolumne Meadows
As many times as I have gone to Yosemite, I have only walked through Tuolumne Meadows to get somewhere else. When Richard Taylor suggested we go to Tuolumne Meadows, just to hike the Meadows, I was a little surprised. His pitch was that we could drive up from the Bay Area on Friday, walk down river that afternoon, walk up river on Saturday and be home that night. We would have two days of hiking Yosemite on a two-day mini-vacation.
Our trip started at 8:00 AM and we were at Oakdale in two hours. We got some lunch fixin’s at a Mexican market and got to Tuolumne about 2:45. But first, we stopped at Siesta Lake to stretch our legs and check out the meadow building process, Olmsted Point to check out the view, and Lake Tenaya for lunch. We got to Siesta Lake just before 1:00. The first time I drove by Siesta Lake was probably 1956 but I probably didn’t stop until the 60’s. Now I try to stop every time I drive by. In the 60’s, it was an alpine lake but it is trying to become a meadow and slowly succeeding. As the lake meadowfies, the Park Service civilizes the turnoff. First there was no turn off, then use turned the shoulder to compacted dirt, then the shoulder got paved and signs added. Now, for the first time, I noticed a sign saying Siesta Lake letting me know, again for the first time, what to call it. I don’t think I will live long enough to call it Siesta Meadow.
Tuolumne Meadows is in a glacial valley formed 10,000 years ago (so I’ve been told). Between then and now, it must have been a lake or a series of lakes. Now it is a meadow starting to turn itself into a forest. It is still a series of gentle, sub-alpine, meadows with the Tuolumne River connecting and running through them but the trees are taking hold. It makes for an easy, varied, walk.
On Friday afternoon, our walk was downriver from Highway 120, starting at Pothole Dome.
As we walked around the dome, following the edge, the view of the meadow was intermittent, often hidden by the colonizing trees and then opening up to fields of wildflowers.
Looking back, Unicorn Peak and Cockscomb started rising above the forest. They are classic horns, like the Matterhorn in the Alps (the thinking is that the horns were bit of the mountains sticking up above the glaciers as the glaciers scoured out the rocks below making the valleys).
At this point, the meadow is almost level and the river running through it – the Lyle fork of the Tuolumne – is flat and lazy. The river soon starts dropping over and through a resistant granite layer. At one time, this resistant layer probably backed-up the water creating a lake until the insistent river, on its way to the Pacific cut through it.
At the bottom of the cascades, just before the next meadow area, Richard took a swim
while I wandered around looking at the rocks. The swimming looked suburb and I may have joined Richard if I had my Tevas like Richard , but I didn’t even bring them on the trip and the bottom looked way too rough for me.
Looking at the rocks may not sound as interesting as swimming, on the other hand, we were walking through a glacial valley and – every once in a while – I could see the tracks the glacier left about 10,000 years ago: grinding down the valley, polishing the rock as it went.
After Richard’s swim and my exploring, we wandered back towards the car with no aim except the enjoyment of the sun, the soft air, and the scenery. We watched deer crossing a stream and talked about past trips while watching our old friends, Unicorn Peak and the Cockscomb, come back into view.
Our next stop would be Mono Lake for the night.
Picking Charlotte up and dropping Another Enigma off
Saturday, I had the opportunity to go with Samantha to pickup Charlotte from a week of Summer Camp. It was forecast to be well over 100° in the Valley and I was worried about the heat, but I needn’t have. Samantha picked me up at the BART station in Richmond, and we drove up to Mountain Camp in her Audi SUV.
Sort of as aside, Audi names their SUV series Q and that always makes me think of World War I Q-ships. During WWI, the British started hiding guns in freighters to surprise German raiders and they called them Q-ships. Over the years, I have taken it to mean a car that is disguised as being milder than it really is. End of sort aside.
I first discovered Yosemite – as an adult, not a child in tow – in my mid-twenties and drove there, alot, one year, especially in the summer. Crossing the Valley, at night, in an un-air conditioned car, stopping to cool off at a Giant Orange every hundred miles was awful. We would arrive worn out. In 2013, we effortlessly glided through the Central Valley in a cocoon of exactly the temperature we wanted. 68° for Samantha and 72° for me.
The camp is at 5500 feet and at that elevation, it was a nice, warm, summer day. Now, I have no idea what I was expecting, but I was surprised at how similar Mountain Camp was to the camps I was sent to as a child and, much later – while in college – spent a summer as a councilor. The same single wall cabins, dirt trampled by hundreds of kids each summer, but this camp also had a ropes course and a climbing wall – a climbing wall that my Granddaughter climbed to the top of – and fencing instructors, and a Lake. A real Lake, a big Lake, with sailboats and ski-boats.
After she showed us around camp, Charlotte said goodbye to her councilor, Chris,
and we drove back through the baking Central Valley, in perfect comfort, to the Bay Area. When we got to Berkeley, where I got back on BART, it was a pleasant 80°. It wasn’t until I got home that I ran into the heat that, I read, is blanketing the West.
I bought a painting of Mike Moore‘s, Another Enigma of the Sheldon Range, before I ever met him. At the time, I was living in an old farm house in Los Altos Hills and Another Enigma hung the end of the entry/livingroom, when I moved, it moved to the wall in my office. Then Another Enigma stayed with Samantha in Berkeley for a while, and now, it moved in with us at 19 LeRoy where it is in the bedroom.
Now Mike and his wife Linda Fleming are having a major retrospective in Santa Fe and Another Enigma is going down there to be in the show. But first we had to get it to their home in Benicia where it will be loaded on the truck to Santa Fe. I rented a van, loaded the painting and drove to an old Art Deco building where Mike and Linda have made a home in a former brewery. It is a great space filled with art and hard to not just wander around in awe.
We dropped off Another Enigma of the Sheldon Range where it was reunited with some old friends and some new acquaintances.
Then it was back home where the heat is still going on.
Fremontia
This time of year, our backyard is dominated by our Fremontodendron californicum, known to Michele and myself as our Fremontia. It is a native of California but I don’t think that I have ever seen one in the wild (actually, I have not seen very many in captivity). The tree – bush? – is actually much more dominating than the pictures show, let me try again.
It is really rough and stickery up close and I am always amazed at how easily the squirrels negotiate it. Today, the bees were busy tending the Fremontia and
Precious Mae was busy at the watering hole.
Death Valley Easter Trip 2013: some other Views
JR on the Eureka Dunes by Coco Gonzo
Last Saturday, Michele and I joined JR at Gina and Courtney’s house for a spectacular dinner followed by their slide show of our Death Valley Easter Trip. Actually, I should say slides shows because we also saw JR’s shots and Michele’s pictures. The slide shows were about an hundred times more fun than it sounds.
First off everybody’s trip was slightly different, meaning that everybody’s point of view was both literally and figuratively different. I wasn’t where Courtney was to see the shot of JR and, if I had been, I might have been looking somewhere else. I know I was looking somewhere else when Gina was demonstrating how windy it was at the edge of Ubehebe Crater.
Gina leaning into the wind by Coco Gonzo
Second, nobody got much in the way of shots of themselves, I didn’t, and it was fun to see pictures of myself (some of them, some were pretty horrifying at how fat I have become).
Replacing the top radiator hose by JR
Steve leaving Red Wall canyon by JR
While I was fretting over the waning light as we crossed over the last Chance Range on our way to camp in North death Valley Wash, JR was looking at the great view down onto Crankshaft Junction.
Looking down at Crankshaft Junction from a pass in the Last Chance Range by JR
He got higher than anybody on the Eureka Dunes and caught the sinuous road leading down to the dunes from the North Death Valley Road.
From the highest ridge at Eureka Dunes by JR
And, on his early morning walks, JR saw and photoed every sunrise and even photoed himself seeing the sunrise.
JR from Lake Hill, Upper Panamint Valley by JR
Lastly, this was a special trip and it was fun to re-live it through the eyes of other people who were on the trip.