Category Archives: California

On the road to Las Vegas

May 16, 2012Around home, Cactus & Succulents, California, Camping, PhotographySteve Stern

Monday morning, we got up pretty much with the sunrise and got going. It was easier and quicker than we had planned – we didn’t bring a stove which wasn’t planned but did speed up the mornings – and we were on the road out of the Carrizo Plain by seven AM. The Carrizo Plain is a large graben in the middle of the coast range. The San Andreas fault runs through it – actually, I guess, it is caused by the fault – like a zipper.

We camped just off the road – on the left side of the fault, on the Pacific Plate – in the picture above but, on the ground, everything looks pretty flat and we wouldn’t know – without being told – that one end of the road is on the Pacific Plate and the other on the North American Plate. Behind us, in the picture below is the Trembler Range – great name! – and over it, past a few wildflowers blooming, is the San Joaquin Valley where they are still pumping out oil after over a hundred years. But first, we had to backtrack past the community center of the pseudo town just north of the Carrizo Plain. The picnic tables offer a great view of a future, sun powered, electric plant.

The it was just a matter of beating our way east – past Bakersfield, Tehachapi, Mojave, and Barstow – until we got to the Mojave National Preserve. I am not sure what a National Preserve is compared to a National Park except that a Preserve allows hunting – hunting what, here, I am not sure – but the Mojave National Preserve does have a heavy duty set of railroad tracks going through the middle and a lot of in-holdings. Our first stop was the Preserve headquarters at Kelso to get a couple of suggestions on camping spots.

Then it was up to Granite Pass at about 4,000 feet to find a legal camping spot. In Death Valley National Park, we can camp almost anywhere as long as we are three miles off the paved road; at Mojave, we had to camp where there was a fire ring. At DV, we can’t have ground fires and, at Mojave, we can (in the ring, presumably). I prefer the DV system because it spreads the campers out and there are no overused fire rings. But the area was nice and, at 4,000 feet, we were starting to run into Junipers.

We spent the late afternoon wandering around, looking at blooming plants – including several Echinocereus engelmannii and a cute little echeveria type plant (maybe a Dudleya saxosa) – and admiring the round, exfoliating, granite, boulders as the setting sun turned them orange.

College Daze

April 19, 2012Americana, CaliforniaSteve Stern

Last Saturday, my Little Brother, Edwin, his mom, and I went to San Francisco State for their Sneak Preview Open House. Edwin has been accepted at SF State but has not yet decided to go there so this was a good chance for him to see the lay of the land. I had taken two psychology classes at SF State, in 1966, so I considered myself somewhat of an expert. Well, I, at least, knew how to find the University, but, it turns out that is about all I knew.

Surprisingly, much has changed since 1966. It is much larger – I think, at least it feels larger than I remember – with an enrollment of about 25,000 and there are a lot of new buildings including a stunning new library.

What else has changed is the general tenor. When I went there – using the term went there in the very loosest sense – San Francisco was the center of the counter culture movement. Cal Berkeley especially, but also SF State were major engines of change. This was the time when protesting students were firehosed on the stairs of San Francisco City Hall for protesting HUAC¹hearings; this was the time of the start of the Free Speech Movement – about a year after Mario Savio was arrested for saying fuck in public – this was two years before the Summer of Love in the Height Ashbury. This was one year after – as the official history of SF State says, brags really – that the Psychology Department’s Psychedelic Research Institute is inaugurated to test the creative power of LSD. Subjects are asked to bring with them professional projects on which they’ve been working; while taking LSD under the auspices of the Institute, one man solves a major design problem of Stanford’s linear accelerator, and another subject manages to complete a set of plans for a shopping center that he’d been commissioned to design.

As an aside. Less than a year before I took those two psychology classes, I had been a sergeant in the United States Army. I don’t remember it being much of a culture shock. End aside.

I want to say that San Francisco State is a more conservative place now, but, in many important ways, it really isn’t. The world has changed. What was radical then is pretty average now. I hope that Edwin decides to go to SF State, it has a great past that it looks like it is building on.

¹ House Un-American Activities Committee.

Easter in Death Valley

April 17, 2012California, Camping, Death ValleySteve Stern

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

April 16, 2012California, Death ValleySteve Stern

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.