Doin' the Blues!

Last weekend a bunch of friends and I went to the Monterey Blues Festival...conveniently located within walking distance of my place. We spent the entire afternoon and into the evening on Saturday groovin' to a lot of cool, extremely well played music. Here Johnny Rawls and his band are playin' some fine Mississippi delta blues. Johnny's bass player, Donny, is a friend of mine; he's just to the right of the sax player. Donny's your quintessential bass player...cool and solid! They put on a great show.

Johnny's great at gettin' the audience involved. Here he's singing to an elderly lady who was previously confined to a walker. Johnny said he'd get her out of her chair, and she wound up dancing! I realized the whole vibe at the festival was great...fun loving but not disorderly. That can be a hard condition to achieve, but I reckon the blues gets it done!

Elvin Bishop played a couple of gigs at the festival. He's 66 and still going strong! A role model for me. Y'know, I liked Elvin's overalls-and Johnny's hat. Maybe I should get some gear like dat!


Here Elvin is jammin' with his band and Terry Hanck, master of the alto sax. Terry played his gig just before Bishop's band, and Elvin came on and played with Terry and his band for a while. All good stuff! It occurred to me that if we got those uptight mullahs in Iran, and the dicey folks in North Korea, and, well, everyone to get into the blues, this ol' world would probably have fewer problems! Why I haven't been to the festival before now is beyond me, but I'll be back next year!

Bodie

Last week I visited Bodie for the first time. It's a ghost town that is now a state park. Bodie was founded in 1859, and a few people lived here as late as the early 1940s. The town's heyday was around 1880, when 10 thousand people lived here and gold mining was at its peak. Fires in 1892 and 1932 burned many buildings, but there are still about a hundred structures preserved in a state of "arrested decay"...the condition in which they existed when the park was founded in 1972. Here's one of the main drags.

Life was harsh here. The town is 8300 feet above sea level, and the weather's cold most of the year. Last winter the temperature bottomed out at 28 below zero F, which is apparently a rather mild extreme. There was virtually no indoor plumbing in the town. It would not be pleasant to use the outhouse when it's 20 below or so.

Since the town had a few inhabitants well into the 20th century, some semi-modern trappings exist. Here's the gas station on the main drag.

The vehicle in the previous pic is authentic but obviously restored and maintained. The cars that have been parked in Bodie for over half a century are in a somewhat different state of repair.

This is a classroom in the school. As a history buff I found this pic interesting; blow it up and you'll see that the map of Europe has the national boundaries of the period between the world wars...1918-1939. The school, church, and several other buildings were not finally abandoned until the 1930s, though the town's prime years were a half century earlier. The stamp mill used in gold mining operations was closed in 1938.

More Sequoias

These are young sequoias, just sprouted a few years ago. The fire in this area of the park killed several large old trees, a rare occurrence. But, it cleared ground cover and provided heat for cones to open their seeds, and now there are many young trees sprouting up.

In a couple thousand years, one of the seedlings above may look like this. This is the General Sherman Tree, the largest sequoia in bulk and thus the earth's largest living thing. It's actually about 3000 years old.

There are several fine meadows in Giant Forest. They're marshy areas with slow moving streams in the wet season. It's fun to walk out into the middle of a meadow on a giant fallen sequoia log and take in the beauty and peace of the scene.

Return to Sequoia

I visited Sequoia National Park last week for the first time in three years. I usually go annually but had not been to the park since I retired...bad oversight. The trees are still majestic as always.


I was messing around with my camera on a gray, foggy day trying to photograph the trees, and discovered that the sunset mode gave me a much more accurate image of the reddish color of sequoia bark. Am I the last person to realize this?

This is what's left of the Washington Tree. It used to be one of the six largest sequoias in the park, but an unusually hot fire 3 or 4 years ago burned the area and destroyed most of the tree. However, it's still alive; a few branches are still growing on the left side of it. Blow up the pic and you'll not only get a better view of the branches, but you will notice that someone renamed the tree, at least on the log in the left foreground...possibly a national park employee with a spray paint can? Perhaps they were comparing the remnants of the Washington Tree with the remnants of US environmental policy after the last eight years.





The lizards got into the sequoias so much that they endeavored to climb one of the big trees. They soon discovered it was a really massive undertaking and gave up the idea, content to admire the trees' grandeur from the forest floor.

Marvelous Marin

I stayed a night in West Marin on my way home earlier this week. Though all of Marin county is beautiful, the western side is much wilder and less populated than the suburban eastern part of the county. Most of West Marin is preserved in parks and reserves, with Point Reyes National Seashore the prime protected area. Point Reyes is beautiful and tranquil, especially on weekdays.

Dairy farming has been the main commercial activity on the Point for 150 years, and continues today. One farm, the Pierce Point Ranch, closed in the 1960s and is now a historic preserve. The old fences have been covered by lichens...more visible if you blow up the pic.

The old farm buildings blend with the cypress windbreak to create a rustic, peaceful scene. Even the operating farms, with their cows, create a mellow atmosphere at the point.

I went out to Pierce Point, at the far northern end of the seashore, near dusk, when the setting sun shone through a thin fog layer. The light was fantastic, a photographers dream! By this time of the evening, almost no one was around. The atmosphere was eerie in a good way. I imagine the Scottish moors, though I've never been there.

The next morning the fog was gone, and I ventured to Abbots Lagoon at Point Reyes. The surrounding meadows were full of wildflowers, and the freshwater lagoon was backed by a large area of sand dunes.

This bunny was hanging by the trail near the lagoon. He's obviously used to people, but he's not safe by any means...there are bobcats, raccoons, and even a few mountain lions at Pt Reyes.

Spring Scenes at the Sea Ranch

I spent my annual week at The Sea Ranch earlier this month; I was here last year at about the same time. Early May is glorious here; the countryside is in full bloom. It's very quiet, especially during the weekdays, and you can get a little bit of any kind of weather. The day I arrived, May 4, we had a winterlike storm with blustery winds and a good ol' downpour. This activated the waterfalls that plunge over the cliffs during wet weather. This one is about 40 feet high.

There's a vast array of vegetation at the Ranch. Wildflowers abound, and you find a wide variety of trees, including pine, cypress, fir, and redwood. The pines are sprouting massive new growth at this time of year.

Horsetails thrive in the shady areas. These plants are prehistoric; they were growing along with the dinosaurs.

There are orchids everywhere at the ranch in May! Also a huge variety of other flowers.

Blow this pic up for a better view of the frog, hunkered down on a rock at Shell Beach.

Cali Coastal Shots

Brooke is showing off her license plate! To most people it may not look unusual, but we meteorologists know it's really a personalized plate depicting weather observation code for fine weather conditions...unrestricted visibility with no significant clouds.

I've been roaming up and down the coast lately, visiting Spike and Danny in Moss Beach, hanging at the Sea Ranch, and roaming around Marin. I hit the Vista Point on the north side of the Golden Gate Bridge on one of those shallow fog days that makes for quirky views. Here San Francisco looms ghostly out of the soup, with higher clouds above. Notice Coit Tower on the far left. Blow the pic up for better detail.

This fine sunset brought to you courtesy Spike and Danny, from their deck in Moss Beach. I never get tired of watching the ocean; it's always changing, perpetually beautiful and majestic.

This sign on highway 116 near Guerneville tells you that suburbia has been left behind.

More Spring Scenes

Near Twentynine Palms early this week, there were large fields of desert dandelions. It's a little late for these to bloom in such profusion at 2000 feet...there must have been some good rain within the past few weeks.

I pass through Joshua Tree NP at least once a year on my way to and from Arizona, but I never spend more than a few hours there. This is a bad travel oversight! One of these times I'll spend a day or two just roaming around the park. The rocks are endlessly cool. The whole place is a photographers paradise!

Here the teddy bear chollas are accompanied by blooming desert senna.

This abstract looking scene is actually a blooming creosote bush...blow the pic up for more detail.

At home, Garland Park is in full bloom. This is a blue eyed grass, a common flower in the park.

A Leisurely Trip Home

I ambled home from Arizona over three days. One of the big advantages of being retired is that you can do stuff like that...you're hardly ever in a hurry. And at this time of year it's good not to be in a rush...the weather's mild, and there's beauty everywhere. Here the lizards are enjoying some desert dandelions. At low elevations the wildflowers are pretty much done in the desert, but above 2000 feet in Joshua Tree NP they're still thriving.

A fine patch of globemallow in Joshua Tree NP.

This was a particularly fine ocotillo flower in full spring bloom.

JTNP is a surreal spot due to the vegetation and the rock formations. Sculpted by millennia of freezing and thawing, this park has some of the coolest rocks anywhere, seemingly piled up at random.

The area around Point Piedras Blancas is better known for its large colony of elephant sloats, but after a decent rain year the countryside is covered with lupines.

Cactus in Bloom

After a week of April, the wildflowers are mostly gone in the Arizona desert. However, the cactus are just coming into bloom. This prickly pear was especially gaudy. I must confess to cheating a bit with this picture; it was actually taken next to a street in Sun City West, rather than in the desert itself.








Now this is a natural prickly pear, growing wild in White Tank Mountain Regional Park west of Phoenix. As of April 9, the pricklys were just beginning to bloom; buckhorn cholla were at their peak; and hedgehog cacti were a bit past their prime, though some late bloomers still sported some really nice flowers.






The lizards hung out with me in the desert a couple days ago, and proved their resilience by lounging in the spines of a barrel cactus. They love the desert above all other environments.










The saguaros are beginning to bud...this has just happened in the past week. In a couple weeks the first flowers will appear, and continue to bloom one after the other well into June. The saguaro bloom is the state flower of Arizona.