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.