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| Milk Maids |
Today I drove up to Mt. Tam once again to gather hazel pollen from some trees I had in mind, but I couldn't reach them due to Fairfax-Bolinas Road being closed. Even as I drove up there I was looking forward to bicycling again, and as it happened I found a great hazel area right along Panoramic Highway that I could easily have collected pollen from during a bike ride. So it goes, as Kurt Vonnegut used to say. (I just watched a documentary about Vonnegut, Unstuck in Time, last night.)
Since I had the car, I brought along my DSLR gear, but I hardly used it despite seeing blooms of Indian warrior, calypso orchid, and trillium. All three can be highly photogenic, but the Indian warrior was in too difficult and unsafe a spot to photograph, the calypsos were all brooding, half-open and bent downward, and the trillium were also nodding as though half-asleep.
Before I found the hazel on Panoramic Highway I'd planned to have a look down along Redwood Creek in Frank Valley (where Muir Woods is). I used to hike into the hills from down there quite a lot back in the day, when it was still sleepy down there, with few cars or hikers, and you could walk into Muir Woods without a reservation. Now, most of the parking areas west of Muir Woods are gone or signed "No Parking - $99 Fine." The old main trail through Frank Valley appears to have been decommissioned. Even the beautifully funky, lichen-crusted old bridge that crossed the creek has been removed. [UPDATE: It looks like they're going to replace the bridge as part of general road work slated for Frank Valley.]
The bridge was near a couple of old California buckeye trees next to the road. Years go I collected a few seeds from those trees and tossed them into a vacant lot near my home, and now there is a small, lone buckeye growing there. It leafs out every year, but I've never seen it produce seeds. Anyway, I was surprised to see that someone had screwed a metal plate into one of the buckeyes, reading "Beckett Briggs" and dated 2022. I googled the name, figuring it was a botanist, to no avail. So now I wonder if it's just some kind of graffiti, akin to carving initials into a tree.
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| Mossy Madrone |
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| Moss Fingerlings |
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| Science Project or Graffiti? |
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| One of the old buckeyes along Frank Valley Road. I haven't noticed leaves sprouting on the wild buckeyes yet, but the big one in Strybing Arboretum is already leafing out. |
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| Just when I thought this log on the way to the trail cams was done sprouting new growths of bear's head fungus, this is what I find today. |
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| Lots of deer and turkeys on the two cams over the last week... |
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| ...but not a single coyote, fox, or bobcat. |
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| Then & Now |
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| I like these little wooden chairs set in a cul-de-sac along one of my urban hikes. That's almost all miner's lettuce packed up around them. |
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