East Peak

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Until today I had never hiked around East Peak. I've always considered East Peak to be more of a tourist destination than an interesting hiking location, and it costs $8 to park there. It seemed like it would be a good place to catch the sunrise, though, so in the interest of exploration I drove on up. The ranger who opened the gate down at Pantoll was gracious enough to be early and to let me head on up before she even had both sides of the gate open. I was the first to arrive at the peak, but I was soon joined by another sunrise photographer who asked me if we were on the right trail (which wound clockwise around the peak, so we had to take it on faith). I said, "I don't know. I've never been here before!" Having been a fan of Mt. Tam for around 20 years, I could hardly believe it myself.

Here's an example of how not to take a good sunrise picture. It was kind of a precarious spot, so I paid more attention to the tripod's footing as well as my own than to thinking things through. I knew the graduated neutral density filters were going to flare out, but I used them anyway, hoping that luck would overcome physics. As usual, it did not.

I was surprised to hear some other people nearby, and was quickly able to spot them on a promontory below me. They must have hiked up from below, well before sunrise.

It's the seventh Spare the Air Day in a row, which I believe one of the weather guys said is a record (and we're not done yet). We've also had record cold temperatures this month and might experience record high temperatures before the month is out. More ominously, we are also wrapping up the driest calendar year since rainfall record-keeping began in 1849.

The Fire Lookout is perched on the very peak, elevation 2,571 feet.

The Gravity Car Barn is open on weekends beginning at noon. 

The Verna Dunshee Trail circumnavigates the peak and offers tremendous views north. Even on a Spare the Air Day I could see Tomales Bay, Black Mountain, Nicasio Reservoir and, of course, 4,342-foot-high Mt. Saint Helena. 

I'm pretty sure you could catch the sunrise and be out of there without getting cited, but I wasn't taking any chances on my first visit. Besides, it's worth eight bucks to be up there.

From East Peak I headed down the hill to pick up the trail camera and was surprised to see a blanket of fog coming down over Bolinas instead of moving in from the ocean.

At the very bottom of the Steep Ravine Trail where it meets Highway 1, I found my first waterfall of the season.... Yes, it's only about a foot tall, but it was refreshing to hear moving water for a change. Maybe it'll start raining next month....

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Upper Mountain Blues

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Once again I had the camera pointing too high. Drat! I'd have to guess this is the same fox I was catching in the other nearby trap. He was looking right at the camera in the first frame, which I  could only deduce from the position of the tips of his ears in the frame. Another sort-of bummer is I caught hikers again! I was truly surprised to see them -- three of them on Sunday afternoon, and it was 28 degrees in the forest shade. Were they mushroom-hunting? They walked right past the camera but did not appear to spot it.

This big buck was the only deer I caught all week.

When I arrived, I noticed that the camera had been knocked askew. Whatever brushed up against it made the camera think it was nighttime, despite it being Thursday afternoon, by completely covering the lens.

Four minutes later, the culprit stuck his fanny in the frame.

I could have left the camera in this location another week, but it seemed pretty dead up there. All the grass on the hillsides is still the color of late summer, with hardly a hint of green. So I decided to pull the camera and take it to a new location much farther down the mountain, down along Redwood Creek.

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Gravity's Sunrise

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With apologies to Thomas Pynchon, I couldn't resist the title for this post. (Coincidentally, I just picked up Bleeding Edge from the library on Saturday.) Despite a weird weekend sleep schedule, I managed to roll out of bed just after 5 a.m. to make the trip up to Mt. Tam in time for sunrise. I brought my mountain bike (a Gary Fisher Hoo-Koo-Ee-Koo, named for a trail very near my morning destination) so I could ride out along the Gravity Car Grade (beginning in 1896 a train took tourists and hikers from Mill Valley to a tavern on Tam's summit, where you could have a filet mignon dinner for $1.35, then spend the night; more on the Gravity Car).

The temperature was a bracing 29 degrees as I biked out in the dark, the path lit only by my small hiker's headlamp (which needs new batteries!). I wasn't exactly sure where I would find a vista point, and I chose to move on after checking out a couple of possibilities, finally ending up at what turned out to be the best spot along the route. Once I was done shooting I continued riding down the trail just to check it out and soon came to the Double Bowknot where the grade began to descend.

Although I'd barely noticed that the trail out was uphill, I enjoyed coasting most of the way back. I'd thought about trying to get up to East Peak, but I aborted before I got there since the sun had gotten so high already. The detour wasn't a total loss: I was happy to see little patches of snow along the road.

I parked at Rock Spring and mosied down the Cataract Trail to look for ice. I'd seen an icy puddle in the Mountain Theater parking lot, and now I wanted to find a more natural patch of ice to photograph.

Cataract Creek was finally running. Hopefully the rain we had the other day will be the first of more to come. There was no ice in the moving water, though, so I explored a frosty area where the Giant Chain Ferns grow.

I checked my thermometer and was excited to see that it was really as cold as it felt, just under 28 degrees. As I was poking around in all the frosty goodness I managed to brush some stinging nettle along the inside of my right wrist, and the affected area remains tingly even now, hours later.

Speaking of the thermometer, I recently added an "Information Kiosk" to the sidebar of the blog where you can waste some time checking out my camera bag and a minor bloviation about why I'm doing this blog.

Not all the giant chain fern fronds were dead. Note the "chains" of reproductive structures along the leaves.

I met up with a coyote once again this morning but didn't try to photograph him. He was coming up the trail just as I was going down, and we met near the big water tank where he detoured into the woods. I continued down the trail, only to turn around at one point and see the coyote following behind me. Once spotted, he veered off the trail again and that was the last I saw of him.

I finally found some actual ice, a patch no bigger than the palm of my hand, but interesting nevertheless.

I eventually circled back to the Jeep and drove out along Bolinas Ridge after placing the trail camera in a new location. I saw very little wildlife other than a pair of kestrels that were hunting on the east side of the ridge since the wind was blowing offshore. I parked where the grassland abruptly becomes forest and hiked a ways along the no-name trail that runs west from there. Is that part of the Coastal/Bay Ridge Trail? I'll have to follow it farther one of these days.

This time I got as far as a manzanita patch, where a hummingbird tipped me off to the surprising fact that one of the two manzanita species in the area was already in flower (the one with relatively smaller leaves and tiny flowers). I'd brought my camera bag along in the hope of finding fungi, but the fungi weren't fruiting yet, so I was glad to find some interesting lichen-adorned manzanita branches.

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Fox & Squirrel

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The fox from the last week of November was back on duty in the first week of December. He decided this time to take a closer look at the camera trap.

It's a good thing the fox likes to use this route on his nightly travels, or I would almost have gotten skunked. There were no deer at all this week, and only one other animal, a squirrel, which we'll soon see. (I surprised a young deer with its mother near the camera trap this morning, but they had not passed in front of the set.)

The fox inched closer and closer to the camera, evidently scenting my presence. In the next frames, the fox is directly under the camera, and all you can see in his tail.

I had a million -- okay more like a hundred -- squirrel hits.

A nice thing about the camera firing three frames whenever it senses a critter is that it makes it easier to find the critter as you scroll through the images and spot the movement. I didn't immediately see the squirrel scaling the rock. (Note 20-degree temperature drop from 12/2 to 12/3.)

As if one squirrel setting off my trap a million times isn't bad enough....

Find Elmo (the squirrel) and his pal. Give up? Check out the bay laurel in the background.

The squirrel and fox each came through the trap on three separate days (Mon-Tue-Sat for the squirrel; Sun-Wed-Sat for the fox). When the fox last came through on Saturday night (Brrr! Note the temperature!), he didn't even get an eye-shine, which I take to mean he's no longer interested in the camera. Nine minutes after he exited this frame stage left, he walked back across to exit stage right, again ignoring the camera.

He's close enough to the bathtub water trough to have paid it a visit in that amount of time, but who knows. It would be fun to set out a whole string of camera traps to see if you could catch the fox moving across the landscape.

This morning I moved the camera to another nearby location which, unfortunately, is beneath an oak tree. Hopefully I won't get another hundred pictures of a squirrel hunting for acorns! 

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Coyote Lessons

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A "coyote lesson" usually begins with the student feeling like a fool, but eventually emerging from foolishness into an important, "that's so true" lesson. 

It began for me on Saturday morning when I opened my eyes and realized it was already getting light out. I'd overslept! It was around 6:20 a.m., and I'd hoped to be at Alpine Lake when the gates opened at 7 a.m. There was no way I was going to make it, but I nevertheless got up, got dressed, and got on the road. 

As I was crossing the Golden Gate Bridge my heart ached as a most beautiful sunrise began to unfold before me. I wanted to stop so bad, but I am just too law-abiding. I watched the sunrise continue to create increasingly gorgeous artwork that I could grasp only with my mind and store only in memory. I could hear my camera whimpering in the back seat like a chihuahua that's dying to run outside and bark at the mailman. 

This time of year, sunrise colors last a long time, an exquisite torture. Even so, the whole thing was going to be over before I could acquire it. And of course, it was.

Having missed the sunrise, I was primed for further disappointment. I'd returned to the lake in the vain hope of photographing the river otters that Pam and I had seen during last week's hike. I was also camera-at-the-ready in case I saw coyotes again. I even thought I might hike all the way out to see if the lion's mane fungus had gotten any bigger (despite the nagging idea that it had more likely dried out). Deep down I knew it was hopeless. You don't get a second chance.

To go looking for something in particular is often to beckon disappointment, so I let go of my expectations while remaining alert for the unexpected. Instead of going to the store to get what I wanted, I would roam the aisles without a cent. I would be given a gift, or I would leave empty-handed. Either way, I was okay with the outcome, enjoying a beautiful morning on the mountain.

I hiked across Bon Tempe Dam and set out along the perimeter of Alpine Lake, stopping to photograph what might be the most excellent grove of black oaks on the watershed. They were striking trees, with curvy trunks and high branches silhouetted against the morning sky. Easier to appreciate with the eyes than photograph with a camera. I should have been there weeks ago, when the leaves were golden. 

As my internal debate about whether I was really going to hike a couple of hours to the lion's mane fungus percolated at low heat, I kept my eyes out for the trio of otters. Where did the otters come from? Did they swim up Lagunitas Creek to Kent Lake, then hike up over Alpine Dam? 

A pileated woodpecker broke into my thoughts when it began calling out from a small, dead fir tree just twenty feet away. I wondered if I'd awakened the bird as I stopped to watch it skitter up the tree in a few quick pulses, then fly away east into the safety of the next grove of trees. My camera was still strapped snugly in my backpack.

The otters weren't there. Numerous mergansers paddled to the other side of the reservoir as soon as they saw me. Three osprey soared high overhead, calling out with their high-pitched whistles, way out of range. Varied thrush called from the forest darkness where no ISO could capture them. All out of reach. 

I photographed clouds reflections on the lake, then hiked a little farther along the trail just to stretch my legs and feel the earth under my feet, but decided to let the lion's mane go unchecked and turn back.

I drove up to Lagunitas Lake for its sunrise possibilities, then headed back to Bolinas-Fairfax Road, up past the golf course and Azalea Hill, and stopped for a quick look at Lily Lake, where I didn't even take my camera out of the bag, thinking, "I'm not coming out here any more until we get some rain to freshen things up and move the season along."

I drove past a few cars parked at the bottom of Cataract Gulch, then up the hill to Bolinas Ridge. I figured I'd been skunked, photography-wise, but I kept my eyes open anyway as I headed for the camera trap I'd set the week before. I pulled into a turn-out just before the fire road down to Laurel Dell, got out of the Jeep to have a look around, and was surprised to see a lone coyote on the hill above Druid Rocks. I half-expected him to take off running when I started walking toward him, and it wasn't long before he did just that, taking refuge in a small grove of trees on the steep hillside. I could hear him moving around in there, but he wouldn't come out, so I walked back to the Jeep and drove away.

Slowly. Keeping an eye on the side-view mirror. Sure enough, the coyote was out in the open again, so I turned around and parked in the same turn-out to give chase once again.

I tried to find the right balance between pursuit and nonchalance in order to get close to the coyote without frightening him away, but it wasn't really working.

He marked his trail near the top of the hill, then disappeared behind it, heading north.

He followed the trail past Druid Rocks. I let him go and hiked back to the Jeep to try to intercept him farther along.

He walked out into the road and appeared to be crossing to head down the opposite hillside, but stopped at the double yellow lines and turned to continue following the road downhill. I shot this frame through the Jeep's windshield.

The coyote got off of West Ridgecrest and followed the Bay Area Ridge Trail until the trail again met the road. He sauntered down the shoulder until he was frightened up this hillside by a passing bicyclist. I took this shot when a second cyclist passed by.

The cyclists having gone by, the coyote resumed his trek.

As he got closer to the Jeep (where I was sitting with the window rolled down), he considered crossing the street in front of me to reach the McKennan Trail.

But something in his innate coyote wisdom warned him against passing in front of a vehicle, even if it wasn't moving.

So he passed right next to me and crossed the road once he was behind me (for what it's worth, all photos in this post are un-cropped).

The coyote was kind enough to wait for me.

A rustle in the grass next to the trail appeared promising, so I stopped to watch, but the moment passed, and whatever field mouse or gopher had stirred would live to stir again.

There appeared to be a naked guy sitting in the man-made vista chair in the upper right corner of this shot. I was hoping I could get the coyote and the guy in the same shot, but this was the last frame I was able to get. The coyote obviously saw the guy sitting in the chair and quickly bypassed him, trotting down the trail after squirting a quick scent-mark. I was glad to see that the naked guy was wearing running shorts. He was tuned into his earbuds and never noticed the coyote. I figured I'd followed the coyote far enough, grateful for the gift. For all I knew, he was heading down to Bolinas Lagoon. It would have been nothing for him, not even a step out of his way. For the coyote, every square inch of the place is home.

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Fox Set

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There are so many potential spots to place the camera trap within even a small area. I was nosing around the Set 1 area, which is very close to the Set 3 area, where I found a promising general location with some animal beds (probably deer beds) nearby, but with many critter trails also in the vicinity. Animals could have passed very near the camera without actually passing in front of it, and when I picked up the memory card this morning I didn't have very high hopes. I wouldn't have been surprised if this set hadn't turned up any animals at all.

Some days, not a single animal passed by, and the deer above was the only deer all week. But I did catch a gray fox on two different days.

On this second catch (early this morning), the fox stepped into the frame and seemed to spot the camera.

But he quickly surmised there was no threat and continued on his way.

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