Mountain Critters

Composite Critter-Cam

Although this is a composite of three image captures, the fox, jackrabbit, and coyote are depicted where they appeared in each frame.

Mt. Tam, May 22, 2020

On May 1, as the scrub jay gathers nesting material, you can see some of the sickle-leaved onions coming up, but there are no flowers yet.

Just a couple of weeks later, the onions' pink flowers are everywhere. This is another composite frame of course. One thing I forgot to do when I re-set this cam on my previous trip was to make sure there wasn't anything in front of the lens that would move in the wind and create false triggers. That blade of grass in front of the chipmunk led to thousands of useless frames. I got the card home and downloaded a record 6,901 files, which used up 29.4 GB of the 32 GB card.

Buck in the Rain

Lizard Cam

This used to be a popular (unauthorized) route for mountain bikers, and the authorities tried to decommission it by blocking it with dead wood. This was the only time since the cam has been in place at this spot that it caught any humans passing through. Pretty much the only people up high on the mountain during the lockdown are park and watershed employees doing various maintenance tasks, and bike riders.

Lucky for the mouse, unlucky for the fox: two captures made hours apart.

When I headed into the woods to check my trail cams, I was surprised, and yet not surprised, when I encountered a guy enjoying the morning who'd obviously spent the night. I was surprised because I never expect to run into anyone off-trail, but I was not surprised since I know I'm not the only one who likes to roam around. As I walked through "camp" I saw that he'd leaned his bike against an oak tree that I've previously placed my camera in. His hammock was also slung very near another spot I've set the cams at.

Passing Bucks

A casual hiker going through this area would have been unlikely to spot this cam, and even though this location hasn't picked up any humans, I wondered if the camping guy would wander up this way after seeing me enter the woods without coming back out the way I went in. After swapping cards and batteries, I moved this cam to the base of the big Doug fir, even though it makes the cam much more visible to anyone who might pass by. Fingers crossed that it's still there next time I go back.

Mama & Fawn

Billy the Wonder Squirrel

You can't do as nice a composite with sunny-day frames because the shadows move through the day.

Squirrel & Bunny Composite

I was probably as surprised to find the bike-camper as I was to find a pair of fresh grisette mushrooms (Amanita pachycolea). According to California Mushrooms grisettes typically fruit from late fall through mid-winter, yet this guy had just recently burst forth from the earth and was still fresh and pretty on May 22.

This was the first time I rode all the way from home. My ebike has a 500 watt-hour battery, and I do believe I could probably just make it to Mt. Tam and back, about 45 miles round-trip, if I used "battery off" mode whenever I could (on flats and downhills). But I decided to banish "range anxiety" once and for all by purchasing a second battery.

The battery weighs about five pounds and fits nicely in the top Topeak bag I have on the rack. When I locked my bike to a tree so I could hike out to the critter cams, I removed the frame-mounted battery and hid it, along with the bike bag and my helmet, to help ensure it would all still be there when it was time to go home.

Northside Vista Point

A park ranger who'd just let a car head up toward Rock Spring was re-locking the gate across from the Pantoll parking lot when I arrived Friday morning. Employees have work to do up there, but the public is still being kept out, unless you get there on foot or bicycle. It appears the closure will continue through the holiday, which is quite disappointing, especially to my wife who doesn't ride.

View on YouTube

I could hear a chainsaw in the distance at one point, but the woods were alive with birdsong. Here's a minute's worth I recorded on my smartphone.

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Coast Reverie

Somewhere out there...

Coast Lily

Sea Pink

Rhododendron

Goldfields & Friends

Pacific Coral Root

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Vista Point

California Quail, Tennessee Valley

I need to adopt the stoicism of a California quail. The wind ruffles his feathers? So what. It's just the laws of physics, so how could it lower your spirits. On my morning walk I noticed the wind was coming up already, which means I'm going to have to plow into it on my mid-day bike ride. It's not even a big deal, though, and in fact it's just a slight diminution of the pure excellence of riding with little or no wind. Since the psychological laws of nature are every bit as real as the physical laws, there's some truth to the saying that it's all in how you look at it.

Quail Calling

I was listening to a report on the marvel of the Mt. Diablo viewshed this morning on KQED radio when the reporter expressed her joy that, looking through binoculars, she could see the Golden Gate Bridge, sixty miles away. As it happens, I had recently measured the distance between Mt. Tam and Mt. Diablo, so I had a pretty good idea how the reporter mistakenly doubled the actual distance.

Anyone who uses Google Maps knows you can plot a route from, say, Mt. Diablo to the Golden Gate Bridge, and get not just the directions but also the distance to be traveled. But that's road distance. Obviously, when you look through binoculars, your vision does not follow that same route! (I was thanked by KQED for pointing out the error in time for them to fix it before the next airing.)

Of course you can also use Google Maps to plot a straight-line distance. Simply right-click on your departure point, then choose "Measure distance" from the pop-up menu. Then right-click on your destination point and choose "Distance to here" on the pop-up menu. Now you can read the distance on the ruler.

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Head in the Clouds

I was enjoying the cloudscape out the back window yesterday afternoon and decided to run a timelapse to get a better feel for the movement of the passing clouds. The video runs for 54 seconds and is kind of a nice meditation on the passing of time (in this case, an hour-and-a-half).

View at YouTube

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Bikeabout

Waking up yesterday to a foggy morning with a bit of wind coming up, I decided the conditions weren't perfect enough to risk trying to e-bike up to Mt. Tam and back. I still wanted to go for a ride, though, so I figured I'd ride a route through the Haight down to Union Square, then to Chinatown and North Beach, then SoMa and the Mission, and end up atop Twin Peaks before circling home. I was en route to the Haight when I saw this excellent heavy-duty offroad mobile home. (Click on any image to see it full-size.)

It wasn't quite 11 a.m. yet, but even though the Haight does like to sleep late, it was still surprisingly dead, with almost everything closed and/or boarded up. The old Haight Ashbury Music Center had already closed before the pandemic struck. I'd bought a tobacco sunburst Gibson ES-347 there in the mid-1980s, but sold it for gas money to get back to California after being stuck in Florida for a while. That beautiful instrument was way above my pay grade as a guitarist anyway, but it sure was sweet while it lasted.

Union Square sort of died to me when the Borders Books closed in 2011, even though it remained a good place to hang out and people-watch. Back in the day when there were people to watch, that is.

I pedaled through the Stockton Tunnel, which thankfully had a bike lane, and was surprised by all the shoppers in Chinatown, the busiest part of San Francisco I'd see all day.

North Beach was pretty sad, with its combination of interesting streets devoid of people, and all the boarded-up storefronts that were there even before the pandemic struck. SFMOMA was eerily quiet, with no lines, no queues of people chattering on the sidewalk. 

Before the pandemic, my wife would walk over to Rainbow after work on Friday, do her shopping, then take a Lyft home, but the main attraction was the great selection of foods in bulk bins, so when the bulk bins were closed, that was it. Although we've been doing our shopping much closer to home ever since, it was still a busy place, with a line of cars waiting to park and two social-distanced lines of shoppers waiting to get in.

Heading through the Mission up toward Market Street, I wasn't quite hungry enough to stop at Pancho Villa Taqueria (and I didn't have a bike lock either), but I had to stop for this mural I'm going to call "The Goddess of 16th Street."

I could have stayed on Market until it turned into Portola, but I decided to take a commodius vicus of recirculation up among the Upper Market castles and environs along Corbett Street. 

You gotta love being on an e-bike at climbs like this.

The last skate ramp you'll ever need?

"Selfie with Concrete Jungle"

This was not really a nature outing, certainly nothing like going up to Mt. Tam, but it sure was great, after a week of working from home, to get out of the house on a warm and sunny day, and for more than just a few minutes enjoy moving freely about the city.

City view on Saturday, May 16, 2020.

I could just pick out our Golden Gate Heights apartment from Twin Peaks, but when my wife texted me that she was waving, I couldn't tell she was joking.... If she'd gotten the binoculars we keep by the window she could have seen me waving back, but she was busy doing life drawing with an online group of artists--an innovation that could still be a good thing even when the pandemic is over.

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Black Point Trail

Golden Fairy Lantern in Flower

Golden Fairy Lantern in Fruit

Yerba Santa on Black Point Trail, Mt. Diablo (May 2010)

Horned Lizard

Wind Poppies

Chaparral Broomrape

Baby Rattlesnake

Mosaic Darner

Whiptail Lizard

Gray Pine Nuts & Leaf Bundle

Separated by just 37 miles, the landscape of Mt. Diablo is as different from the landscape of Mt. Tamalpais as our inland climate is from our coastal climate. The difference in these landscapes puts me in mind of the differences among various internal landscapes, the inner worlds inhabited by individual people. 

The inner landscapes we inhabit may have objective properties, but the way we see them, the way we react to them, and the stories we tell ourselves about them, are quite varied. Some people are content to remain within a very limited sphere of their inner landscape, and even believe that limited sphere is all there is. It would be comical if it wasn't so sad.

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Town Critters

It's drizzling as I write this, but the clouds were only just cruising in when I did my walk through Grandview Park earlier this morning. And a lovely morning it was, with the bonus of experiencing my second neighborhood coyote encounter since the shelter-in-place began. And the first was just a couple of days ago, so this week is looking pretty good so far.

The neighborhood cat on Monday, standing on a mossy concrete block strewn with wild cucumber, miner's lettuce, sorrel, and lilly-pilly berries.

In the wee hours of Tuesday morning, a raccoon ambled through my garden, knocking down a few miner's lettuce plants as it foraged for insects and whatnot.

Ten minutes after the raccoon visited, the neighborhood cat came through to reassert her domain.

On my Monday walk I had been slightly amazed to have crossed paths with no other walkers. That was a first for the duration of the lockdown. Also a first was seeing this coyote which had probably just ambled down from Golden Gate Heights Park. He took a detour up these stairs when he saw me, and I snapped a picture with my phone.

This morning I saw another coyote at the base of Golden Gate Heights Park, but she skedaddled back the way she came when I approached to take a picture. I wish I had more time to watch and follow them around. If it's a pair, I'd like to see if they're denned-up in the area. 

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Night & Day

Some images from a trip to Mono Lake in May 2013.

It seems like we're all living in a kind of night world these days.

Hobgoblins practice the dark arts of mendacity and treachery in the service of greed and selfishness. Elves band together to practice veracity and honesty in the service of sharing and community.

Night falls, but the sun also rises.

The face of the Earth moves into the light. Warmth and clarity return.

Life is renewed.

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Fire Season

Lupines in Burn Zone Near Yosemite, May 2013

The name of this blog can be understood in a couple of ways. It's about photography that is minimally processed and represents nature pretty much as I truly encounter it in the field. And it's also about expressing my own true nature with pictures and words. 

Nature photography is about having an encounter between myself and the world, followed by the response of letting it all in, and allowing it to have an effect on all of my senses. Immersing myself in the truth of that encounter sets fire to my soul and inspires my creative spirit.

That's the basis of artistic truth, and creative people take it from there to express, through myriad arts and crafts, what comes of that encounter and response, that marriage of subject and object. The expression of artistic truth isn't didactic. It's not trying to teach or explain or convince. It's a means by which the human soul expresses its encounter with the sublime.

So if we grant that there is such a thing as artistic truth, what do we make of other kinds of truth?

There's scientific truth which can be codified into physical laws which are the same for everyone. Then there's social truth which can be codified into civil and criminal laws whose logic must be adjudicated by a human being and which are the same for everyone only in principle, not in practice. And finally there is political truth, which can be codified into talking points whose purpose is to persuade and which are obviously not true for everyone.

It's interesting that "might makes right" even in the world of scientific truth, sometimes keeping ignorance in the forefront for generations before facts finally become incontrovertible. Until that factual apotheosis arrives, science can be a messy business full of all the slings and arrows of human frailty.

But for social and political truth, there is no final apotheosis of fact, and we're left, at their root, with "might makes right." The forms of might include the power to deploy or withhold money. There are the powers of persuasion, and not just with logic and evidence, but also with psychological manipulation, self-serving beliefs and outright lies. There are also the powers of charismatic force, of tribal bonding, and of course the most basic "might makes right" power of brute force. 

Human beings who aren't content to have their minds filled for them by unscrupulous or even well-meaning others must do their own due diligence on statements of "truth" by constantly reminding themselves to question their opinions and beliefs, to check whether the tracks that have led to those opinions and beliefs were laid on a factual foundation. 

Other human beings will just go along to get along.

There's a saying in journalism that if your mother tells you she loves you, check it out. Meaning you're always looking at the tracks and sign behind the statement that's being presented to you, no matter how trustworthy the presenter is, and figuring out for yourself if the tracks add up to a truth. If they don't, it might not even be a lie, but an opinion or a belief. And of course with an emotion like a mother's love, there really is no way to check it out.

In the end, social truth -- the law of the land -- isn't factually true. Laws are an invention used to organize society and have to be enforced with brute strength. Political truth is a battle of opinions and is enforced by social conventions such as lobbying, storytelling, and voting.

Only scientific truth and artistic truth can claim to be factually true. Scientific truth is objectively true, while artistic truth is subjectively true. And the road to each of these truths can be labyrinthine, to be sure, but in the end they are the most worthwhile to pursue. Only these two truths touch eternity, and to touch eternity while existing in time is to experience the sublime fire of true knowing.

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P.S. The idea for this post was sparked by a video my wife shared with me yesterday regarding the "Plandemic" conspiracy. In a world where the president of the United States is, in addition to anything nice or otherwise that you might say about him, also a gaslighting con-artist, can we be surprised that an unhinged conspiracy theorist could have a #1 book on Amazon and successfully run her con on otherwise intelligent people? 

Although I spent a few hours reading about this intriguing story on NPR, Retraction Watch, and Science Magazine, the most comprehensive source debunking the claims made in the video that I found in one place is here (at sciencebasedmedicine.org), and it has no paywall. 

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