East Side

View of East Peak with Flowering Toyon

When you exit the 101 freeway onto Highway 1 to go up to Mt. Tam, there's a brilliant California buckeye next to the road just past the Holiday Inn Express, on the Coyote Creek side of the road. Just a couple of weeks ago, that tree was at its showiest peak, its crown completely covered with pristine panicles of white flowers. I still had that vision of loveliness in mind when I decided to revisit a trail on the east side of Mt. Tam that I last hiked in May of 2014, where I photographed a ravine with a river of buckeyes that were flowering but had yet to reach their peak.

I was pretty sure the peak was going to be over by now, but I decided to go up there anyway yesterday morning. The approach took me past Phoenix Lake, and I tried to discern anything unusual out there due to either the drought or the surprise rain we got over the weekend. Some dead trees along the edge of the lake seemed unusual, but had probably been there a long time, maybe having been drowned by higher lake levels. I couldn't detect many noticeable effects from the rain. The trail wasn't dusty anymore, but the ravines that crossed it were dry.

Even though it had been eight years since I last hiked out that way, the trail seemed familiar, and I immediately recognized the ravine of buckeyes that I was looking for. Unfortunately, the sweet-scented flowers were well past prime. I made a mental note to remember this hike next year, and I'm thinking that a photograph at sunset could be great if there were some interesting clouds to catch the color. Getting a nice sunset in the second half of May could be a tall order, though.

Wiry Snapdragon
(Antirrhinum vexillocalyculatum)

East Peak from Buckeye Ravine

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Nada Branchs

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I was nestled like a sea anemone among soft fronds of kelp and seaweed, sitting in my car in the parking lot at Fitzgerald Marine Reserve. It was still dark out, and I was waiting for the pre-dawn sunrise to cast a purple earth shadow on the western horizon. When the beautiful morning unfolded, I planned to be set up behind a tidepool to capture the sky's reflection in colorful splendor.

Unfortunately, the fog, which has been absent the last several mornings, had other plans. Eventually, despite the dismal light, it became bright enough to head out onto the reef in advance of the 7 a.m. minus tide. And it also became bright enough to read the sign saying the Reserve does not open until 8 a.m. I guess I forgot to check when I was at home making plans, but I was amazed to discover when I got back home and checked my photo files, that my last visit to Fitzgerald was ten years ago! It seemed funny that the Marine Reserve, famous for its tidepools, wouldn't open until an hour past low tide.

I walked back to the car and drove a little farther south, down to Pillar Point. I scoured that  magnificent reef hither and yon for interesting critters, but I could hardly believe the complete absence of nudibranchs (which I ear-worm as "noodle branchs"). Zip, zilch, nada, as they say. I wondered if I was looking on the wrong part of the reef, or if my eyesight wasn't acute enough, or if I'd simply lost my branch-o-vision. If King Neptune would just let me see one, I knew my brain could refresh its search image and suddenly reveal the tidepools to be teeming with 'branchs.

By and by, I had covered the reef pretty well and finally gave up and returned to the car, then drove back to Fitzgerald just for the heck of it since it was a little past 8 o'clock by then. This time I got past the gate, only to find out the whole entrance was closed to protect the harbor seals (none of which I could see) from being disturbed by tidepoolers. Signs said the reef could still be accessed at the Seal Cove entrance, so I trundled off in that direction and found a park ranger and a few other folks among the remaining tidepools. Just a bunch of nada-branchs again, but the find of the day was a flowery orange tubeworm with its tentacles extended.

Sea Sacs (a.k.a. dead-man's fingers) carpet the reef at Pillar Point.

Tetraclita rubescens, the red-thatched or pink volcano barnacle.

Sunburst Sea Anemone (Anthopleura sola) in Bed of Coralline Algae

Gull Feather & Seaweed

Mossy Chiton

Serpula columbiana, the red-trumpet tube worm (guessing).

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50mm or Bust

I thought I'd try something a little different on our usual hike on Saturday. Instead of snapping a few phone pix, I'd lug my trusty old Nikon D800E with a 50mm lens. 

Shortly after spooking up a jackrabbit near the beginning of our hike down the Old Mine Trail, we spotted a couple of deer lying in the grass. We kept waiting for them to get up and bound away, but they watched us pass with little sign of alarm.

Having the Nikon didn't really slow me down much, which is a shame in a way. Being out and about to do photography is one thing, and going for a hike is another. I don't see making a habit out of bringing the Nikon, but there might be a point-and-shoot in my future, a compromise between the DSLR and my phone camera.

One of these days I'm going to take a closer look at the possibilities for photographing this oak tree to better show off its beautiful shape. It's rare on Mt. Tam to see a single oak with so much space to itself.

The grassy hillsides are drying out, but the forest along the Matt Davis Trail is still getting a fair amount of moisture from fog drip. Whenever I pass this vine of poison oak on the Douglas fir next to my wife, I'm reminded of Tom Killion's woodblock print called Above Stinson Beach.

I don't know if it was because we were hiking so early in the morning, or if it's just that people are going elsewhere for the holiday, but we encountered very few other hikers and only a couple of trail-runners. 

After the Matt Davis Trail heads down to Stinson beach, the Coast Trail angles gently up along Bolinas Ridge where it plays cat-and-mouse with the rising and sinking fog. There was enough moisture in the forest to support a couple of helleborine orchids sprouting along the trail.

I wished I had a wide angle lens for the fog-bows. My wife's iPhone camera did a great job with them. Despite the very steep hillside, the sun was a little too high in the sky to make Brocken specters.

Saturday's hike was a first for me -- the first time I ever hiked as a retired person! Woohoo!

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Cat Nap

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When I stepped out back I saw that the cat was sleeping. She looked too cute to pass up, so I went back upstairs to get my camera. Of course, when I returned she was awake and looked up at me the moment I set foot on the stairs. 

I was determined to catch her napping, though, so I went for a 10-minute neighborhood walk and tried again. This time she was awake and watching a junco who was taking a bath in the water bowl (a drinking source for this and one other cat, and the occasional raccoon) maybe six feet away. She showed zero interest in stalking the bird.

I soon gave up trying to catch the cat napping and went down to hang out with her for a minute. The juncos were chirping an alarm the whole time, as they have recently been doing all day, including while bathing. There are two birds, and I'm as sure as I can be, without actually having found the nest, that they are nesting somewhere nearby. They took turns scolding the cat from a few feet away in a hazelnut bush that I planted years ago, when it was little more than a seedling I bought at Bay Natives Nursery.

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Layers of Time

The point of this post is to share the next three images, but I didn't want any of those to be in the top spot, so I'm including a shot taken from Mt. Tam last week. 

 

A few years ago I found this 1928 picture of the block I live on. It was pretty amazing to see what everything was built on. Who'd have thought by looking at all that dune scrubland that by 2022 a vacant lot (and one still exists) would cost more than a million bucks.

Back in 2015 I pulled a screen shot of the same area from Google Maps. I just stumbled on these pictures the other day, and one change since 2015 that I noticed right away is how much the hedge on the right has developed.

As you can see from a phone snap I shot just minutes ago, the Red Trumpet Vine has gone crazy during the last seven years. Hardly any of the original supporting hedge still shows.

Those big pine trees might be marked for death, which would be a shame. Just walking under them and smelling the fresh pine scent moments ago took me out of the city and up to the Sierra. Yesterday I watched a couple of crows chase a squirrel out of its top branches. Sometimes the crown fills with cherry-headed conures, which presumably feed on the pine nuts. I'm often amazed to see such big trees anchored in sand dune, and all the gopher tunnels around the roots can't help.

Speaking of layers of time, I joined the Navy on Friday the 13th of May -- 45 years ago!

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Fading Glume

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The mountain was bathed in gloom when I arrived shortly after 7 a.m. I'd worn shorts but was glad I'd brought a long-john top as well as a wind-breaker. And gloves. It was only a week after my last visit, but as I took shelter from the drizzle beneath a rocky overhang along the Old Mine Trail, spring seemed to have reversed its direction to head back toward winter. Finally, a flash of sun painted the landscape and I tripped the shutter three or four times before the flash was over.

The wind was coming up, so I took cover behind a grove of trees surrounding Forbes Bench and photographed some cobwebby thistle. Red-breasted nuthatches called from the nearby woods.

I'd been shooting with a 50mm lens, but was glad I'd brought a long lens, 300mm, as well, when the hills south of the mountain started to pick up some interesting light.

Soon enough, the rising wind swept away the clouds and fog.

The sun was too high for my purposes by then, unfortunately, so I roamed around and was intrigued by more cobwebby thistle, here sporting a cup of crystal dewdrops.

I created a dreamy version of cobwebby thistle by overlaying an out-of-focus frame with a sharp-focused frame, then played with the opacity of the latter until the blended images appealed to me.

I'd been hearing the gobbling of turkeys nearby, but I was still surprised when a pair of toms suddenly emerged from the forest close behind me. The colors of these birds are just incredible. What if we could always appreciate beauty as much as, say, money? It's easy to get rich on beauty. All you have to do is let go of all your troubles, and beauty you hadn't even noticed before will magically flare up all around you.

As I followed the turkeys strutting their stuff with cobwebby thistle in the background, I noticed that last week really was "Peak Green." The glumes and florets of tall grasses bowing under the weight of seeds, dew, and wind, were already fading toward brown.

I got back in the car to check out another location after the gate out to West Ridgecrest opened. Three bucks were resting and feeding near a tall oak tree where many years ago I found a recently placed grave for someone's pet. 

The biggest surprise of the morning was finding this fruiting of Gomphidius glutinosus mushrooms. I photographed them in a bed of lichen with a couple of flax flowers and a blue-eyed grass.

Just a few feet away, this lone spotted coral root orchid, a non-photosynthesizing plant that relies on mycorrhizal fungi, rather than sunlight, to survive, bloomed from the douglas fir duff on the forest floor. 

As I packed up my camera gear for the last time I noticed all the birdsong in the air, and my Merlin app recorded chestnut-backed chickadee, acorn woodpecker, black-throated gray warbler, and hermit warbler. My feet were cold and wet from walking through all the dew-laden grasses, but the sun was shining. I gratefully hiked back to my car with no ticks crawling up my legs. 

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Street Scenes

On my morning walk today I noticed this nice little world between the cracks that illustrates a crack between the worlds of weed and garden. When it came time for my afternoon walk I decided to bring along my DSLR and 50mm lens to snap it up.

A very short distance beyond the street bouquet I admired the almost animal-like patterns of vine remnants clinging to a retaining wall.

Mother Nature's graffiti.

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Peak Green

The little bit of rain we've had lately has spruced things up on Mt. Tam quite nicely, and I'd have to call it "peak green" right now, although it'll probably last at least through next weekend. I hope so, because as I hiked today I wished I had my DSLR with me at a couple of choice spots.

I arrived at the locked gate about eight minutes before opening, pulling in behind a guy who got out of his pick-up truck right away and started walking toward the gate. I thought how lucky I'd been to arrive right behind the ranger, but the guy wasn't the ranger. He was just stretching his legs. The ranger came right about 7 a.m. and opened the gate, then asked us not to park in front of the gate, something I've been doing since before the ranger was born (not really, but that's how it felt). He even pointed out the "No Parking" sign right next to my car and told us that in the future we should wait over at the Pantoll campground parking lot. Okeedokee, we were fine with that. Things change.

My wife was still recovering from the work week, so I hiked our usual loop by myself. I've been thinking about place names lately, and how I often don't remember the names of streets I've lived around for twenty years. We've hiked our loop so many times, though, I've made up my own names for places along the trail. Along the Old Mine, Matt Davis, and Bolinas Ridge trails there are place names on no map except the one in my head: Lupine Lookout, Tinker's Fence, Sun-Squirrel Tree, Bigfoot Bend, and Dandelion Overlook. This morning I added Woodpecker's Choice after spotting this pileated woodpecker. At first it was pecking inside the hole, but I got too close and it hopped out but stayed close by and went back in after I backed away. 

Back in January of 2016 I took this selfie with a young bay laurel tree that had an interesting cone-shaped base created by browsing deer. I recently passed by that tree and determined to photograph it now, six years later (that rain jacket has since fallen apart, and I lost the hat after driving away with it still on the roof of my car). I figured I might as well do it this morning so I wouldn't forget, even though I had to use my phone camera.

I didn't get the same angle, but it was interesting to see the difference. The basal branches were just shriveled dead things. I hadn't brought the original picture with me, but I'd remembered the dead tanoak in the background and thought I could line up with that, but there was no sign of the dead tanoak. In fact, there was tanoak in the background, and it looked healthy. Maybe the drought is doing to sudden oak death what it once did to the chorus-frog-eating bullfrogs some fool had put in Lily Lake.

On the morning's hike I'd exercised my legs on the trail, feasted my eyes on the gorgeous landscape, and enjoyed the sounds of singing hermit warblers and other birds, and I was almost back to Rock Spring when I realized I hadn't stopped to enjoy any smells. I picked up a dried bay laurel leaf and crushed it under my nose. The scent lit me up. The first time I'd done that was in the mid-1980s in the Santa Ynez Mountains behind Santa Barbara. I'd used a fresh green leaf and inhaled deeply -- too deeply! Whatever chemicals are in those leaves (pinocarbone and umbellulone, among others) made me so light-headed that I had to sit down before I risked toppling over.

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Morning Sky

Here in the Sunset District we don't take it for granted that we'll be able to see the sky on any given morning, so it's always a pleasant surprise to have a clear view when we open the curtains after shutting off the alarm clock. This morning the waning crescent moon had just risen above Twin Peaks, and the appearance of Venus and Jupiter were icing on the cake.

Today is my first official day back in the office since the pandemic, so I'm going to take the morning sky as a good omen. I skipped my usual routine to grab my camera and a couple of lenses and step outside into the cool, but not very quiet, pre-dawn neighborhood. With a garbage truck noisily working its way up the hill I snapped a couple of frames and headed back indoors.

Mars and Saturn were supposedly out there above and to the right of Venus, but I couldn't see them. Jupiter will get closer to Venus over the next couple of days until they actually appear to touch.

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Grandview Park

Ordinarily I'd have included this park on my morning walk, which today would have been about a half-hour before sunrise. But as I began my walk I thought I heard some little birds or varmints scurrying in the red trumpet vines next to the sidewalk. Only when I had passed the vines did I realize the sound was drizzling rain. 

It was very light, though, so I continued my walk. Naturally, the rain started to fall harder instead of stopping, so I took refuge beneath an overhang in someone's driveway. I waited and waited, then finally started walking back home since I needed to stay on schedule. Back at home, Pam had changed out of her walking-to-work clothes so she could catch the bus. Naturally, the rain soon stopped. No morning walks for us!

But hey, at least it's Friday. I took another spin up to the park for my 10 a.m. walk and brought my camera along to capture the three-in-one: cloudscape, cityscape, and landscape.

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