Mountain Run

 

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.

Mossy Madrone

Moss Fingerlings

Science Project or Graffiti?

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.

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.

Lots of deer and turkeys on the two cams over the last week...

...but not a single coyote, fox, or bobcat.

Then & Now

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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Twenty Percent Chance

 

Sun and Clouds at Seal Rocks

I completed most of my morning walk before I needed the rain jacket. I'd circled through Forest Hill and West Portal and was up near Golden Gate Heights Park when it began to drizzle, and the clouds had already passed by the time I reached the Cascade Walk stairs. As the sun came out, a trace of rainbow lit up out toward Mt. Tam, and I took a snapshot with my phone camera, then dropped it and cracked the screen in two places. It still works, but this might be the excuse I've been waiting for to get a new phone with a top-notch camera.

Today's forecast called for a 20 percent chance of rain, so I figured the early morning sprinkle might have been it, and I headed out on my bike soon after I got home. I dropped down Golden Gate Park via JFK Drive until I reached the Great Highway, where I usually turn south. But when I looked to the north, the contrast of bright sun and dark clouds lured me toward it like singing Sirens.

The clouds and ocean provided beautiful drama, but since I wasn't getting any rainbow action, I rode up to Land's End where I arrived just in time to view a faint bow over the water with the Marin Headlands in the background. Unfortunately, as faint as it looked through my polarized eyeglasses, it was even fainter in the phone snap and soon disappeared as a huge rain cloud moved in and blotted out the sun. The cloud was impressively dark, but the rain was forgivingly light, and I managed to stay fairly dry under the branched awning of a cypress tree.

When there was a brief let-up in the rain, I coasted back down to the old Cliff House to find a more secure refuge to wait out the next line of squalls. Another faint rainbow appeared in the rain's wake, but it was 11:30 by then and the bow was very low in the sky.

On the way home I wished I'd brought my FZ80 to photograph a great blue heron  on the fallen tree at Metson Lake, where I last saw one on December 21st. I've looked for the heron every time I've passed by since, and today was the first time I've seen it again. Incidentally, I haven't seen the great blue herons I recently saw in their nests at their eponymous lake (formerly Stow Lake) since the big wind storm.

And finally, apropos of nothing, I learned that Alabama's Supreme Court has ruled that frozen human embryos are children. The striking thing to me was the Court's reasoning. I thought I heard a reporter on the radio state that the Court reasoned that destroying embryos would incur the wrath of God. 

Really?! Here we are in the twenty-first century, and our highest courts are invoking the wrath of Zeus (or whatever name one chooses for God)!

I downloaded the Court's decision to make sure I heard right, and indeed it says on page 37, "In summary, the theologically based view of the sanctity of life adopted by the People of Alabama encompasses the following: ... and (3) human life cannot be wrongfully destroyed without incurring the wrath of a holy God, who views the destruction of His image as an affront to Himself." 

Variations of the word "God" appear 41 times in this Court's decision, and the Court relies, at least in part (I haven't read the whole decision, and even though I worked as a litigation assistant for many years, I do not have the expertise of a lawyer), on the U.S. Constitution's declarations about God for authority. 

People are entitled to believe whatever they want, but a state supreme court that bases its legal ruling on relgious beliefs and metaphysics should be an affront to so-called sober judges everywhere. A lot of people in this country have already abandoned reason and science, but now even a court of law has woven its own logic out of mythological cloth. This seems like a misunderstanding of what it means to be rational.

("Mythology may, in a real sense, be defined as other people's religion. And religion may, in a sense, be understood as popular misunderstanding of mythology." --Joseph Campbell.) 

One more apropos of nothing item: Last night I watched an excellent documenary, Radical Wolfe, about the writer Tom Wolfe. As a teenager I never took to reading  beyond our set of Encyclopedia Brittanica until a kid four years younger than I was turned me on to The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, and I've been, if not voracious, at least hungry for books ever since. Thanks, kid!

Love is Blue

If you squint and put on your x-ray goggles, you can just make out the faint bow arching below the line of six white birds in the distance.

The view back toward the squall that just moved off to the north.

Rear Window Timelapse of Clouds

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Cloudplay

 

Afternoon Partial Bow
(Screenshot)

Try as I might, I couldn't resist running some timelapse video of the clouds racing through the sky out the back window yesterday. I hadn't even been thinking about it until I went back there to get my e-reader and noticed a rainbow blinking in and out of existence. But even with the timelapse set to fire every two seconds, the shimmering evanescence was over in a couple of finger-snaps.

Rear Window Timelapse, 2/19/24

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Bow Shift

 

Storm Blowing Through San Francisco

Hanging out at Grandview Park this morning was the best show in town. The wind was often blowing at 15-25 mph, with occasional forays into the 30s. The most powerful gust I recorded on the wind speed unit was 38.5 mph. Despite all the wind, it really didn't rain very much. Ditto for last night. The wettest parts of the storm must have passed to our north and south.

At the foot of a rainbow, Golden Gate Park's Murphy Windmill was catching the southern wind while large waves broke with dramatically billowing spindrift along Ocean Beach.

I spent so much time at the park that I got to watch the rainbow shifting across the horizon. In this shot at 10 a.m., the top of the bow is over the Richmond District.

By noon, when this was shot, the top of the bow is over Blue Heron Lake (Strawberry Hill is the high point just to the left of center). The bow has shifted east, but it's also lower in the sky (since the sun is higher).

A quick clip from Grandview Park just before I left.

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In The Neighborhood

 

Red Shouldered Hawk Sounding Off

I took a few hours between storms to enjoy a stroll around Strybing Arboretum in Golden Gate Park. It was so sunny this morning that it was hard to believe a dramatic change is in store. It's about noon now, and the wind is gusting pretty strong, about 17 mph, with clouds blowing in from the west.

Lone Magnolia Blossom

More Magnolia

Forget-Me-Not

Magnolia Bud

Silk Tassel Bush

This red-shouldered hawk swooped onto the branch with a nice bunch of salad greens in its talons. The main course was somewhere inside the bunch.

The hawk eventually tossed away the greens.

A bunch of golden-crowned sparrows were munching on willow pollen back in the Children's Garden.

I thought this was some kind of super-interesting new bird I'd never seen before, and I only managed to catch this one sharp image as it flittered around near the surface of a small pond. There doesn't appear to be any online bird identifier similar to what you can get on your phone, so I had to take a phone snap of the image on my computer screen to get it into the Merlin ID app. I had to laugh when the ID came up: song sparrow. D'oh! So pretty from this angle though.

It was interesting to be reminded again how even a sparrow can look huge compared to a yellow-rumped warbler or, as we have here, a townsend's warbler.

Downy Woodpecker

It's still autumn for some of the trees in the botanic garden.

There was a large patch of Peziza cup fungus in some wood chips near the bamboo trail.

Also in the same patch of wood chips, these jumbo Agaricus pancakes (with size 10-1/2 shoe).

Rocky Outcrop near Grandview Park

Succulent Garden on 14th Avenue

One more view of Burney Falls that I forgot I had. The trail that's closing in April makes a circle around the falls, with a bridge that gets you over the river upstream.

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Sunrise This Morning

 

Rear Window View

I happened to look out the back window just as the clouds were picking up some color this morning and set up a timelapse. The center of the action is actually off to the right of the frame, but houses block too much of the view.

Sunrise Timelapse (2/16/24)

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Burney Falls

 

Burney Falls in Winter

Burney Falls is one of those places that I'd swear I visited not too long ago, but it's actually been a dozen years. The spectacular falls made a deep impression. I just read that the state park will close access to the falls for trail maintence from April through the main summer visitor season. 

Burney Falls, Dec. 2012

Burney Falls, Oct. 1993

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Down the Creek

 

Drifting Past the Huckleberries

I figured if I'm going to walk in the rain I'd rather be in the woods than in the city. 

I also wanted to collect some hazel pollen and knew where a couple of hazels were located not too far down Cataract Creek. On my way down to find them I suddenly recalled where I could find a bunch of hazel, only to remember soon afterward that it was a bunch of huckleberry. I had gone to the huckleberry patch before to gather a handful of soil in the hope of transferring some beneficial microbes into the soil around our huckleberry at home. It might have worked too well, come to think of it. Several branches broke under the strain of all the berries we had last year.

When I reached the huckleberries I realized I'd somehow missed the two hazels I had in mind. It wasn't really raining at the time, so I decided to make a few compositions of little scenes in the immediate area. On my way back to the car I found both hazels and collected a little pollen to dust on the flowers of my backyard hazel.

Creekbed Edged with Chain Fern and Hucklberry

Mosses Loving the Rain

Corkscrew Tree

Polypody Ferns

Gentle Cascade with Mossy Rocks

Newt on the Scoot

Fox on the Cam

Recent Tam Cam Clips

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Grab Bag

 

A Gathering of Clouds

Rainy days have thrown me off my usual schedule of urban hikes, but I finally caught up with two neglected routes yesterday and today. 

The bad news yesterday was finding a familiar yucca plant near Hawk Hill that appeared to have been killed by the recent strong winds. (A large pot of oaks in my own yard also got knocked over, but the oaks survived.) I've been gathering a few of the yucca's fallen fruits each time I've hiked past it, then tossing the fruits into a south-facing patch of weeds farther along my route. 

The good news today was finding San Francisco wallflower (Erysimum franciscanum) blooming on the edge of the Oak Woodland in Golden Gate Park.

Tomorrow or the next day I'm planning to drive up to Mt. Tam (doesn't look like very good cycling weather) to hopefully collect some pollen from a hazel or two. I just noticed the female flowers on my backyard hazel are open and ready for business.

Coco the cat has been doing well. We never had to take her to the vet for the first seven years she started hanging around our place, but we've run up more than $12,000 in vet bills in just the last year, mostly on a recent emergency care visit where they kept her for two nights. (When you walk in the door, you hear the chime of a cash register going "ka-ching!") We've been giving Coco subcutaneous fluids every other night at home (and will soon switch to once a week), and we also bought her some prescription cat food which she refuses to eat. I figure with whatever time she has left, she ought to be able to eat her favorite foods, and I'm always relieved when she doesn't flinch as I jab her with the needle for the fluids.

Unrelated to Coco's appearance in our lives I also went "flexitarian" around the same time, so it's been about seven years since I switched to a plant-based diet (partly after learning that my favorite cold-cuts were likely carcinogenic). They say more than half the people my age are taking four or more prescription drugs, but so far I'm not taking any, and I plans to eats me spinach and keep it that way.

Head in the Clouds

The yucca that toppled in the recent strong winds.

The yucca fruits.

One of Today's Roadside Attractions

San Francisco Wallflower in Golden Gate Park

Coco McFuzzy

Salad of spinach, butter lettuce, sliced apple, cherry tomato, corn, green and kalamata olives, and Violife feta.

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