Sonora Pass

 

View from St. Mary's Pass (August 2022)

It seems overly romantic now that I'm back in the city--that almost religious sense of release I felt in the High Sierra. The word "moksha" came to mind as I took in the rocky landscape with its sparse meadows, steep ochre cliffs, and river of wind-blown clouds crossing a deep blue sky. I had been making photographs here and there while my wife painted a landscape over the course of a couple of hours. The passing clouds, which occasionally spilled a dash of rain, constantly changed the landscape from bright to dark and every shade in between, first over here, then over there. I can't imagine trying to paint a landscape that refuses to sit still. 

Sometimes we are the ones who have to sit still while the landscape moves into position. Such was the case for me after I hiked north up the St. Mary's Pass Trail to photograph the mountains on the south side of the valley. I'd shot a panorama from up there on August 11, 2010 (a 36x48 print hangs on our bathroom wall), and wanted to capture the scene  again these dozen years later. Since I was just recently in the area of Sonora Pass, I wasn't surprised to see so little snow compared with back then, but what is interesting is that less than half the amount of snow fell in the 2009-2010 snow year as it did this last year. More snow fell this year, but it melted faster.

When I reached my destination, the whole mountain range that I'd planned to photograph was in deep shade. That would definitely not do for a comparison since my 2010 shot was made under a virtually cloudless sky. It wouldn't even even do as a shot worth hiking up there for. The short but steep hike to get into position only took about an hour, but I had to wait another hour for the mountains to come out of the shade. I'd hiked up in shorts and t-shirt and was glad I'd brought a windbreaker.

I didn't mind the wait at all. A friend took me up St. Mary's Pass for the first time in the late 1980s, and I first went back with my camera in '91. The landscape holds good memories of both those early trips. At first I didn't see any of my favorite plants from up there, Astragalus whitneyi, a locoweed whose fruits, when I first saw them, were a joy and marvel to behold. When I finally spotted a couple of the plants it was like running into an old friend.

One thing I noticed from my panoramic vantage point was a bright yellow meadow near the base of the mountains. The next day I hiked over to check it out and discovered that the source of the color wasn't the wildflowers I'd expected, but a mass of corn lilies and other plants that had already dried out. Upon closer look I was happy to see that the central part of the meadow was still blooming with ball-shaped inflorescences of purple and magenta onion flowers which were being visited by numerous honey bees and by one strikingly odd white moth-like insect about half the size of a crane fly (which iNaturalist shows to be a plume moth).

As I moved around in the meadow I came across a trail of footprints that were much too big to have been made by deer, and too incongruous to have been made by a human. It looked  like I'd stumbled onto a bear trail, and the trail led into a nearby willow thicket. A nice little chill of fear raised the hairs on the back of my neck, and I hoped the bear trail was old. I imagined what I'd do if a bear appeared either in the nearby willows or farther away on the edge of the meadow. I would have no chance of finding safety by running since there was nowhere to go. I figured I'd have to stand my ground and hope that I could talk my way safely out of the meadow, with sincere apologies for the intrusion. Happily, I didn't have to do that. In fact, despite being in the middle of a meadow, I was bothered, and only briefly, by just one little mosquito!

View from St. Mary's Pass (August 2010)

View Along St. Mary's Pass Trail

Wide Angle View from the Pass

Whitney's Locoweed

Arnica, Sonora Peak, and Small Snow Patch (August 2022)

Snow Patch Panorama (August 2010)

Patch of Fleabane

Onion Meadow in the Sun

Onion Meadow in the Shade

Plume Moth Nectaring in the Onions

View from the Onion Meadow

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Checking the Trap

 

Prowling Bobcat
(Video Frame Capture)

I hadn't checked my camera trap in a while, so the day after I got back from visiting family in Chicago I packed up my saddlebags and biked across Golden Gate Park and the Presidio, over the Golden Gate Bridge and through Sausalito, then climbed up Panoramic Highway until I finally emerged from the fog and reached clear skies a short ways before the Bootjack Campground. As always, it was a beautiful day to be on the mountain.

After locking my bike to an oak tree I set out toward the trap at a very relaxed pace in the hope of finding interesting insects or reptiles to photograph. A fence lizard drew my attention with its brilliant colors, as if it had recently shed its old dull skin, and up around a bend in the trail I encountered a small meadow with countless stalks of yampah swaying in the breeze. Their tiny white flowers were being visited by many buzzing insects, the most prominent of which, to my eyes, were the black-footed drone flies (identified thanks to the brilliance of iNaturalist).

On the far side of the yampah meadow I stopped to try to spot the white-breasted nuthatches that I could hear foraging among the cones up high in the Douglas fir trees. Once they became used to my presence, a couple of goldfinches fluttered onto some nearby thistles to gather seeds, perturbing an Anna's hummingbird that was gathering nectar from the remaining blossoms. A Wilson's warbler made a brief appearance, and a pacific slope flycatcher emerged from the woods to gaze out over the edge of the meadow. I suspect the little flycatcher (I thought it was a ruby-crowned kinglet at first) couldn't concentrate on hunting with a pesky human so close by, and it soon disappeared back into the woods. 

Fir Forest in the Fog

Magic on the Mountain

Showing Off Its Colors

Black-Footed Drone Fly on Yampah Blossoms

Eristalis hirta Feeding on Perideridia kelloggii

Goldfinch With Seed Halo

Goldfinches Gathering Thistle Seeds

Wilson's Warbler

Pacific Slope Flycatcher

Empidonax difficilis

Bobcat Passing Through

Gray Fox at the Water Hole

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Head in the Clouds

 

Above the Sierra Nevada

One of the things I enjoy about flying is staring out the window to watch the clouds go by, and I always try to get a window seat. When I look around to see if anyone else is entranced by the view out the window, it seems the only other cloud-appreciators are small children. I do confess a childlike sense of awe at being privileged to fly above the clouds, a place people once considered the exclusive domain of the gods. 

The clouds in the image above were boiling up over the Sierra Nevada when I returned to San Francisco the other day. Below, Mt. Diablo stands in relief on a hazy, corduroy landscape.

Diablo Landscape

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