TamCam (Set 2)

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I finally picked a productive spot after two consecutive weeks of duds.

It must have been just dark enough here in the woods to make the camera fire in infrared mode. I wonder if this is the same coyote caught in the previous frame. It's the same day, Sunday, about two hours later.

I got nothing but a squirrel's tail in Set 1, so it was nice to get the whole critter this time. We take gray squirrels for granted, but they are not acclimated to people on Mt. Tam and are not easy to see, much less photograph.

Trail cams are built for hunters, not photographers. All a hunter wants to know is whether game is plentiful and at what time of day it passed by. Even the most basic point-n-shoot can take a better picture, though.

Sorta think this is the same coyote again.

Definitely a different buck, though.

And here's a different coyote, a bit younger than the other one. This is close enough to my first set that this could be the same young coyote I caught over there by the bathtub. This coyote and one doe deer (which I'm not bothering to post) were the only two animals that used the main trail. Several pairs of human hikers passed through, all of whom used the main trail. I believe that white stick of plant material in the foreground set off quite a few empty frames when the wind blew. I've got to be more careful about noticing such things when I set up the camera.

This is a shot of me being captured by the camera this morning. Although this is not a regular, maintained trail, it is obviously a people trail; however, I was still surprised to see that so many people used it. I had hikers on Saturday, Sunday, Monday and Wednesday! Thankfully I placed the camera next to the animal trail, so none of the passing hikers noticed it. A much better spot was available nearby, but it would have been spotted by hikers for sure. I'd also considered putting it where a tree had fallen across the trail, but it would have been right out in the open. I doubt an animal jumping over the log would have been caught by the camera anyway.

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Tam's Toes

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If you go to Muir Woods really early -- I mean really early -- you can always beat the crowds, even on a weekend. But government shutdowns? Those you can't beat. 

Purely out of historical interest I headed down to Muir Woods to photograph the closure sign, which reads, "Because of the federal government shutdown, this National Park Service facility is closed." Nothing snarky, though the temptation must have been fierce. Just the sad fact, black ink on white paper. Later on I would see a tour bus at Rock Spring for the first time ever. French-speaking people milled around outside the bus: "Ou sont les frickin' redwoods?" Some of them visited the portable toilets. Somewhere in the distance, a cabal of Republicans were high-fiving each other for screwing a busload of French people out of a trip to Muir Woods.

I'd been thinking about getting over to the coastal feet of Mt. Tam since I hadn't been out that way in a long time. The wind was still blowing pretty hard from the east, and I had to use the Jeep as a windbreak to make this 30-second exposure along the Shoreline Highway north of the Muir Beach Overlook.

I didn't have anyplace in mind to shoot from, so I stopped at a few different pull-outs and decided this one would do.

This is another view from the same pull-out. That spit of land in the distance is Bolinas. When the sun finally rose, it touched the very tip of that spit and worked its way inland.

I have never stayed at the Steep Ravine Environmental Campground. It looked pretty quiet down there, but I see that they are closed this month for maintenance. I've heard it's not easy to get reservations on the spur of the moment, but one of these days I'm going to have to make a plan and spend a couple of days there.

When the original Forty-Niners saw this stretch of coast, there wasn't a pampas grass in sight. It was introduced in Santa Barbara in 1848 and has since spread throughout the state. 

Dawn at Stinson Beach.

I swung a right just before Stinson Beach and drove up toward Pantoll, reacquainting myself with this stretch of road. Along the way I spotted this fern-filled canyon and had to stop to check it out. I guess I made some noise clambering up the hill; I could hear a deer loudly chuffing in indignation from farther up the canyon.

Heading up to Rock Spring I was passed by several Ferraris whenever I stopped at a pull-out. They appeared to be gathering for a group photo. I had moved on by the time they left, but you couldn't miss hearing them go, as they all revved their engines for maybe half a minute before they went.

On my way to check out the trail camera I stopped to photograph some ripe peppernuts (bay laurel).

The coast live oak acorns were still green.

I haven't had much luck with the trail camera since that first week. I had one week with no animals at all -- but lots of pictures of wind-blown trees -- and a second week with just a single deer. It's amazing to realize that a game trail can go completely unused for a whole week. I moved the camera to a pretty good trail for the coming week, but I'm thinking about moving it back over to the west side of Bolinas Ridge next time. There's lots of coyote and bobcat scat along the trails, but it's all old. Maybe the animals don't use that area much this time of year.

I spotted some wild turkeys and American goldfinches on my way back from setting up the camera.

They need a dexterous beak to separate the kernel from the fluff.

The meadowlarks are back!

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Nature's Chaos

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"The images . . . are mostly details of nature which emphasize how nature's apparent disorder can be reduced to aesthetically stimulating fragments."

--Eliot Porter, Nature's Chaos, 1990

California Buckeye Along Redwood Creek

I finally found an Eliot Porter book that at least comes close to doing justice to his photographs (the public library had a first edition). It's called Nature's Chaos (NY Times review) and features Porter's photography accompanied by the writing of James Gleick, author of Chaos: Making a New Science (1987). Porter had been fascinated by Gleick's book and was inspired to spend the last days of his life (he died in 1990) on one last photography project.

I can see how Porter, who had a scientific bent (he began his career as a biochemical researcher at Harvard University), took such an interest in Gleick's book. I remember being excited about the book myself when it came out. 

Chaos seems like such an unlikely subject for a photographer. We tend to look for something simple and graphic, something with a clear subject that grabs our attention and stands apart from its background. Indeed, that's the key to our usual aesthetic in nature photography. What I loved about Nature's Chaos was Porter's genius for creating beautiful compositions from a chaotic scene. Much of his success for me is due the details so clearly visible in the images captured with his large format camera. With the details rendered so clearly, my eyes comfortably roam over the larger compositional elements -- the lines and shapes -- and gradually transition into the finest surrounding textural details.

Porter didn't make new photographs to illustrate the book. He pulled the images from his collection after being inspired by the "new science." As I was looking through the Mt. Tam images in my "October" folder I came across the photo above of the California buckeye with dozens of large nuts dangling from a now-leafless tree. Although I shot that image in October 2004, I still remember being charmed by the scene and thinking it was going to be impossible to photograph. I shot a frame anyway.

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September Favorites

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I'm convinced that my unabashed appreciation of Bay Area wildness is based on my direct experience of such highly touted places as Alaska, Hawaii, the Galapagos Islands, the polar regions, and Tibet. Only after having photographed all seven continents and both poles do I know with certitude how favorably my home wildlands compare.

--Galen Rowell, Inner Game of Outdoor Photography

Jimson Weed

Tanoak

Bobcat Surprise

Insect Galls on Wild Rose

Jimson Weed Trumpet

Monarch & Milkweed

First Light

Coast Look-Out

Sargent Cypress

Spider Feast

Wind-Brushed Grass

Mossy Bay Laurel

Canyon Live Oak

California Fuchsia

Variegated Meadowhawk

Rifle Camp Meadow

Big-Leaf Maple

Pileated Woodpecker

Mating Dragonflies

Pacific Treefrog

Fall Colors at September's End

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Things In Trees

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With Pam just coming off a bout of the flu and my having just come down with some kind of crazy allergy (or whatever's going on that involves lots of nose-blowing and a keen desire to get back in bed), we headed up to Mt. Tam with a loose plan to hike out to Potrero Meadow.

Not feeling up to it by the time we got to Rock Spring, though, we decided to just mosey around.

Our mosey took us out along Bolinas Ridge.

For a hike that's really just an excuse to find a great viewpoint, you can't beat Bolinas Ridge. Although there was a line of smoke across the horizon (perhaps from the Hay Kingdom fire out near Winters), there wasn't a lick of fog and we had a clear view out to Chimney Rock at Pt. Reyes as well as the Farallon Islands.

This was the first of three unusual items we found in trees along our route. This is some sort of webbing that's tied into some trees to provide a platform. Not knowing its provenance, I did not climb into it. It's high enough off the ground that you would not want to fall through an unfortunate spot of dry rot.

As we continued our mosey, Pam discovered this Buddhist statue installed on a bay laurel. I believe it's a statue of Avalokiteshvara, bodhisattva of compassion, and I might hazard a guess that it was installed only recently, perhaps on last week's equinoctial Circumambulation of Mt. Tam....

Finally, moseying about on a different patch of the mountain, but still on Bolinas Ridge, I discovered the third unusual item in a tree -- someone's nicely camo'd trail camera! Like the bodhisattva, the camera was bolted in place, obviously set up for a long-term stint. We found raccoon tracks in some nearby mud (what are 'coons doing way up here?!), but my imagination was piqued: has this camera ever trapped a mountain lion?

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