Thursday, August 11, 2022

Sonora Pass II

 

Pass Panorama
(click to view larger)

I've been driving my Mazda 3 for eight years now and still have less than 45,000 miles on it, and yet I've thought about replacing it for a vehicle with higher ground clearance and 4WD. I figured places I would want to go would be off-limits to me otherwise, places like the St. Mary's Pass trailhead parking area. But with a little recon I was able to chart a route from the paved highway through the rutted, rocky entrance. I was proud to park my little Mazda next to higher-clearance pick-up trucks and SUVs, and even a brand new Jeep Wrangler that still had its temporary license plate. I even watched a guy in a Lexus SUV with plenty of clearance start to pull into the parking area, only to turn back and park across the street.

It reminded me of how I'd been sure I couldn't drive the Mazda up to the Patriarch Grove at the Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest because I remembered how rocky the last section of it was. But by picking my routes and driving slowly, I was able to make it. 

After all the trucks and SUVs left, my car was alone in the parking area for the night. The next morning we heard car doors being shut and went to investigate. A guy driving a Honda Fit had made it through.

I know there are places I went with my Jeep Cherokee and Ford Ranger that I wouldn't try with the Mazda, but they are not necessarily places I need to re-visit, especially given all the excellent places I can reach in a regular car. 

The one fairly new purchase I made to make camping more appealing to my old bones was a very large tent, a North Face Wawona 6. I don't use this when I camp by myself, mind you, but it's amazing to have when my wife is with me. It's actually bigger than some campsites we've stayed at, so we do have to keep that in mind. The vestibule alone is as big as many 2-person tents. But inside the main tent we have a queen-sized air mattress, with lots of room left over along the sides and in the front, and at six feet tall, I can stand up in it.

All too soon, our stay to Sonora Pass was over; we packed up the tent, crawled the Mazda out through the rocks and ruts, and were soon enjoying a beautiful drive home through the mountains, with the only concerning view being all the dead trees. They dotted the forest here and there, and we could only wonder if eventually there will be vast swathes of them. We were delayed a little due to road work on CA-108, but it was well worth a minor inconvenience to be able to enjoy all the excellent road work that had already been done.

The pleasing part of the drive usually takes a pause right around Sonora as traffic becomes an issue again, and once we've refueled in Oakdale we usually hunker down to cross the valley as quickly as possible. But this time, since we were recently in Wisconsin and had gotten some excellent farm-fresh corn on the cob, we stopped at a farm stand to get some of our own California golden nuggets. We passed a couple of stands along CA-120 before we saw one that advertised corn, called Baba Bazaar, where we loaded up. In addition to the fresh fruit, nuts and veggies we got, they also had numerous flavors of corn nuts which I used to love, plus freaky "garlic chips" which are whole cloves of garlic with a brilliant soft crunch and a surprisingly mild flavor. As we packed our loot in the cooler my wife asked me if I had seen the pies. Fortunately, I had not. But next time....


The Other Side of the Pass


Loco Fruit



Minty Fresh Landscape


Lupines Catching the Light


Painting in the Open


Bouquet of Faded Skyrocket


Fireweed on Edge of Onion Meadow


Rein Orchid in the Onion Meadow


The Orange Beast


Roadside Attractions


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Wednesday, August 10, 2022

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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Saturday, August 6, 2022

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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Thursday, August 4, 2022

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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Saturday, July 30, 2022

Backyard Pipevine

 

Backyard Dutchman's Pipe
(Aristolochia californica)

A couple of years ago I walked down to Strybing Arboretum and found someone who could sell me a pipevine plant. The clerk at the little store near the entrance sent me to the nursery greenhouses down by the California garden. I snooped around until I found a gardener who offered to see if they had one they could sell me, and she soon came back out with a fragile little sprig. For the price of sixteen bucks, quite a bit more than the typical potted plants I get at Sloat Garden Center, I had another California native to plant out back. It joined a hazelnut and a huckleberry that I planted more than ten years ago.

The little sprig looked so fragile that I didn't let myself get too attached to it. But it was still alive the following season, and I kept coddling it, giving it a little extra water and pulling out any nearby weeds or other competition. 

One day I happened to look down from the stoop above the garden and saw the cat sleeping right next to it, oblivious. I placed a ring of thin sticks around the base of the plant to make sure she didn't accidentally crush it. It has so far survived the cat, as well as visiting skunks, squirrels, raccoons, rats, slugs, and gophers. It's a winter-deciduous plant, and after its first growing season it soon looked even more pitiful than when I first planted it, so I was relieved to see new growth on it after its first winter.

At the end of January this year it flowered for the first time. Just one flower. Our yard gets very little direct sunlight (even when it's not foggy), so growth is unsurprisingly slow. Because it had already bloomed earlier this year, I was cheerfully surprised this week to see that it had bloomed yet again, and again with just one flower. 

And such a cool flower it is. According to the California Native Plant Society, "[t]he flowers have an unpleasant odor which is attractive to tiny carrion-feeding insects. The insects crawl into the convoluted flowers and often become stuck and disoriented for some time, picking up pollen as they wander. Most eventually escape; the plant is not insectivorous as was once thought."

I can't detect any odor at all from the lone flower I have, and looking down into the pipe reveals no fungus gnats or other critters, carrion-feeding or otherwise. When I trained my macro lens on the flower I did see a spider tiny enough to hide behind a grain of rice scuttle up the flower stalk. Maybe it is a hunter of other tiny visitors.

My neighbor, a former gardener at Golden Gate Park who at the age of 95 still does vigorous gardening by volunteering with the Recreation and Parks Department, has much more mature pipevine plants in his back yard. Much of his pipevine climbs the oak tree he planted from an acorn back around the time my wife was born, and his plants have hosted numerous pipevine swallowtail caterpillars (which I believe he got from the arboretum, if I recall right). I hope one day my plant becomes robust enough to be a host as well, and perhaps to provide a little genetic diversity should any pollinators visit the flowers in both our yards.


Hanging by a Thread


Phone Snap, Jan. 30, 2022

[UPDATE]
Phone Snap, Jan. 19, 2023


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Friday, July 29, 2022

Summer Morning

 

Summer on Cataract Creek

Mt. Tam's Cataract Creek, so named for its wet season splendor below Laurel Dell, is just a series of quiet pools separated by stretches of dry stones in the summer. I was on the trail at 7 a.m. the other day, feeling a little guilty for driving all the way up there on a bit of a wild goose chase, but also feeling very fortunate to be out in nature on a beautiful morning.

A couple of scenes I'd glimpsed in passing during a recent hike with my wife had stuck with me, so I thought they might be worth a closer look with the D800. One was a bloom of farewell-to-spring, and the other was this little fern-fringed section of the creek. Both spots were close together and only about a half-mile from Rock Spring. Despite the lack of novelty in these very familiar surroundings, I somehow spent a couple of hours exploring photo opportunities, about the same amount of time my wife and I had spent hiking our six-and-a-half mile loop a few days before.

The farewell-to-spring blossoms were still closed when I arrived, but the sun soon rose above the forest and opened them up. Around the same time the sun was opening them up, I noticed that the blossoms still in the shade were also opening up. I wondered if they were responding to some sort of circadian rhythm, or maybe temperature or a slight increase in brightness. Or maybe even the wood-wide-web: imagine the plants in the sunlight somehow communicating the new day's arrival to all the others nearby.


Fern & Pool


Morning Meadow #1


Morning Meadow #2


Flames of Grass


Arcs of Sedge & Spears of Mugwort


Farewell-to-Spring #1


Farewell-to-Spring #2


Farewell-to-Spring #3


Rosinweed


Fresh Green Cones of Douglas Fir


Close-up of Cone Scales & Rat Tails

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