Mystical Mt. Tamalpais

 

About fifteen years ago I got on a haiku kick and wrote a bunch of little poems to go with some photos I'd shot on Mt. Tam. I made a little 7x7 booklet with a print-on-demand service and only made a few copies. A few of the photo-haikus were printed in Marin Magazine back in 2011, and although I thought I'd kept at least one of the booklets around, I can't find one at the moment. 

On a side note, I was surprised the other day to discover that the Mt. Tamalpais Flickr group has basically gone defunct. I was kind of sad about it because the mountain provided so much inspiration for me for many years. I think the inspiration has just taken a different route for folks nowadays, with people posting tons of stuff to iNaturalist instead.

Anyway, here's the whole set of haiku photos.

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A Porpoiseful Day

 

For Expert Swimmers Only

For just a minute there, I was pretty sure I'd seen the Sasquatch of the Sea. As I rolled out onto the back deck of the Cliff House I caught this huge splash out of the corner of my eye. Whoa! What was that? I figured it must have been a sea lion, so I got my camera out and started glassing the area, and before I could say "Coral Key Park and Marine Reserve," I saw a porpoise catching a wave. Or, more properly, a dolphin, just like Flipper.

It's actually pretty hard for me to tell for certain by the photos if they are dolphins rather than porpoises, but the fins look more dolphin-like to my uneducated eye. Anyway, that was my excitement for the day. There were maybe two or three guys on surfboards out there, but I only saw one guy actually catch a wave, and he was way off in the distance. I pedaled out to Noriega Street to see if he or anyone else was crazy enough to still be out there but came up empty.

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Year of the Hermit

 

Hermit Thrush Near Elk Glen Lake

My wife told me that 2025 is the Year of the Hermit in Tarot. There were lots of hermit thrush calls accompanying me through Golden Gate Park yesterday, so it might be going to their head. Get a whole year named after you, it can happen.

New Year's Day Sunrise

There's a point on my walk where, if it's clear enough, the Farallon Islands can be seen between two houses.

I finally remembered to bring a wax paper bag to collect one of the Amanita muscaria mushrooms from that yard on Noriega Street. It was still in perfect shape by the time I got it home, so I just planted it out back near our huckleberry bush.

Western Bluebird on Sunset Parkway

I believe this one is a female. She didn't get to forage in peace for very long before the male swooped down and gave chase.

It was fun to see some wood-rotting mushrooms that aren't honey mushrooms. I don't know if honey mushrooms are ubiquitous in the park every year, but they are just about everywhere this year.

Here's another one growing out of wood.

I felt too lazy to collect the mushrooms to try to ID them, and I only had one spare wax paper bag anyway.

These are probably a Stropharia sp., or maybe Leratiomyces percevalii.

This pair of red-shouldered hawks was hanging out above a fairly birdy area next to Mallard Lake.

Hermit Thrush Being A Diva

Brown Creeper Near Elk Glen Lake

The creeper was definitely messing with me, sometimes coming so close that I couldn't get my lens dialed in before it got away, and other times creeping behind tangles of branches.

I was just giving up on the creepers and was about to head home when this great egret swooped in.

Finding little of interest in the lake, it flew onto a small trail next to the lake, where I could see a family with a dog heading its way, and then a bicycle rider. The rider finally decided to go for it, and the egret hardly seemed to care.

The egret played it cool until this little girl tried to get a little too close for comfort.

It flew away but didn't go far, landing in the grass nearby. I watched it apparently hunting for a little while, wondering if great egrets hunt gophers the way great blue herons do, but I was in shorts and needed to get moving to warm up before it made any strikes.

The water was relatively glassy yesterday, with a nice little swell.

Ocean Beach was surprisingly busy on New Year's Day. It almost looked like a Memorial Day crowd out there. Even the Giant Camera was open.

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New Year's Party

 

Looking Forward To A Great New Year

Lucky for me, I decided not to hike Mt. Tam in shorts on Monday. Cold! I'd hiked from Rock Spring half-way to Upper Cataract Falls before I finally started to warm up. 

It's been so long since I took a hike up there that I felt a mix of familiarity and surprise. It looked a little different due to continued tree-thinning, as well as storm-related changes such as toppled trees and flood-scoured stream edges. Even the airplane engine that's been in the creek for decades seemed to have become re-buried beneath fallen trees. Near that same spot, a log that had spanned the creek and once sported a beautiful fruiting of lion's mane (photographed in this post) had been smashed by a falling tree and/or washed out.

The fetid adder's tongues (featured in the current issue of Bay Nature Magazine) were not yet showing any sprouts near the wooden bridge that links the Cataract Trail with the little Ray Murphy Trail. The "meadow" where they like to come up has also become a lot more cluttered with forest debris. One odd bit of trail maintenance near the bridge was the addition of three large sections of a cut-up Douglas fir that had been rested against the pull of gravity on fairly small rocks. I would not want to be downhill of one of those logs if it broke loose.

The only camera I brought on the hike was the Lumix FZ80D. I'd been looking forward to shooting along Cataract Creek to see if I could get hand-held exposures long enough to soften the look of the moving water. Again, the camera surprised me in a good way. After hiking to the falls I doubled back to pick up the Mickey O'Brien Trail to Barth's Retreat, then looped back via the Simmons Trail. 

Although it was a pleasure to be carrying just one little camera and no tripod, I admit to feeling a little bit of guilt for trading the convenience of a point-and-shoot over the quality of a full-frame camera. 

The pix in this post are from Tuesday morning. There was a flock of sanderlings feeding between two groups of fishers. I glanced up and down the coast and, seeing no dog-walkers closing in, walked down to photograph the birds. I was able to sit and observe them for several minutes, and at one point a long-billed curlew dropped in. The curlew never got comfortable with me though and soon flew south. A minute or two later, a few dog-walkers showed up and let their dogs chase off the wildlife.

The Cliff House yellow-rumper is still there (but I haven't seen the Say's phoebe at Balboa Natural Area in a while).

Sanderlings at Ocean Beach

Mt. Shasta Sunrise on New Year's Eve

New Year's Day Sunrise from Golden Gate Heights

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