Need a break from your day? Come walk with me through the magical redwoods of Henry Cowell State Park, near Santa Cruz in California…
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California
Scenes from California (Part 2)
Here’s part two of my late 2021 travels through my native state, wherein I travel south and then east on my way back to the southwestern deserts of Arizona and New Mexico. Warmer weather, cheaper gas, what’s not to like about that plan?!
Related link: Scenes from California (Part 1)
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Scenes from California (Part 1)
48 days and 1300 towing miles, from late November to the first week of January. I went from the Salton Sea to Santa Cruz, back down to the Inland Empire, and ended up in two new desert spots in the the southeastern part of the state. What did I get for all that traveling? A lot of photos, actually, so I’ve got two blog posts to cover it all. Here’s part 1…
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Bombay Beach, or Farewell to 2021
One of the oddest places in California (and that is saying a lot…) has to be Bombay Beach. So it feels fitting to end the weird year of 2021 with this post. Maybe we’re all living in different versions of Bombay Beach in a matrix run by robot overlords or we’re all just characters in a video game (go see Free Guy if you haven’t yet, it’s hilarious)…
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Sending 2021 into the Sunset
I had one absolutely gorgeous sunset while I was in California, so I’m using the end of the year as an excuse to publish the four shots I made as a series. As we approach the end of a difficult year for so many of us, enjoy the beauty of a Salton Sea sunset for a few minutes.
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Desert Days: Photo Walking
I was having a down day, which happens, even in a really amazing place like Death Valley. Everything was getting on my nerves: generators firing up at 7:01AM, noisy campers the night before, people walking through my site on the way to the bathroom… it was just one of those days.
I decided to go for a drive and grabbed my Sony A7 on the way out the door. I thought maybe today was the day to hike Golden Canyon, but as I drove by it, I could see the parking lot was so full there was no way my car would fit in, and I wouldn’t want to hike a crowded trail anyways. I went about a mile more and saw this out my window…
It looked like the hike I needed: a long walk with no one near and not much to see, so I could think out loud and maybe pull myself out of this funk. I parked on the side of the road, checked the camera had battery and memory card, and started walking.
It took me about five minutes to actually notice what I was walking through instead of what I was walking towards. This dried out little bush caught my eye and I felt like I had to take its picture.
I ended up sitting in the dirt, lowering my camera and getting as close to level with the ground as I could to get the tree in the foreground in focus, framed by the Panamint range of mountains in the background. I don’t know how long I spent, maybe 10 minutes, but it sparked something in me and I started looking for more bushes.
This one is looking the other way, toward the mountains I had first picked out as my destination. Again, I had to get down in the dirt for the shot, but I didn’t mind at all. I was having fun and lost all track of time.
I kept walking, looking down at the ground more than I was looking out at my destination. I had thought I was looking for geology photos but the keepers from this photo walk turned out to be the bushes.
Isn’t that the way sometimes? You think you know what you want, but then you actually needed something else. My hike turned into a photo walk and it made me feel so good to be creative and attentive that my whole day turned around.
And just to give a sense of scale to the hike, that little dot at the end of the red arrow in the photo below is my car. It was about 30 minutes of serious walking from where I took this photo to where my car was parked. Death Valley is all about scale; feeling so small in such a vast space.
What draws us into the desert is the search for something intimate in the remote.
Edward Abbey
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Desert Days: Afternoon Hike
The desert is one of those places you have to slow way down to experience. I pity the people just passing through, either on a day trip or a one-night camping stop on their way to somewhere else. You have to let the desert in to your soul slowly. Sit and listen to the silence and you’ll start to hear the faint birdsong, the buzz of insects in the bushes, the wind through the branches of the cottonwoods.
One of the best ways to get to know the desert is to walk through it. So let’s go on a hike on part of the Ring Trail in Mojave National Preserve. The trail starts at the parking lot of the Hole in the Wall Visitor Center, deep into the eastern side of this wonderful land managed by the National Park Service.
Look up as you walk along the sandy trail. These rocks are the remnants of a volcanic eruption about 18.5 million years ago. A groundswell of ash and rock fragments blew out along the ground for more than 200 square miles, cooking everything in its path. The ash and rock welded together as they cooled and entombed remains of birds, plants, and mammals.
Over time, weathering from wind and rain have worn away the softer materials, causing rocks to fall and that’s what you see from the top all the way down to the trail.
As we wend our way west, we can see mesas formed by that volcanic tuff and ash. Looking up and out, you start to get a sense of how large that volcanic eruption was.
The trail takes another curve, a bit north, and this canyon comes into view. The trail continues…
…until you’re inside the canyon, looking at walls of rhyolite tuff, with tafoni created by weathering. Tafoni is the geological term for those “holes” you see in the rock, created over lifetimes of wind and rain. Yes, there is enough water in the Mojave Desert to weather rocks like this!
Sometimes the weathering looks very much like modern art. This one below reminds me of a Picasso face.
We turn around to retrace our steps and get home before sunset, but not before enjoying one last few to the south. It’s hard to imagine that one of the most violent volcanic eruptions ever took place here. We stand in silence looking out at the landscape, letting the sun warm our faces before it slides behind those mountains for the night.
May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view.
Edward Abbey
For more information on the volcanic eruption, click on this link.
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52 Frames: B&W Minimalism
Last week’s challenge was two-fold: black and white and minimalism. Hmm. I was in motion a lot of the week, making my way down from the central coast of California to the LA Basin, so I didn’t have a lot of time for searching out excellent locations or unique places.
This shot was from my campsite at Pismo Beach, just after the sun went below the horizon. Venus is in the upper right area, but darned if I can see it in the photo 🙁
When I was still up in the Santa Cruz area, I found this little spiral of kelp on the beach and had fun with it in post-processing.
But, in the end, it was a beach at sunset image that became my entry for the week. Something about the simplicity of water and sky made me pick it over the others, for no particular reason. Sometimes, the weekly selection is random, and that’s how it went this week for me.
The simplest things are often the truest.
Richard Bach
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3 for Thursday: Water View
One of the best things about full-timing in my tiny trailer is that I can go where the water is. Sometimes, like today, this is not all that exciting, because the water is all rain and it’s all the time. But I digress…
Some images don’t make it into a post about a place but I love them anyways and want to share them. This surfer, headed out on a cold but sunny afternoon, is one of those images.
Then there’s the Northern California coast on a stormy day, between the rain showers.
And we’ll end with an image from the one sunny day last week, when the Russian River was beautiful, indeed.
With every drop of water you drink, every breath you take, you’re connected to the sea. No matter where on Earth you live. Most of the oxygen in the atmosphere is generated by the sea.
Sylvia Earle
(Images: Cover photo and surfer, Bandon, Oregon; Blind Beach viewpoint, California; Russian River, Duncans Mills, CA)
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Sunday Serenity: Redwood Cathedral
There are sacred spaces built by humans: the ancient ruins at Stonehenge, the majesty of Chartres Cathedral in France, the great Pyramids of Giza. And then there is Earth’s cathedral: the soaring heights of trees in forest, creating a canopy of shelter lifted skyward by massive limbs and the trunks that support them.
Photographs cannot truly capture what it is like to walk among the California Redwoods, completely alone, the forest silent except for late-season birds and the sound of my footsteps meandering down the narrow dirt trail. I crane my neck up at every bend, the trees soaring so very high above me.
The golden gothic era of stone cathedrals, with their high, vaulted ceilings and expansive windows of stained glass were designed to direct the eyes upward to heaven. In the cathedral of redwoods, the tallest of the trees do the same.
I feel so small walking among them, looking upward to appreciate their true majesty and measure my true size on this planet. May the redwoods survive forever, a sacred space for me, for you, and for generations to come. Namaste, redwoods.
The redwoods, once seen, leave a mark or create a vision that stays with you always. No one has ever successfully painted or photographed a redwood tree. The feeling they produce is not transferable. From them comes silence and awe.
John Steinbeck
Travels with Charley: In Search of America
For millennia the two-million acre redwood ecosystem thrived and sheltered myriad species of life. In the last 150 years, 97 percent of the original redwood forests have been destroyed by timber corporations. … Big business cut-and-run logging operations have instilled a false dichotomy: jobs versus the environment.
Julia Hill
