Meanderings in Blogland

I really should spend my time more productively…

I’ve caught the youtube bug lately, mostly watching and commenting on ads and news videos relating to the upcoming presidential election. Oh, my goodness there are some incredibly stupid people out there! The comment forums there are such a sewer that I figured anything I type would raise the level of discourse a little. Hey, at least I can spell and punctuate. I doubt I’ve changed anybody’s mind about anything, but all I can do is try.

One particularly irritating theme is taking something Obama says, stripping it from context, and trying to turn it into an outrageous gaffe. The classic is the now hot, but soon-to-be-forgotten, lipstick on a pig statement. Obama was talking about McCain (McSame? McWorse?) trying to position himself as the candidate of change. Obama listed a whole host of ways McCain’s policies are the same as Bush’s, and compared the re-branding to putting lipstick on a pig. An apt metaphor. But, somehow, the rightwingers are shocked, just shocked I tell you, that Obama would say such a crude and sexist thing about Palin, despite the fact that he wasn’t talking about Palin. Since Palin had used the word “lipstick” a week before, all subsequent mentions of lipstick are automatically a reference to her. I guess that’s what passes for “logic” these days.

Was it disgustingly sexist when McCain used the same figure of speech in reference to Hillary Clinton’s health care proposals? No. McCain was a POW. That makes it OK.

Anyway, since I was commenting and stuff, I figured I should type up a profile, and, while I was at it, upload a video. So I posted a montage of my nature photography. Check it out:

Floating Rocks, Living Water video

I’ll be teaching a field photography workshop as part of A Breath of Plein Air II, in Westport, CA on September 27 & 28. Here are a few of my pics from last year’s event. One of our locations was Blue’s Beach, AKA Chadbourne Gulch:

We also walked out to nearby Bruhel Point and watched the waves roll in:

Later, we walked in the hills above Westport, where there is some photogenic debris left over from an old commune:

This year’s event includes workshops in painting, woodwork, wrought iron, and other media besides my photo whorkshop, plus continental breakfast, box lunch, and evening party.

Here’s the text from the event’s official flyer:

An invitation to
“A Breath of Plein Air II”
Westport, California September 27-28, 2008
Westport Village Society and Gallery This! invite you to participate
in the plein air outing of your choice:
Painting with John Hewitt
Oil or Acrylic with Erin Dertner
Watercolor with Carol Deetch
Photography with Garth Hagerman
Saturday activities will include:
Continental breakfast
A six-hour group outing with your preferred level of support,
from companionship to technical instruction
Box lunch
Blacksmithing by Toby Hickman and Barry Kulmann
Evening party with wine, hors d’oeuvres, and music on the
Westport Headlands
Special show of instructors’, students’, and local images
Optional Sunday activities include:
Gala champagne Brunch/lunch
Additional outing as arranged with your instructor
Saturday cost will be $125. To enroll, contact Liza at 964-1749
or e-mail: art at westportca dot org.
Benefits Westport Village Society Community Center Fund.

The fire situation has calmed nicely around Mendocino County. The roads are open, the evacuations have been called off, the fires are contained or out. On the Coast, we hadn’t seen the sun for a week or so, so I thought I’d go inland to Montgomery Woods for an afternoon.
There were several fires near Montgomery Woods, a nearby hot spring resort—Orr Springs—had been evacuated, and the road through the area had been closed. Since the main old growth grove at Montgomery Woods is in a low, damp drainage, it seemed likely that the grove had been spared. When I got there, I found signs saying the park was closed. So, I loaned my camera to my evil twin Skippy and sent him into the main grove. He filed this report.
From the road, there is no sign of fire. As soon as you start up the trail to the grove, though, you encounter a whole burned hillside. More specifically, the understory is burned. The larger trees look OK. (For those of you unfamiliar with the biology of redwood trees, it’s worth noting that they have thick, fire resistant bark.)
In the main Montgomery Grove, some areas are just fine, lush and green and healthy:

In much of the grove, the ground had been burned and ash covered the ground, making it look like it had been snowing:

Some places had oases of lush greenery surrounded by scorched earth:

In a few areas, the devastation is terrible:

Some places were still smoldering:

A few downed logs were glowing red hot:

Through it all, there is still lots of bird life in the grove. I heard a normal amount of sounds from chickadees, wrens, thrushes, etc. I even saw this (I’m pretty sure it’s a) juvenile northern spotted owl:

I’m not sure if this owl was terribly stressed by the fire or not. Did its nest burn? Did it get any barbequed mouse treats from the fire?

Over all, it’s very sad to see the beautiful treasure of Montgomery Woods in such a charred state. The good news is that the big trees are almost all ok, and the understory should recover fairly quickly. It will be interesting to watch the recovery process over the next few years.

Note: This is a rough draft of content for my future Lost Coast website. I’ll do research and stuff later.

California Highway 1 runs along the Pacific Coast from the border with Mexico northward. A few miles north of the tiny town of Westport—roughly 180 miles north of San Francisco—Hwy. 1 suddenly veers inland, intersects with US 101 at the town of Leggett, and ends. Hwy 101 doesn’t hit the coast until near the Humboldt Bay, leaving an 80 mile stretch of the California Coast highway-free. This no-highway zone is the Lost Coast.

From a viewpoint near Juan Creek, just before Hwy. 1 turns inland, you can get a view to the north which explains why the highway builders opted not to continue along the coast: mountains rise abruptly from the ocean two, or even three, thousand feet high. If you look to the south from this point, you’ll see a considerably gentler coast; it’s still fairly rugged, but there’s a flat terrace about a hundred feet above sea level which makes a great place to put a highway. To the north, there’s no sign of terraces, only cliffs, and high cliffs made of crumbly stuff at that.

This photo doesn’t really do justice to the cliffs or the abrupt change of geology, but it’s kinda pretty, so I’ll use it for now:

The Loast Coast is divisible into three regions: in the south, there’s public access through the Sinkyone Widerness State Park; in the central zone the Bureau of Land Management owns most of the land, and administers it as the King Range Natural Conservation Area; the northern section is nearly all privately owned, but there is some public access to beaches near Cape Mendocino.

To a purist, the Lost Coast is not truly wilderness. Europeans have been logging tanoak, douglas fir, and redwood in the region since the late nineteenth century. There are only a few groves remaining of the original forest. There are old mill sites, and even old town sites, scattered throughout the region. Still, the remoteness, the ruggedness, the current land use practices, and the low human population of the area make it feel pretty gosh darned wild. And if you get injured out here, help is a long, long ways away.

There are only two towns of any significance in the Lost Coast region. Shelter Cove is a resort community at the end of a thirty-mile paved—but narrow, steep, and twisty—road from Hwy 101 at Garberville. It can also be reached by air or sea. Petrolia, near the mouth of the Mattole River, is a more traditional town servicing the local farmers and ranchers.

The view from one of the rooms at an inn in Shelter Cove:

For hikers, there are many places to explore in the region. The most popular backpacking trip in the area is a forty-mile beach stretch of the California Coastal Trail, from the mouth of the Mattole to Shelter Cove.

The beach near the mouth of the Mattole:

The other end of the great wilderness beach backpack, Black Sands Beach:

South from the Shelter Cove Road, there’s another excellent stretch of the Coastal Trail, running over Chamise Mountain, down steeply into the Sinkyone at Whale Gulch, and then up and down and up and down through a series of gulches to Usal Campground. There are also plentiful options for day hikes in the region.

Needle Rock in the Sinkyone:

Looking down to Usal Beach from the Coastal Trail:

A couple of years ago, on a camping trip to the Needle Rock area, I was ruminating on my various trips to the Lost Coast region. I realized that it was the twentieth anniversary of my first trip to the area, give or take a week or two. Over the years, I’ve done a fairly thorough job of exploring and photographing the place.

Today, I registered a new domain, lostcoast.info. Eventually, I’ll create a substantial site for that domain, with a trail guide, information about the natural and human history of the area, my photos, user-submitted photos, links to web resources about the area, etc.

In the short term, I’m planning to use this blog to post drafts of content for the long-term project. The discipline of creating regular blog posts should help me actually get this thing done.

Here’s a photo taken from the Coastal Trail looking south (and down) to Usal Beach:

California’s Lost Coast is a fifty-or-so mile stretch of the northern Mendocino and southern Humboldt coast which has no highway near it. It’s a remote and rugged region, and one of my favorite places for hiking, photography, and exploration. While I usually stay home during the major Summer holidaze, this year my girlfriend and I found ourselves at Wailaki Campground, near the Shelter Cove Road.

The drive up was my first trip away from the Mendocino Village-Fort Bragg coastal zone since the fires began. Many of those fires are out or controlled now, so the conditions were not bad. The only place we were close to a recent fire was near the “town” of Rockport. There, a ground fire had burned right next to Highway 1. The larger trees appeared to be unharmed. There were a few fires still burning on nearby hills and the smoke was pretty bad in this area.

Our camp was about ten miles from the Paradise Ridge Fire in southern Humboldt County. That fire appeared to be out, although we did see a helicopter making repeated passes over the site, presumably looking for hot spots.

One local we talked to in the area relayed a tale from the week before of just how bizarre the priorities of our current federal government are. During the height of the fire, with the local volunteer fire department toiling away to protect their homes, in comes the feds. Four hundred feds in a caravan of black vehicles. Were they there to help? Nope. They were there to bust pot farms. Many of the firefighters had to leave the lines to make sure their partners hadn’t gotten busted.

The air was pretty clear during our stay, and the weather was fabulous. While there were quite a few people in our camp, the trails were remarkably free from crowds. In fact, in three days of hiking we saw exactly eight other people on the trails. I did a little, not-so-serious photography on this trip, but wound up getting a few ok shots.

Here’s the Coast Trail through the Smeaton Chase Grove:

Here I am in the same grove (photo by Andi Corsick)

Here’s Momma Elk and Junior at the end of the road near Bear Harbor:

The Smeaton Chase Grove:

From the top of King’s Peak, looking south toward Chmise Mountain:

The ridges north of King’s Peak:

A distant fire in the east, probably the Kettenpom Fire:

Fog creeping up a gulch NW of King’s Peak:

All Hell is breaking loose here in Mendocino County… where to begin?

Well for starters, the weather. We had a very wet January, but from the middle of February on, it’s been frightfully dry. Pretty much all Spring, it’s been dry, windy, chilly, and dry.

Last Friday evening, I noticed some interesting clouds; it looked like we were going to have a nice sunset. I wanted to go out and do some photography, but I had to do some chores a couple of miles inland. As the chores dragged on and on, a strange thing happened: distant, and not-so-distant, rumblings of thunder. We don’t get thunderstorms here very often. On the rare occasion it rumbles we usually get lots of rain with it. But this was different. I usually love thunderstorms, but this was scary. Lotsa thunder and lightning, hardly any rain.

I did manage to get out for some tail-end-of-the-sunset photography. Here’s a shot of the Mendocino Presbyterian Church:

Later on the Mendocino Headlands, I shot a series of frames with different exposure and focus values for this composite:

Ah, peace and tranquility on the Mendocino Headlands!

The next day I started to hear reports of the fires from friends whose houses were near fires, from news reports, overheard conversations, etc. More than a hundred fires in Mendocino County alone, with many, many more in nearby counties. Whole towns with (voluntary) evacuations. So few government resources that many of the fires were burning without crews even trying to slow them down. Local fire departments running out of gas money.

But still, the feds are in the area in force, busting pot farmers. Priorities, people!

It’s almost a week later now, and we’ve got 87 active fires in Mendo County (some fires have merged with other fires, few are out). Even here on the coast, with most of our air blowing straight of the ocean, the Sun is an eerie orange color.

The scariest thing is, it’s only June. It may not rain significantly until October.

I just got back to civilization after a brief camping trip to the Yolla Bolly Middle Eel Widerness and its neighborhood. We were camping with a pop-up tent trailer, a whole new style of camping to me. Hardly anyone drags a trailer up the rugged dirt roads to Yolla Bolly Land; in fact hardly anyone goes there at all. In three days, we say absolutely nobody outside of our group. While that’s mid-week, it’s also early June, the best time, overall, to visit the area. From July to September it’s frightfully hot and dry there. The Fall is the most visited time, as people go there to kill things. In the Winter months, the area is completely inaccessible.

The core of Yolla Bolly Land is a 150,000 acre wilderness; the surrounding area has great opportunities for car camping. One reason so few people visit the area is difficult access. One single-lane paved road approaches the northwest corner of the wilderness; the rest of the place must be accessed via long and bumpy dirt roads.

For this trip, we used the Indian Dick Road, a forty-some-odd mile trek from the town of Covelo, which is a pretty remote little town already. Since it was early June, and the mountains are not as high here as in other California wilderness areas, only the highest part of the Wilderness still had snow. We started encountering patches of snow on the Soldier Ridge Trail at about 6500 feet the Minnie Lake trail and the French Cove trail were very snowy and difficult to follow. The highest summits in the area barely touch 8000 feet. Most of the Wilderness is between 3000 and 5000 feet; in May it’s paradise, in August it’s frightfully hot and dry.

On to the pics:

I used PhotoShop to merge four frames to make this panorama. It was taken from the Soldier Ridge Trail looking southeast.

Shooting Stars, Dodecatheon hendersonii gowing in a rock crevice

Our camp. That’s Castle Peak in the distance

My girlfriend and I have gone for a couple of little trips to Montgomery Woods in recent weeks. Montgomery Woods is a State Preserve on a remote county road between Ukiah and Comptche. It has Mendocino County’s finest stand of old growth redwoods. I got a few decent shots there:

Some flowering dogwood along the stream:

A tiny waterfall feeds a cool pool in a side stream:

A trail by a giant:

Pool with reflections:

I’ve stumbling onto some amusing cases of vandalism on a couple of recent trips. Maybe they say something about the Mendocino/Humboldt culture, I dunno.

It’s not just cannabis keeping locals in an altered state: