Meanderings in Blogland

Andi (my girlfriend) and I just got back from a brief trip to the northern Sierra Nevada. There were a few adventures on the trip such as a concert with the English Beat, and a couple of nice hikes; but for the moment I want to tell the tale of our car trouble. It’s a tale of drama, intigue, and absurdist comedy which took place just a few miles from where the Donner Party spent their fateful winter. Fortunately, our story turned out better than the Donners’.

It was supposed to be the last day of our trip. Instead of the faster, but boring freeway route home from Truckee, we were heading north, with the intention of going over Yuba Pass, seeing some new country, and taking a couple of short hikes along the way.

We stopped at Kyburz Flat Interpretive Area, a mile up a gravel road from Highway 89. Kyburz Flat features historical sites from three groups of humans: Native American Washoe, Goldrush-era northern Europeans, and Basque sheepherders. We looked at the Washoe “cupules” carved into the rock, walked through the site of an old stage coach stop, and were starting to drive to the Basque site, when Andi’s 2001 VW Beetle started beeping and flashing the red temperature indicator on the dash.

We stopped, popped the hood, and looked inside. Have you ever looked under the hood of a 21st Century VW? It doesn’t look much like the guts of a traditional car. More like a spaceship, actually. I found what appeared to be coolant storage, and sure enough, it was nearly dry. Before I put water in it for the trip back to civilization, I checked the manual to make sure that that plastic box thing was actually coolant storage. The trace of fluid there was an odd reddish color, and I didn’t want to put water in a tank that was for brake fluid or some such.

Yup, the box thing was for coolant all right. BUT, the manual says to never ever put anything in there except VW’s own special coolant. No plain ol’ water, and especially no Prestone. So we decided to use Andi’s cell phone and call for help. We started with VW’s roadside assistance (the number was in the manual). Cell service was pretty poopy in that corner of the world, so it took a while to communicate. But they reiterated the no water, no Prestone thing, and suggested we call AAA.

For whatever reason, we couldn’t get a strong enough signal to communicate with AAA from that spot. We were walking toward open, higher ground to try again when a Forest Service ranger happened by. He offered to take us to a spot which had better cell network coverage. Andi went to make the call; I stayed with the car and her pets.

An hour drifted by while I walked the dogs, found some grinding holes near the pictograms, and read a little. Andi returned; AAA was on its way. We ate lunch, played frisbee, and waited for the tow truck. And waited. And waited. After a couple of hours, we managed to find a nearby spot where, if she stood at just the right angle, Andi could get a decent cell signal. She called AAA again to see if the tow truck driver had gotten the directions wrong. She said he sounded drunk and/or stupid, and he was just now heading in our direction.

Since by now it’s getting close to 5 o’clock and we have a usable cell signal, we start researching the question of where to tow the car. Can the locals in Truckee handle the problem, or do we need to get towed all the way to the VW dealer in Reno? We track down the service department of the Reno dealership. They say to fill the coolant tank with water and drive it in. Apparently, we don’t need the tow truck after all, and the last few hours have just been a stupid waste of time.

Back to AAA. When we track down the tow truck driver, it turns out he had just cancelled the call. His truck had bald tires,  he was slipping on the gravel, and we’d have to find “commercial” towing. Really fills your heart with confidence in whatever tow truck company AAA uses in Truckee, doesn’t it? Since it turned out we didn’t need the tow anyway, that part was just laughably pathetic, but what if we were really, truly stuck? What kind of towing company does such a lame job of maintaining their vehicles or hires such bozos?

So, we filled the coolant reservoir with water, drove to Reno, they fixed it the next day, grossly overcharged us, and we came home. The whole episode doesn’t feel my heart with warm fuzzy feelings about Volkswagon; and the mountain tow truck that can’t drive on gravel is truly a comedy gem.

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.

This charming fixer upper in Mendocino Village can be yours for only $.5 million!

Due to the recent crash of real estate prices, the price on this beauty has been reduced from $.75 milion.

If real estate prices keep falling by 33% a year, people who actually work for a living will be able to afford to own their own squalid hovels. Eventually. Maybe.

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.

After my days at Palmer’s Camera in Berkeley, I moved to Mendocino and [tried to] make a living as a photographer/custom photo printer. This was in ye olde days of the mid 1990s, and photo printing still involved a wet darkroom. I had pretty much the only custom color darkroom in the area, so I had a viable, if weird, little market niche. Doing my own printing was also an advantage when it came to selling my nature photography.

I enrolled in a desktop publishing class at my friendly neighborhood community college (CRMC, College of the Redwoods, Mendocino Coast). My immediate goal was to learn how to make brochures to promote my little business. Pagemaker led inevitably to PhotoShop, and PhotoShop led in several directions at once, changing my business and my entire life.

Compared to the abomination I’d used at Palmer’s, the Windows 95 machines at CRMC seemed positively sci-fi in their sophistication, at least they did when we were just running Pagemaker. During my second semester at CRMC, we tackled PhotoShop, and the consumer-grade Windows machines proved laughably inadequate. This was version 3 of PhotoShop, without RAM-snarfing features like layers.

After a few weeks of banging our heads into the wall trying to use PhotoShop on machines that crashed every few minutes, our class moved to the graphics lab, where we had more sophisticated computers with a then-whopping 128MB of RAM.  The graphics lab also offered another improvement: it had Macs in addition to Stupid Windows Machines.

It didn’t take me long to switch to the Macs. Not only did they out perform the SWMs, but they were less in demand. Most of the other students had SWMs at home, so they didn’t want to clutter up their brains by learning a different operating system. So I could always get a Mac while others were duking it out over the SWMs.

Digital photo technology was in a weird state at that point in space and time. I didn’t even want a digital camera then. The ones I had used took pictures that were unsharp and toooo contrasty. Furthermore, they had very bad layout of the controls. The shooter had to navigate through dozens of bells and whistles to get to the useful features. Even if I did want one, they were frightfully expensive, and I was financially challenged.

Scanning film images was another option, but film scanners were exotic, expensive, cantankerous contraptions back then. Print scanners were good, but you needed a good print to scan. Since I had my own darkroom, that wasn’t a problem for me. For several years, my photo workflow involved making a 7×10ish print in the darkroom and scanning it.

Once you had a digital image file to work with, adjusting or manipulating it in PhotoShop was easy and fun. While PS has continued to improve since then, it was already fabulous. Its abilities to adjust  brightness, contrast, and color locally or throughout an image were already far beyond anything I could have fantasized about in the wet darkroom.

But, once the image files were adjusted/manipulated, I still had to print them. CRMC had pretty typical inkjet printers for the time. They produced prints which were vibrant, saturated, surreal, and ephemeral. Their hyper-saturation was OK for some graphic design projects, where vibrancy was more important than accuracy, but for landscapes the hyper-fluorescent saturation was unacceptable. But then, the prints only lasted a few months before the colors turned to goo, so they were useless for fine art photography anyway.

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:

After my brief flirtation with a Computer Science major, I plunged headlong into impractical artsy-fartsiness, and wound up with a degree in Dramatic Art. For twenty-some years, I had very little contact with computers. Somehow, technology managed to continue stampeding without me.

I caught a few glimpses of the herd along the way. It wasn’t always pretty. For a couple of years I worked for The Nature Company, when they were a relatively small business with a few stores around the SF Bay Area. Legend has it that the owner met somebody at a party who sold claimed he could painlessly set up a computer system which would track the inventory and ordering for the whole enterprise. We wound up with a woefully inadequate system which was a nightmare for all involved.

I worked in the warehouse, receiving books from the publishers and sending them to the stores. Before the computer, we had a paper-based inventory system which worked pretty well. As the computer system started up (in 1985), we wound up with two separate systems at the same time: the old system, and the computer data sheets. We didn’t get computers or terminals at our work stations, that would have been too expensive. Instead, in addition to a whole new set of paperwork, we had to individually mark each book with the price and a sku number. Since most books came with pre-printed prices, they didn’t need to be marked at all before. That was a lot of extra work. The new computer sheets went to the computer people while the rest of us used the old system.

During my tenure there, I saw no sign that the computer system might possibly ever work. From my perspective, it was just a lot of extra stupid work with no discernable benefit.

Later, I had another experience computerizing a retail store’s inventory system. This was at Palmer’s Camera in Berkeley. This was technically a simpler project—it was only one store—and technology had had another eight years or so to stampede along. This time, the technology sorta kinda worked.

I checked Google, and sure enough, the company that produced the software, The General Store, is still in business. It’s been many years, and TGS has no doubt improved through many versions. I assume/hope the TGS of 1992  bears little or no resemblance to the TGS of 2008.

TGS was the first time I had intimate congress with a database. I was doing all of the receiving and a good chunk of the purchasing for Palmer’s at the time, so I spent an awful lot of time dealing with the new system. We did get it to work well enough that it started to save work time, but it was a struggle. Part of the struggle was with TGS, part of it was with our own budget, and part of it was with technophobic staff members.

One of the TGS problems was that it couldn’t handle some of the complexities of our ordering. There were hundreds of items we got from more than one supplier, often at different prices. There were hundreds of items for which we got case lot discounts when we ordered in even case lots. There were other items for which we got discounts when we ordered more than a certain minimum number. TGS couldn’t handle the variables and never gave reliable wholsale amounts for our orders. If I needed to now, I could create a database system that could handle all of those variables, but it would be a pretty big job.

The basic relational database structure has been around since the late 1960s, and even with several thousand widgets to track, a system like this wouldn’t require all that much computing power. The computers and software of the day should have been able to work better than this—in fact, they could—but we had the econo models of both hard- and software.

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.