Tag Archives: california

New Year’s Day 2025

Posted on by
Reply

I planned to go on a hike today, but that was mid-day. Feeding sheep is first.

Sunrise viewed from the barn. After chores I drove to the newly opened 1500 acre Patwino Worrtla Kodak Dihii open space park managed by Solano Land Trust, outside Fairfield and only about 25 minutes from home. I had never been to this park but had read about the progress made on opening it for the public.

The park is usually open Friday through Monday, but there was a special New Year’s Day docent-led hike. There is good signage throughout the property so you can always figure out what trail you are on. We started at the Welcome Plaza at the bottom of this map. We saw the east half of the property, making it to the loop at the northeast and then back down the Bay Area Ridge Trail. That was just under six miles total.

This is oak woodland. The blue oaks are deciduous so they are bare now. The recent rains have brought the landscape to life with green grass.

That is Mt. Diablo in the distance. That’s the mountain that features in many of my Across the Road photos because those are taken from the property just across Meridian Road where we live. Wikipedia says, “The Mount Diablo Meridian, established in 1851, is a principal meridian extending north and south from its initial point atop Mount Diablo in California at W 121° 54.845. Established under the U.S. Public Land Survey System, it is used to describe lands in most of northern California and all of Nevada.” DavisWiki says “Meridian Road is a north-south road, roughly located between Dixon and Vacaville. The Meridian refers to its location on the principal meridian for NorCal for the US Public Land Survey. If you were to travel due south from the road, you’d hit the peak of Mt. Diablo, a prominent geological landmark.”

The wind turbines along Hwy. 12 on the way to Rio Vista feature in the view to the southeast.

There are live oaks interspersed with the deciduous blue oaks.

These blue oaks are magnificent with and without leaves.

Another view that includes Mt. Diablo. Hopefully I’ll go hiking there one of these days. I was there in 2020 and this is the blog post (on my website) about that.

I will definitely be back here in the spring for wildflowers.

A Birthday Hike

Posted on by
Reply

My birthday was last weekend and I wanted to go hiking. I thought about Mt. Diablo or Pt. Reyes or Mt. Tamalpais, all places that I’d like to explore, but the thought of Bay Area traffic discouraged me. Then I realized that I could take advantage of some open space that is closer to home.

Lynch Canyon is in Solano County just north of the freeway between Fairfield and Vallejo. In the 1980’s the property was purchased by a company who proposed a landfill. Thankfully that was rejected by Solano County voters and the land is now owned by Solano Land Trust.

The land is rolling hills dotted with oak trees. We had the first real rain of the season the previous evening so this may start to green up soon. On the morning of our hike the vegetation was all dry.

The trail we chose headed generally west. I wanted to get to the top of the hills for the view.

My brother, Dave, was with us.

This area could be stunning when there are spring wildflowers. The only plant flowering now was tarweed.

The thistles were an interesting contrast.

That’s my brother.

Cattle graze these hills right now.

This was a beautiful day for a hike.

Once we got on top of the hills we had views all around. This is looking southeast over American Canyon and the marsh land where the Napa River ends at San Pablo Bay. If I turned around I could see the windmills along Hwy. 12 to the east.

We could see Mt. Diablo to the south.

An easy 6-mile hike was a good way to spend my birthday.

When I got home I walked Across the Road with Ginny. Do you recognize that mountain in the distance? That’s Mt. Diablo at a little different angle than the phioto from Lynch Canyon.

Road Trip 2024 – Day 1 & 2

Posted on by
2

Finally…another Road Trip. The last real trip Dan and I made was in 2019. Yes, we drove to Estes Park last year, but it’s not the same when you have a trailer full of sheep and can’t stop to play along the way. This trip was planned to coincide with the opening night of an art show in Trinidad, Colorado, but I’ll get to that in a later post.

I drove my granddaughter to the airport Tuesday morning (July 30), and we were finally packed and ready to go by about 5:30 that evening. How do we get away when there are all these sheep to take care of? Thanks go to Farm Club members who were able to spend two to three days each to take care of sheep, the garden, and of course, Ginny.

We have our phones, but I sure like to follow along with real maps. We can find a lot of interesting details along the way, figure out USFS lands where we can camp, and get a broader overview of an area. Then I use my phone to look up odd place names and read background info as we travel.

Some of my photos will be “drive-by” where there are plenty of windshield splotches visible. I haven’t been in the higher Sierras lately. I don’t think I’d seen this devastation from some of the fires over the last couple years. I think this was from the 2021 Caldor Fire that burned in the El Dorado National Forest and beyond. There were miles of devestation.

We drove east on Hwy. 50 and turned south towards Markleeville and then Hwy 395 on the east side of the Sierras. It was dark by the time we were near Mono Lake where we decided to spend the night. We got gas ($6+/gallon) as the last station was closing in the nearest town. Then we found a place to park the truck and camp.

This photo is from the next morning. Our style of camping is to bed down on the platform Dan made in the back of the truck. I sleep on a foam pad and a sheepskin and am almost as comfortable as in a real bed.

It’s hard to imagine that this was once part of the lake. The sign in the next photo says that in 1994 the State Water Resources Control Board set a target level of 6392′ which is 25′ below the lake level in 1941.That decision decreased diversions by Los Angeles from four Mono Lake tributaries.

I don’t know how much progress has been made but there is still a long way to go, The mandated level of the lake will be at the base of these signs

We walked down the board walk to the lake edge.

From The Geology and History of Mono Lake: “Along the southern shoreline of Mono Lake, large tufa towers or pinnacles rise above the water’s surface. These iconic pillars, comprised of precipitated calcium carbonate, formed over thousands of years by the interaction of freshwater springs and the highly alkaline waters of Mono Lake.” This website also says that when the water diversions were stopped in 1994 the lake was at about half the water volume and twice the salinity of what it was before the water diversions began.

Mono Lake
Mono Lake

After exploring a bit of the lake edge we got on the road. We planned to camp at Great Basin National Park, on the eastern edge of Nevada, Wednesday night.

We have always wondered about the Clown Motel which we discovered on a trip through Tonapah when we made a decision to NOT stay there and try another. It is even more clown-themed now than I remember it from before. I just looked it up and found that in 2019 it was purchased by someone who embraced that theme and has modernized the motel. I read more and found that there is a history to the clown theme. You can see that here if it intrigues you.

We made it to Great Basin National Park by about 5 p.m.

I needed to get out of the truck and get some exercise. After we chose a campsite I followed a trail along the nearby stream about a mile and a half. We didn’t see any warnings about bears, but I started thinking about them and wondered if hiking by myself near dusk was a good idea, especially with the recent fatality in CA by a mountain lion. The only bear encounters we have had were at Grand Tetons and Yellowstone, but maybe it’s the older I get the more I know that sometimes things go wrong. I decided to turn around. I still enjoyed the beautiful scenery.

This was our camping spot.

Farm Club Retreat in San Francisco – 2024 – Part 2

Posted on by
Reply

Here is the Part 1 blog post. I just realized that I got the timeline wrong. That restaurant dinner was on Friday night. The library visit was Saturday. We ordered dinner to be delivered from Kung Food on Saturday and had enough left over that some people had it for lunch the next day as well as taking some home.

Both evenings and during other parts of the day we arranged ourselves in the parlor and working on projects. The parlor is the room that we were surprised and dismayed last year to find out there had been severe water damage and it was closed for repair. The floors and ceiling had major repair work. The difference this year is that there is no carpet and some of us commented on the different feel to the room. It is still a lovely place to hang out. We were able to leave our “toys” there the whole weekend and come back to them when we felt like it. That empty end of the green couch is where I set up shop. I wove two rigid heddle scarves and spun on the e-spinner.

Some people knitted, some spun, and some just relaxed. Deborah used the time to finish the fringe on a v-shawl that she (and I) wove in one of my classes last year.

Sunday morning I decided that after all that food and a lot of sitting I’d better go for a walk. I love seeing these old houses. (One here serves as a church.)

Some of the houses are maintained remarkably well, but I noticed some as I got farther from this neighborhood that need work. I can’t imagine how much it costs to keep up the paint job and the window repairs on these houses.

I took this photo a couple of blocks from the Home. Now I wish that I had investigated at the time and we had gone back. I assumed that “made while you wait” would mean that someone has a circular knitting machine and they crank out acrylic beanies. NOPE! I have looked at the website, www.hampuihats.com, and these are felt hats, among others. The website is impressive and the process is interesting. I encourage you to look at it.

A different kind of home decoration, still beautiful.

I wasn’t able to get much of a photo here because of the angle. There is a cow in there (not real, but a good size). You can see the face between two of the bars in the cetner and the body between another two.

Isn’t this a wonderful house?

Buena Vista Park is across the street from that last house. I walked into the park and up and down paths through and around it. I came out with this view. Now that I’m looking at a map I see I was at the south side. I saw Sutro Tower and thought that it didn’t seem that far and I may as well head that way.

I walked along streets going in the general direction. Every so often you see a stairway that cuts between properties and takes you from one street to another.

I found another small park at the top of one hill and looked beyond it to Sutro Tower. Hmmm. Not as close as I thought. I knew I could still walk there but maybe I shouldn’t spend the time. I turned around and went back taking a different route through Buena Vista Park.

From there I looked to the north and saw the Golden Gate. You can see the towers just below those distant hills.

I got back to the Home and many of our group had gathered in the dining room. We finished off yesterday’s pies and spent more time in the parlor visiting and spinning before we headed home about noon.

What will next year bring? If the weather is good I plan to walk to Sutro Tower and maybe through some of the other parks in the city.