I traded a house for a camera! Well, not quite, but I got your attention didn’t I!
The Friday before last we sold my folks’ old house, the one Glenn and I bought 8 years ago so that they would have the cash they needed to buy admission to a facility where Mom could get the care she needed. It took us 8 years to fully disengage ourselves and them from the property, but at last it has new owners who will love it as much as my folks did. I am relieved of having to be an absentee landlord, and I got a little bit of cash back. So Saturday I went shopping, of course! Among the assets I inherited from my father are stubbornness, sturdy knees and a love of photography, and I believe he would have been all in favor of the purchase. It’s a full frame Nikon D750 with all the bells and whistles.
As soon as I got the battery charged up I went outside to play with it down in the canyon behind our house, with the dogs. I found plenty of stuff to shoot and was really happy with the results…
Yellow dog-tooth violetPippi sees a squirrel. She has a few mosquitoes which I didn’t see until I got home and looked at the pictures on the big screen!A red newt is going for a hike too.My thinking spot
The second day I started reading the manual, (about 458 pages!) and learned how to shoot butterflies on the wing, and some other stuff.
Swallowtail butterfly visiting the fireweed in the gardenPartner is almost 16! I promised him a cake.
The third day I read the manual some more, and figured out how to edit Nikon RAW files in Adobe Lightroom…
Hank likes to split wood. He does a little bit every day.Lyssa.The tractor has been put away for the summer.
A couple of weeks ago I had a crazy idea. Why not take my Long Trail Journal and turn it into an eBook and put it up on Amazon so that lots of people might have a chance to read it? Originally I had planned to offer it for free, but Amazon insisted on making me charge the minimum price of $2.99, and so I decided to donate the proceeds any sales to the Green Mountain Club of Vermont, because without them the trail would not exist and my trip would not have been possible. Crazy idea, huh! So I dusted off my Adobe inDesign program and during the past few weeks I put together an eBook of my journal and illustrated it with lots of photos from the trip.
I finished formatting the eBook over the weekend and uploaded it Sunday night. Then this morning just for the heck of it I decided to take a peek at my account and to my amazement I had already sold a copy! Yahoo- champagne and dog-biscuits for everyone!
Sometime this winter when us Westerners were watching in awe as Mother Nature delivered vast amounts of precipitation to our dry & desiccated landscape, a couple of pieces of Forebay Road broke off and fell down into the American River Canyon. To any geologist this is to be expected. Mountains are forever falling on their way down to sea level- the only variable in question is whether the tectonic forces shoving them up are working faster than the forces tearing them down.
A giant penstock carries water down to the EID power plant on the South Fork of the American River
Luckily the pieces of roadbed which lost the battle with gravity were located a few miles past the residential section of the road, past the signpost marking the end of the county maintained section of the road, and just past the big bend where the road leaves the east ridge of Long Creek Canyon and curves out over and down into the South Fork of the American River proper. I call it SMUD-land. SMUD stands for Sacramento Municipal Utilities District, and the only reason the road exists or is maintained at all is because there is a SMUD power plant located down there in the canyon on the river, not to mention an extensive infrastructure including reservoirs, a giant penstock, underground tunnels and a grid of overhead transmission wires. All this so that Sacramento Valley residents can flip a switch to turn on their lights, air conditioners, TVs and computers!
The shady south side of the canyon escaped much of the King Fire. Not so on the sunny north side
You might remember this bit of canyon from September of 2014, when it was making headlines because of the King Fire. The fire, which burned nearly 100,000 acres and triggered the evacuation of several thousand El Dorado County residents, started near Forebay Road on King of the Mountain, when Wayne Huntsman kicked burning embers over a cliff, supposedly to hide the fact that he’d been cooking up a little meth. The fire scorched much of the territory on the north side of the river canyon before heading overland to scorch the Rubicon River Valley; the area is still a blackened moonscape today because the fire was so hot it sterilized the soil. To everyone’s amazement however, the steep canyon hillsides and cliffs on my side of the river, which face north, remained green and untouched. I can only speculate that this was because they are much wetter, cooler and generally more protected than the hot dry exposed south-facing slopes across the river on the North side of the canyon. Forebay Road wends it’s way about 1000′ down that cooler wetter north facing canyon wall to reach the river and the SMUD powerhouse, and with the road being closed it’s a great place to take a walk with a small pack of dog friends.
Most of the road slid right on down down the hill here!A giant Douglas fir came down across the road here. Must have been quite a crash!
It’s a beautiful road through a beautiful section of forest. Tall firs, pines and cedars carpet the hillside, lending further shade and protection to a lush green understory. The shale cliffs and outcroppings are endowed with thick layers of moss, lichen and ferns. Wildflowers abound. Occasionally the road finds a clearing and you can catch a glimpse the river far below. There is plenty of water too, even a small cascading waterfall tumbles down the cliff at one spot. It’s lovely, really. But when the winter storms knocked down trees and sent huge mudslides over the road, and several sections of the road bed just plain fell off and tumbled down into the canyon, SMUD wisely put up a gate with a lock to prevent the general public from using the road.
Lots of water loving plants can be found on the wet north facing cliffs on the shady side of the canyonA little dog with a big spirit.
The closure was just fine with me and the girls. A few months ago we discovered that the closed section of road was just perfect for taking the entire pack for a walk. There’s no traffic except for an occasional SMUD engineer coming or going by, and they usually just smile at the dogs and drive slowly. Today one engineer type person helpfully pointed out that my dog had short legs. I knew that- she’s a miniature dachshund. But he drove off before I had a chance to reply that my dog’s legs were perfect seeing as they went all the way to the ground and not a bit further. Oh well.
The waterfall!
It’s a couple of miles down the cool shady side to the bridge over the river, and then from there you can continue up the other side to a landing area where the Forest Service roads begin. From there you can go all the way to Mosquito or Georgetown if you are a good navigator with a reliable GPS device. Or if you work for SMUD you can access all of the reservoirs, tanks, pipes and power lines that feed the grid. The other day we walked all the way to Brush Creek reservoir. Just for fun. The views are wonderful, and the weather is perfect for tromping up the sunny side of the canyon. The mudslides and slipouts are not dangerous for a foot traveler, but I’d be nervous about driving over the damaged sections of road bed, especially the 100 yard section on the north side that simply dropped about 3 feet down in elevation!
This section of roadbed dropped about 3 feet lower than the adjacent roadbed!
In case you can’t get over to see it for yourself I’ve been taking some photos of the area for you. Here ya’ go…
Lots of ferns grow on the shady side cliffs.A Live-forever. One of my favorites!Wow!Lupins abound on the sunny side of the canyon. Perfume!Another sunnyside favorite!Brush Creek Reservoir is on the North side of Poho RidgeLyssa looking particularly noble. Lucky for squirrels she can’t climb trees.
The Island of St John has a long and fascinating history, traces of which can be found if you are willing to venture a bit into the bush!
I visited St John for 2 weeks in the fall of 2016. Being a hiker at heart, it was not your typical Caribbean holiday! Here’s as except from the journal I posted today
“…..Glenn popped his head up right about then and said “c’mere, there’s a shark.” I thought to myself, shouldn’t it be, like, “swim away fast, there’s a shark,” but he was doing the hand signal thing for come. The shark was about 4 feet long, a nurse shark, evidently sleeping down on the sand in a cozy spot amongst the rocks and corals. So my brother decided to take a picture, which woke up the shark, which proceeded to head for deeper darker country. Pretty cool…..” ( read more…)
Rams Head peninsula juts far out to the sea along the south coast of St John. There’s a great hike out to the end, best done early in the morning when it is still cool!
Welcome to six!dog studios! If you are looking for Glenn’s Guide to the British Virgin Islands, it has sailed on to glennsguidetothebvis.com
My current project at the studio is to tell the story of my quest to see and experience some the beauty and wonder of some of the remaining unspoiled mountains and wilderness areas of this heavenly planet called Earth- up close and on foot- in the company of some four-footed furry companions.
It wasn’t very long ago that I woke up and realized that the worst thing had finally happened, (no, not the election…), and that I had actually become a “middle-aged woman”. Somehow while I was exhausting myself holding together a career, a family, and paying the bills, life was imperceptibly slipping past. Call it a mid-life crisis. The thought that I might never fulfill my dreams, long shoved away on the back burners and covered with dust, was horrifying. The epithet on my tombstone would read “Here lies Shirley- she always paid her bills.” To have spent a lifetime on this beautiful planet without ever having really seen it seemed a tragic waste. I am too much my Father’s daughter to be content with letting the day go by without seizing opportunities when they come to me.
