Bonelli Park Hike

About a week and a half ago I decided to hike the perimeter of Bonelli Park, a regional park located in my area. I decided to take advantage of the nice weather and the fact that there's free parking on the weekdays until the end of April there. There are several different trails that could have lured me in and I've hiked many of them in the past, but I decided to take the main trail around the park, the Bonelli Trail. I'd never hike the entire trail before, so some of this was going to be brand new to me. This particular trail follows fire roads around the edges of the park and sometimes the "communing with nature" is just a myth since the park borders on two major freeways in our area, Interstate 10 running east/west and Hwy 57 which runs north/south. But it was an enjoyable hike nonetheless.

I found a place to park the car down by the picnic area mainly because the trail comes very close to that point and then I started my hike there. It was here that I made my first mistake, but I really didn't think much of it until later in the day. I started out heading in a counter-clockwise direction on the trail, got about 100 yards up the trail when I realized that I hadn't turned on my Relive App on my phone. I wanted to record the entire hike as I traversed around the park. So I walked back down to the trailhead, started up the app and then decided to hike the other way along the trail in a clockwise direction around the park.

The trail from that point works its way over to the west entrance of the park and parallels Hwy 57 for a good distance. But as you can see from the first photo, there's a lot of cool, green and shady spots along the trail. In fact, most of the trail on the western side and the northern side have a lot of spots where you're hiking in the shade of large trees. You also have to be aware of poison oak as well. If you look at the bridge, the bushes growing through on the right side and then again on the left side at the other end of the bridge are all poison oak. It's not something that you'd want to bump into, but as I was walking by, I could tell that numerous bike riders had done just that, based upon some broken branches along the edges of poison oak that encroached on the trail.

On a side note, my back yard rain gauge has measured out over 23 inches of rain since January 1st of this year. Since we average 13 inches or so for an entire year, the lake that lies in the center of the park is very full. I crossed over the spillway for the dam and while no water was flowing at that time, you could tell, just by the dampness in the area that they appeared to be periodically spilling water as the snow melts in the mountains.

Needless to say, there was a lot of muddy areas of the trail, but once I got over on the east side and started heading south on the trail, it dried up considerably with the exception of this one area where I was forced to wade across this water inlet. I took my shoes and socks off and carefully waded in. The water came up almost to my knees, but it was actually rather refreshing. Getting to the other side, I put my socks and shoes back on, had a snack and then continued on with my hike.

The last several miles of the hike, which headed south and then west back to the trailhead where I started were on exposed ridges and/or low lying area with little any shelter from the sun. When I mentioned my mistake before, this was it. Had I done the hike in a counter-clockwise direction, I would have been through this part of the hike early in the day, when the sun is usually very welcome. However, later in the day, it just beat down on me and sapped my strength so my pace was much slower than usual. 

No rattlesnakes were spotted on the hike that day, although it appeared as if the weather was perfect for snakes to be out basking. I did encounter a very large gopher snake just relaxing at the side of the trail. It let me get quite close to it for a photo op and never did try to flee. I also saw a coyote ambling down the trail earlier in the hike, but just briefly, so I wasn't able to get a shot of it before it ambled off the trail and into the underbrush.

Overall, the hike was 9.1 miles with 1276 feet of elevation gain. It took me 3 and a half hours to traverse. That's a decent 2.5 miles per hour for the entire trek. I did end up stopping once for a maintenance check on one of my geocaches hidden in the park, but that probably added only about 5 extra minutes on to the entire hike. It was a good workout and one that I will probably do again, although not until the fall because the weather is heating up and it's harder to hike when it's really hot. And so it goes.

It's that time of year again...

And once again, it's time for my annual public service announcement. Things are nice a green, but some of that stuff you don't want to touch. "Leaves of three, let it be." I went on a hike last week in Marshall Canyon and came across a lot of very healthy poison oak. The angle is poor in this shot, but those leaves are as big as my hand. I've seen bigger, but not by much. 

As I was walking I encountered another hiker and mentioned about the healthiness of the poison oak and he nodded. I walked up to where I wanted to go that day and then turned around and headed back to my car. The man was still there, apparently taking a nice break on his hike. As I passed he asked me whether I could point out poison oak to him. It was pretty much everywhere, intermingled with some berry bushes, so I was able to show him the difference between the two since berry bushes also have leaves of three, but also have thorns. Yeah, you never stop being a teacher I guess, but I'm happy he asked.

Also, if you're out on the trail, be ever observant for our slithery friends as well. I went looking for a geocache this morning where the cache was hidden in a large rock pile and the only hint said, "in a hole." I found a two foot long stick (probably not long enough) and probed several holes and looked around for while before calling it. The extra find is not worth it in my opinion. So I headed down the trail, got about half way down and turned a corner and there's a snake lying right in the middle of the trail. I wasn't close enough to it and fortunately, it was a small gopher snake, but it could just as easily have been a rattlesnake. The weather's warmer and they're out and about. Be careful out there my friends.

Which to believe?

Back in early February, I headed to Yuma for the Southwestern Arizona Geocachers annual mega event. Lots of fun was had all weekend long and our geocaching adventures took us all over the southwest corner of Arizona. At one point, we came across this benchmark on a canal overdressing. If you look closely, it's an elevation benchmark listing the elevation above sea level as 132.8 feet. I'm not sure when this benchmark was placed, but it was probably placed sometime in the middle of the last century.

When I saw it, I decided to get out my phone and pull up an app that I have on the phone called My Altitude. I've used it in the past and it's proven to be pretty accurate when comparing it to other spots of known elevation. One summer when camping in the eastern Sierras, my friends and I hiked up to the top of Kearsarge Pass out of Onion Valley. This pass tops out at 11,760 feet above sea level according to the sign indicating you're entering Kings Canyon National Park. When I pulled out the phone on that particular occasion the My Altitude app was within about 10 feet of the same numbers. Several other times I've noted that the app was very close to what was an already known altitude.

Which brings me back to this benchmark. I spotted this one and once again decided to see what the app said about the altitude on this bridge. As you can see, there's almost a 30 foot difference in elevation between the posted altitude and what was showing on the app. I have theory behind this which, I think, offers a possible explanation as to why the app was so different from the posted altitude.

Altitudes are constantly being changed and/or as better technology rolls on to the scene. When I was growing up, I remember Mt. Whitney, the highest peak in the contiguous United States measuring out at 14,495 feet above sea level. Yet today, if you look on new maps, you'll see that Mt. Whitney stands 14,505 feet above sea level. What? An earthquake happened and the mountain grew by ten feet? If that had happened, we'd know about it because that kind of earthquake would be common knowledge, especially in this day and age.

What's happened is, over the course of time, new technology has allowed us to measure things more accurately, hence the change in the elevation of Mt. Whitney and other peaks all over the world. Even Mt. Everest in the Himalayas is a different height than when it was when I was a kid. New technology has caused our measurements to be more accurate.

So if this benchmark was embedded into the bridge before the advent of satellites, which is entirely possible, we're looking at probably outdated information on the benchmark. Please notice on the My Altitude app that the elevation is accurate to plus or minus 11.09 feet. So the benchmark could be as high as 172 feet above sea level or possibly only 150 feet above sea level according to the app. Now if we extrapolate it out and say that technology might have added an additional ten feet in actual elevation to where the benchmark was located on the bridge, then we actually fall into the margin of error, especially if the app was measuring things a little bit too "tall" that particular day. 142 feet as opposed to 132 feet on the benchmark and the app could be as low as 150 feet, which means there's only a difference of 8 feet between the benchmark and the app, which is about what I've been seeing ever since I started using the app.

Granted, this is all hypothetical, but that's my best guess as to why the two were so far apart originally. I guess what I need to do is bring out the My Altitude app more often when I come across things that have a posted elevation so I can get more data.

So what are your thoughts on this? Do you think I'm close? Or do you have a different hypothesis of your own that you'd like to share? I'd love to hear your thoughts on this.

Webcams, Memorials and Challenges

This is a continuation of my road trip I took last September to Colorado and Utah. It will probably be the last one I write about this trip since I didn't take any photos on the last day of the trip. As noted in many of my other posts, this one will be entirely about geocaching, so if you're not interested, feel free to stop now. I won't be offended. I mean, how could I even know if you've stopped reading?

After touring around Dinosaur National Monument, I headed over to spend a couple of days in the Salt Lake City area of Utah. One of the goals for this area were the four webcam caches that are strategically placed along Interstate 15 in this area. 

For those of you unaware, a webcam is a cache where you have to place yourself at a certain point in order to get yourself on the webcam that is in that area. Either you call a friend, or use your phone to take a screen shot of yourself on the webcam to get credit for the webcam cache. Because geocaching.com doesn't allow the creation of new webcam caches anymore, webcam caches in general are becoming extremely rare with less than 200 worldwide. With four webcams in this general area, this is a goldmine for cachers seeking out webcam caches.

Because I was here on a Saturday, I started out my morning with a coffee event in the local area. It's always nice to meet the locals because you get some insight into some caches they've hidden or others have hidden. That being said, no one said anything to me about my attempt later in the day of going for those four webcams. As you can see, the first stop which was a couple of miles south of my coffee event was a success as I was able to grab a screen shot of me standing on the corner of State St. and Hwy 89. Unfortunately, that was the only one I was able to score that day.

The second webcam that I attempted was closer to the heart of Salt Lake City, which is where I ended up having a lot of problems. The closer I got to the center of town, the heavier the traffic became. What the heck was going on? As soon as I got to the corner where the webcam had been focused, I realized what was happening. There were massive amounts of people all converging on a spot about 3 blocks away from that corner. The University of Utah was playing U.C.L.A in a football game. No one at the coffee event bothered to tell me that it was football weekend there and so that one ended up being a no go as the nearest parking spot that I was able to see was over 2 miles away. I'll have to remember that the next time I end up in Salt Lake City and make sure I do that one on a non-football weekend.

The next webcam I attempted was virtually impossible to do because the webcam itself had been changed to observe another part of the highway and so getting a shot of me in it was next to impossible, so I concentrated the rest of my day on getting other kinds of caches including working on some Adventure Lab caches and finding some caches that helped me fill out some of the challenge caches I've already signed but haven't qualified for yet.

One of the Adventures that I worked on later in the day took me on a tour of this very nice park. Included in the park was a virtual cache that took me to an exact scale replica of the Vietnam War Memorial found in Washington D.C. I don't have any relatives who are found on the wall, so every time I see one of these, either of the traveling variety or something like this, I always seek out a particular soldier who was killed in the war and take either an etching of his name or take a photograph of his name. I am friends on-line with his sister and I know she appreciates the thought of someone else remembering him when they visit the wall.

The next day, I headed out of town, intending on spending the night in the southwest corner of Utah and geocaching along the way. The last photo was taken at a truck stop rest area in Tooele County, Utah. Why there of all places? Well, it was another county that I'd never cached in in the state of Utah and you already know if you'd been following along that my geocaching tends to revolve around challenges. I've found a cache in every county in California, Arizona, and Nevada, so now I'm working on Utah. I did a significant dent on this trip, but still have to get back there to finish off the state. Anyway, this last shot was a selfie I took at one of the filming locations for the movie Dumb and Dumber. Some of the things that you learn about areas when out geocaching are interesting and some things are just plain weird. I think this one falls into that latter category. Some of you might disagree, but that's what makes the world go round.

After finding this virtual cache, I headed back to Interstate 15 and southward. The next day would be spent driving home, traveling through four states in one day. There's a couple of challenge caches for that as well, but I've already signed and qualified for those challenges, so it was just a standard road trip caching day, which is why I didn't take any photos on that last day. 

Please feel free to comment. As always, I'll try to respond in kind and I promise I won't bite.

Exploration

It's the beginning of the month and although it's a little late, it's time for P.J.'s photo blogging challenge for the month of February. The theme this past month was Exploration. After looking at my photos that I took last month, the explore theme fell right into my lap and the tough part was picking the photos that I wanted to represent each exploration, but I narrowed them down to five and so here we go.  This is my take on the theme Exploration.

First off, I want everyone to know right now that most of this post will be about geocaching, so if you're not interested in geocaching, then feel free to stop at this point in time. All of the photos for this month's theme dealt with geocaching in one form or another, sort of.

1. Exploring Geology

The first weekend in February I took a road trip to southwestern Arizona, most particularly, Yuma, Arizona. The geocaching group down there hosts a large event on the Sunday and there's all sorts of things happening the entire weekend. One of the things I like to do when I'm on a road trip is to get as many different icons (geocaching types) as possible. One of the types that I found that weekend were five earth caches, where you learn about a geologic phenomenon of some kind, then answer some questions regarding what you've seen.

This particular earth cache is located just north of the town square in Yuma. We actually had a little time to kill before heading down to the town square for a flash mob event, so we stopped off here to study the rock and answer the questions put to us on the cache page. Most geologists that I know always carry a coin in their pockets so they can use it as a reference marker for grain size of a particular rock, hence the photo of the quarter on this rock. We ended up finding five different earth caches that weekend, not a large total, but it was enough for us with all of the other things that we explored that weekend.

2. Exploring History

One of the newer types of geocaches are the Adventures. They are kind of a cross between a multi cache and a virtual cache. We did quite a few Adventures on our way down to Yuma, mainly because it was raining all the way down there and the Adventures tend to work better, because you're looking for information, as opposed to an actual container and so you can usually get the answer much more quickly.

However, several of the Adventures that we'd chosen to do that day were quite moving and we ended up getting pretty wet in the process. One Adventure in Cathedral City had a stop at a Cancer Survivor's Park, which, for obvious reasons, was quite emotional for me. I chose not to post a photo for that one, mainly because I didn't feel a got any really good photos and so I opted to post this second photo instead.

This Adventure was in Palm Desert and explored a huge park in the city. One of the stops along the Adventure was the Desert Holocaust Memorial. This particular sculpture was right in the middle of the spot and I felt the sculptor caught the essence of the tragedy of this event. I hope I was able to convey with my photo what I felt the sculptor had already done.

3 & 4. Exploring Food

In our local geocaching community, I have a reputation of liking my food and I also have a reputation that when I say I'm hungry, that's usually the signal that we need to stop very soon and find a place to eat, otherwise "Webfoot" is going to get hangry. And hangry Webfoot is not a pleasant individual to be around. On this trip, I don't think I ever had to worry about being hangry, or even hungry because we ate well.

We were in the Palm Springs area on the first day and my daughter, when she heard that we were going to be going through Palm Springs, recommended Sherman's Deli and Bakery. The menu was extensive and I eventually settled on Sherman's Philly, with brisket, peppers, onions and provolone. Then of course, I almost had buyer's regret when I saw the man at the next table get served his Reuben sandwich. Man, that looked good, but once my sandwich came, I was all in. I guess what this really means is I need to go back there again to try the Reuben. Yeah, I can do that.

We had an asian buffet later that weekend and the last night we were there, we had fantastic Mexican food at this place that used to serve up from a Taco truck, but in the past year or so have found a brick and mortar building to serve great food. After we finished there, I mentioned that we really needed to go get some ice cream and so we ended up driving up to Mooos Creamery.

The wait was a little long, but the ice cream was worth the wait. My friend Kami had already decided when we walked into the place that she was going to sit on the ice cream bench as opposed to a booth, and so that's why we ended up there.The place had so many choices, that this is one of those places where you're going to have to go back more than once to really enjoy yourself. I had two different flavors and I could have probably chosen six or seven different ones; they all looked so good. Once we were totally satiated with that, as always, we checked our geocaching apps and realized there was a geocache right behind the building, so we walked out and around to the back of the building to score one more find before the night was done.

5. Exploring Geography

If you don't already know it, then I should tell you that I majored in Geography in college. I ended up taking a physical geography course while in community college and I was off and running from there. I'd found a subject that really interested me and I took more and more courses there and when I transferred to Humboldt State University, I continued to take courses in Geography pursuant to my degree.

I can honestly say that most of my hobbies revolve around geography in some way or another. I discovered Where's George? the dollar bill tracking web site. You enter your dollar bills, mark them in some way telling people to come to the website and then you spend your money in the hope that it will show up again. This hobby led me to Geocaching and although I still find Where's George? interesting, it's more of a passive type of hobby since you can't really control where your bills go.

Geocaching, on the other hand, you control what you do.  You want to go on a road trip to find geocaches? Go for it. You want to find urban micros? Go for it. I guess the point I'm trying to make is you can decide how your geocaching hobby works for you and that's why I like it so much more so than Where's George? I think that I like geocaching so much more because it involves all sorts of the different types of geography that I studied when I was in college, physical, historical, political, and many others.

Geography in general is a combination of different fields that sort of overlap. For instance in this last photo, we can see the physical geography of an area, what the lay of the land is doing and how those mountains in the background might be influenced by the river that you can't quite see behind me (that's an irrigation canal directly behind me). You can also see the political and human implications if you explore more deeply into this photo. I found this photo interesting from that point of view. Here I am, exploring my hobby of geocaching in Arizona, with California over my left shoulder and Mexico over my right shoulder.

And there you have it, my interpretation of the theme for this month Exploration. Please feel free to stop by P.J.'s blog and see how he and others interpreted the same theme. Please feel to comment here. I promise, I won't bite.

Dinosaur Stew

This is a continuation of my trip to Colorado and Utah from last October. This particular day was mostly a travel day, getting myself from Grand Junction, Colorado, over to Salt Lake City, Utah where I would spend several days. When I worked out the itinerary of this trip, I realized that I was close enough to Dinosaur National Monument that it wouldn't make sense not to stop and at least whet my appetite on the fossils there, and so this particular spot also made the list of must sees. And as always, I usually bite off more than I can chew when I'm on trips like this, but it just gives me an excuse to come back at a later time.

I think if I were to do this monument up right, I'd spend several days here, probably camping. The monument has lots to offer including whitewater rafting, something that I'm not into, but I do know other people are and so I've mentioned it. For me, I was most interested in seeing the quarry of dinosaur fossils. I did not come away disappointed.

The park straddles the Utah/Colorado border and so is sort of broken up into two different unique areas. Since the quarry where the dinosaur bones can be seen close up is in the Utah side, I chose to head there. As I approached the monument border, I noticed a geocache outside the park boundary, so I decided to stop and find that one. It's very rare to find a physical geocache inside a national park area, because the National Park Service views it as litter. There are a couple of exceptions as there are several hidden in Petrified Forest National Park but they are maintained by a ranger in the park. Most geocaches you'll see in national park area would be either earth caches (geology based) or virtual caches which I've written about previously. In this case, the quarry area of the park had one of each that I was interested in finding.

I spent a good amount of time in the quarry area taking in all there was to see. The earth cache I working on asked me to examine the fossils along the wall of the quarry. It's estimated there are over 1500 fossils still embedded in the wall. I talked with a ranger and he told me that it's really more of a Dinosaur stew than anything else. The herbivores would be killed by the carnivores and the bones would be left after the carnivores had their fill. Eventually, the bones would be carried downstream where they were caught in this area by a large sand bar. Over time the bones were buried and eventually fossilized, hence the jumble of different kinds of dinosaurs all in the same area. 

The two bones you're looking at in the second photo are the femurs of a diplodocus and an apatosaurus (what we would call the brontosaurus back in the day). The photos don't really tell the tale, but both of those bones are about 6 feet in length and 18 inches in diameter.

The third photo gives more of a scale size to it. One of the tourist there was from Germany who was slightly taller than me, probably close to 6 feet tall. I asked him if he would stand near the fossil so I could get a size comparison, which he obviously obliged. This particular dinosaur, a camarasaurus, was the most common fossil found in the quarry area. This was one of the most complete camarasaurus ever found anywhere. The camarasaurus is part of the long necked dinosaurs commonly referred to as sauropods.

After taking in the quarry and finishing up the earthcache, I decided to drive further down the road to a virtual cache. I did a small hike out there to get what I needed to get and then headed back to the car and the exit so I could get to Salt Lake City in a timely fashion. I caught a little bit of rain on the drive there, but that was about all of the inclement weather that I got on this particular trip. All in all, I was very glad I stopped as this was one of those "new" places that I promised myself that I wasn't going to miss if I was in the area. It's not new anymore, but that doesn't mean I won't come back again sometime in the future.

When is Graffiti not Graffiti?

Every now and then I stumble across things that make me go "Hmmmmm." I'm sure most people have a working definition of graffiti, but I thought, why not write about it anyway. I'm sure most people would recognize the artwork on this truck which was parked on a street in San Francisco as graffiti.

According to most sources, "graffiti is a form of visual communication, usually illegal, involving the unauthorized marking of public space by an individual or group." In each of the three examples I'm posting with this, I'm pretty sure that the image makers were not given permission to create what they created, although some will argue, and I think rightfully so, that the middle example probably didn't need permission before creating what they did. But are we sure that the first example of the truck isn't a piece of art that's on display on the streets? I did not research who created the artwork on the truck. I didn't feel like I had to.

What I wanted to do was examine each piece and try and figure out if it's art, graffiti, or something else entirely. I think I would argue that all three pieces are art and graffiti. The phrase, "One person's trash is another person's treasure" comes to mind immediately. I think most people would say that the first piece is graffiti, but some graffiti is wonderful art at the same time. If you don't believe me, then look at the last photo I've attached to this. Those images, on the last four columns, are original graffiti that was placed on the Berlin Wall during the Cold War era.

The second one is the most interesting, I believe. If we look at the definition that I wrote earlier we can makes some judgements about it. Visual Communication?  I would say so. Illegal? Hard to say, but probably not. Unauthorized marking of a public space? Probably, but then again, the Ancients of Utah and Colorado probably didn't have the concept of ownership of land, so it was all public space and who's to say they didn't have permission to create those symbols on that rock outcropping? Today, I know that almost everyone who sees this would view it as artwork, not to be disturbed. I mean, the state of Colorado has viewing points set up alongside the road where you can look at these pieces of art from afar. There are also posted signs stating that the defacement of the art is considered a crime. 

So I guess, time plays an element in all of this. Even the National Park Service has weighed in on this issue. While they don't condone graffiti, they actually preserve graffiti in some of the areas they are set up to protect. I know of at least one instance in Great Basin National Park where writing inside of Lehman Caves inside the park have been preserved as part of the history of the park and cave. The writings (mostly signatures and dates) were done by employees of the National Forest Service over a hundred years ago. Time heals all wounds?

What it boils down to I guess is the public's perception of it or maybe the authority's perception of it. The Berlin Wall, when it was all in Berlin was a striking example of this. The western side contained all of the graffiti. The eastern side was pretty much pristine. Different forms of authority obviously made this a reality. People in West Berlin let their feelings known about the wall in the one way they could at the time and that was by drawing on it. People on the east side didn't not have that kind of freedom since there were barriers in place that prevented people from even getting close enough to it to place graffiti on it.

And while I don't like the gang related graffiti that is so pervasive in some areas, I'm not going to deny that some of it is amazing artwork. What's your take on this? Graffiti? Art? A combination of both? As always, comments are welcome.