So I haven't done this in a couple of years, but since I have a new blog, I thought I'd get back into this again. The theme was relatively easy to cover this month, since it was pretty much in my wheelhouse considering the circumstances in my life at the moment. This month's theme was "Get Out and Play" and I did that a lot this past month.
1. Foggy morning For readers of my other blog that haven't come over here yet, I retired at the end of May after teaching for 36 years. I can really get out and play all the time now. This particular photo was taken on Monday, June 3rd, the first day of my summer vacation since I don't technically retire until August 1st. The fog is actually the key to this photo. This is a fire road loop trail in the foothills north of the town I live in in California. This is the sunny side of the trail. Coming down the other side you descend into a creek ravine and there's lots of trees there, so I usually just do the loop counter clockwise so I can finish in shade. I didn't need to do that this time, but I'm really glad I did. Hiking is one of my passions and I'm trying to build up stamina even more for longer hikes in the future. This, being the first hike of the summer, was a short hike by my standards. But at the 2 and a half mile marker, I came upon a bear walking up a side trail. For those of you who are familiar with this loop, this is really close to civilization, but there he was, a bear on my first day of vacation. And, no, I was too interested in watching it that I didn't even get any photos of it. By the time I thought about taking a shot, it was up on the ridge above the main trail, in heavy fog, behind some bushes. Even if I had taken a photo, it would have been a grey blob. So, you'll just have to trust me on this one. Talking with rangers after I came down indicates that they think there's at least 3 bear up in the foothills calling this spot their home. I've been hiking up there for the better part of 15 years and this is the first time I've seen a bear. I probably have a better chance of seeing a rattlesnake up there, yet I haven't seen one of those either. And so it goes.
2. Halfway through One of my other passions is geocaching, which I do a lot. Some people would say I'm obsessed about it. I've been finding caches in the wild and in the urban environments since 2001, before the hobby/sport/game was even a year old. The nice thing about geocaching is it usually involves hiking, so I'm all over that. Or at least getting off of your butt and out in the environment, even if it means just looking around town for things hidden then. I prefer going out on geocaching excursions with other people. This particular hike would have been really frustrating since we ended up with a lot of DNFs (Did Not Finds) for the day. Eh. That happens. As you can also see, I upped my mileage for this one. Technically, this was a little less strenuous terrain-wise since it was all on paved trail, but it was definitely longer. This was taken at mile marker 6.5 and we'd actually walked beyond that marker before we turned around and went back down the canyon we in which we were hiking. I also hide a cache up in the canyon. Curiously, no one has found it yet. That is usually a rarity as there are always cachers out there who like to be First to Find on any cache, but since this particular hide is a 4 mile hike one way, it's going to take more than one cache to lure many people out there. Had I hidden two or three caches out there, all of them might already have been found. But just one? I suspect it will sit there until the fall now before someone ventures out to find it.
3. Pacific Crest Trail When I was younger, I really wanted to hike the entire Pacific Crest Trail. I still do actually, but life is in the way. I don't think my wife would take kindly to me taking off for five to six months to be by myself in the woods. Although today it's probably much safer than it was 40 years ago, it's still a challenge. The trail is 2650 miles long. 700 of that is hiking pretty much through desert landscapes. You hike 1700 miles before you even leave California. It's a rugged trail to say the least. This doesn't mean I've given up on the idea, it's just on the back burner. Right now, I've been pretty satisfied just getting out and hiking sections of it, like this one north of Big Bear Lake. Taking a weekend backpacking trek or possibly a five day trek is not out of the realm of possibilities. I'm sure my wife would rest easier if I went with someone else. Any takers?
4. Checkerspot butterfly Photography, another passion of mine has changed over the years. I've started an Instagram account called @dogzonwalkz where I literally go out and take photos of dogs on walks and post them to my account. Feel free to follow along there as well. I've always enjoyed photography and this month, I went back out and started exploring other areas that I've neglected in the past, particularly, nature photography. While out on that geocaching hike earlier in the month, we were literally swarmed by flocks of butterflies. We counted 7 different species of butterflies as we hiked in the canyon. I didn't have my main camera with me because I was trying out some new trekking poles, plus I was geocaching, so I felt that leaving the large camera at home was the right thing to do. All I had with me was a point and shoot and my iPhone. This Chalcedon Checkerspot on a berry blossom was taken with my point and shoot. There was another instance where I had a chance to get a shot of one of the other types of butterflies and I couldn't get close enough to get a shot like this since all access in was through a large patch of poison oak. Nope, I did not want to go there, which means there's still a place for my larger camera and its big zoom lens.
5. Muir Woods National Monument Growing up, my dad would always take the entire family on camping trips and most of those camping trips revolved around seeing some kind of national park in the western United States. I continued that tradition with my kids and took them to many of the places I'd been to as a kid. I also took them to new spots, places I'd never visited or camped at previously. Joshua Tree National Park comes to mind very quickly as one of our spring trips. Another spring trip was to Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument. One spot that I never visited, nor took my kids to see was Muir Woods National Monument. I finally got to visit it when my wife and I went up to visit my daughter and son-in-law last week in the Bay Area. We had tried to visit it last summer, but didn't realize that you need reservations for parking in the park, or to get a shuttle down to the monument and the place was sold out for the week we were there. Once we finalized our travel plans this year, I went ahead and booked a parking reservation for the monument and we were good to go. The park is very peaceful and despite the number of people in the park on the trails, it never felt like it was crowded, nor were the crowds disrespectful of the environment. Most walked quietly taking in the glory of the coast redwood environment. If people did talk, most talked in low whispers out of respect for everyone around them. Other national park places I've been to people haven't shown the same kind of courtesy, which is why I really enjoyed myself while we were hiking along the trails. My daughter said she enjoyed watching me just enjoy the moment. And that's that for this month. I hope you enjoyed these offerings to the Get Out and Play challenge set up by P.J. on his a Lil' HooHaa. Check out some of the other photographers and how they interpreted the challenge for this month. I apologize in advance if I don't comment back on any of your comments. For some reason, I haven't been able to do that and if anyone else who uses Blogger can figure it out and help me out, I would greatly appreciate it.
Today I went on a hike in Marshall Canyon, which is located a little northwest of me in the town of LaVerne. I have many geocaches hidden up there and it was a nice day to walk up and check on them. The trail is notorious for having a lot of poison oak alongside of it and it didn't disappoint today at all. In fact, with all of the rain we've had this year, I was anticipating on seeing a lot of it. Hillsides were covered in it and there was plenty of it on both sides of the trail, but whoever is maintaining the trail is doing a good job of keeping it at bay. Not once, while I was hiking, did I ever feel like the poison oak was encroaching onto the trail. However, the poison oak is very healthy. Looking at the photo, you can tell those leaves are about the size of my hand. They usually don't grow that large, but this has been a really good year for rain, and thus most vegetation. I guess you can say, it's more food for the deer. And if you guessed there's a geocache nearby, you would be right. It's not one of mine, but to find it, you have to gingerly make your way around that particular bush, then lean out with one hand on a tree trunk to view around the other side to get the cache. Fortunately, I didn't have to do that since I've already found that particular cache. I just wish other people would be more cognizant about where they put their caches so you don't possibly have people walk directly into the stuff. I know what it looks like, but I'm sure a lot of other people don't. It's one of the reasons I don't pet dogs on this particular trail. It's too easy for a dog to brush up against it and transfer the oil of the plant to their fur. Then, if you pet the dog, the oil is now on you. Not something I'd want to get.
Last Saturday, I went on a long hike while geocaching. As I add more hiking paraphernalia to my pack, I'll talk about things from time to time. This hike was a relatively easy hike, but being that it was the first long hike of the season, it pretty much kicked my butt. I took a photo at this mile marker. We hiked a little beyond this one, then turned around and walked back out of the canyon as we knew it was going to be an up and back. Fortunately, the return trip was down hill. We had side excursions tacked on looking for geocaches, so overall, the hike was something slightly longer than 14 miles. One of the things that I tried for only the second time on a hike were trekking poles. I'd received a nice gift certificate and so this was one of the first purchases I made with that. I've used trekking poles one other time on my climb to the top of Mt. Lassen several years ago and it came in handy, but I've never seen a real need to have poles before, so I never went out and got any. However, I have decided to up my hiking recently, so I decided to invest in the poles. The first time out was a good test because I was walking on relatively flat surface. You develop a rhythm when using the poles, and it went very well. They were a little awkward when looking for a geocache. How do you hold two trekking poles and a GPSr in your hands? Two hand and three things don't work too well, but I managed. In the future, I believe that if the hike is predominantly a hike, then two poles will be used, but if the hike is predominantly geocaching, then perhaps I'll just bring along one pole for stabilization and for poking and probing into holes where geocaches might exist, or where snakes might exist. The next time I go out, I'll get to experiment with the gaiters I purchased yesterday. Near the end of this hike, I got really tired of having to wade through fields of foxtails looking for non-existent caches. So I went out and bought some gaiters which fit over the top of your socks and shoes keeping those nasty things out. We'll see how they work out.
Hiking in the woods, you see some very interesting things. We walked by this tree and just marveled at the tenacity of the tree as it clung to the side of the cliff with its roots running in several different directions looking for nourishment and stability. If you look closely, you can see several plants growing in the roots of the tree. Soil had obviously collected there and seeds from other plants were growing in those tiny pockets of soil. Eventually, more erosion will happen and the tree will lose some of its support and probably fall. But for now, life goes on and it seemed to be doing quite well.
Yesterday, I went on a hike in San Gabriel canyon along the San Gabriel River. It was an up and back hike which was supposed to possibly net us 20 geocaching finds for the day. Now, any self-respecting geocacher knows that if you start counting your geocaches before you find them, you'll probably not find all of them. And we didn't. Stats for the day: 2 did not attempt. One was at the end of the canyon and we still had another 6+ miles to hike to get back to the Jeep, so we opted not to hike all the way back there. The other was climbing up a rock wall that was very slick. Yeah, no. I'm getting to old for that kind of shit. 9 finds! - Yay! 9 DNFs - Boo! Yeah, it was not a very productive day as there were lots of problems finding some of the caches. Poison oak, poor coordinates, and caches that were just plain missing were some of the problems we encountered out there on the trail. However, the geocaching wasn't the only thing that was interesting. If it had been the only thing, we probably would have come back pretty disappointed, but we were there to enjoy the outdoors and the outdoors didn't disappoint. We spotted 7 different kinds of butterfly species while out on the trail. Some included Lorquin Admirals, Swallowtails, and Gulf Fritillaries. I wasn't able to get photos of every time we saw, but I did get this video. This is what it was like through most of the sunny parts along the trail.
The more creative geocachers out there will create, what's known in the community as, Geo-Art. They possibly will use programs, or just eyeball certain things and lay out caches to create images that you can see on the Geocaching maps. Today, I got up fairly early and decided to do the Lucky Horseshoe Series just north of Victorville, CA. As you can see from the two screenshots, there's also a Blinky out in the same area which I've already hiked and found. And yes, to the west of there, is a Pac-Man. There's also a Smiley Face out there to the northeast. The Horseshoe was fairly easy, as there's only 15 caches in the series. I parked near the top as you can see from the first screenshot which shows the three I'd already found. Usually, when I do something like this, I like to have any long hikes where there aren't any geocaches done first when I'm still fresh. Something this small, though, it really didn't matter. Each cache was only about 800 feet away from the next one in the series, so the gap at the top of the horseshoe is about 3 tenths of a mile or so.
It took me about an hour and 15 minutes to complete the circuit and hike back to the Jeep. Not a bad morning outing.
Yesterday, I went on my first hike of the summer season. I decided to keep it fairly simple and easy as I hadn't been hiking in a couple of week mainly because the weather has been really bad the entire month of May. I didn't want to overdo it on the first day and then set myself back a couple of weeks while I recuperated from an injury. Since it's summer, I can sleep in, which I did, and then I ate breakfast and decided that I just wanted to hike the Claremont Hills Wilderness Loop, which is in the foothills just above my house. Usually, I hike there on the weekends, but yesterday, being Monday, the parking lot was uncrowded and I pretty much had my pick of the parking spots. I walked in and headed up the Burbank side of the trail, meaning I walked the loop in a clock-wise direction. Best choice ever, at least for this day. About halfway around, I see lots of people coming back at me, including some people who had passed me earlier. Strange, until the first couple of people warned me about a bear up on the trail. COOL! Yeah, I'm not one to shirk away from a little adventure, so I kept going, as I'd never encountered a bear on any of the trails in the foothills before. As I got up a little bit farther, I could see the bear lumbering up a side trail on the side of the hill heading up to the ridge, so I just stood there and watched. That's usually my M.O. Watch and then remember, "Oh, yeah, you should take some photos." Well, photos didn't happen, but the image of the bear on the hill is ingrained in my mind. So not photos of the bear, but I did get a pretty good shot of some Scotch Broom at the side of the trail. That's a pretty good way to start out the summer season.
Well, here we go again. To begin with, I've started a new chapter in my life and I decided that the blog needed to be "new and improved" as well. I'm not going to make any promises with this one, but with more time on my hands, now that I am retired, I'm going to try and make this work a little better. I'll be tinkering with the format over the next couple of days to make this as visually appealing as possible. In the meantime, sit back and enjoy the ride. As always, please feel free to comment. Trust me, I won't bite.
