Potpourri

Wow. Three posts in less than a month. I guess I'm on a roll now. It's either that or I actually have something to say. But since it's the beginning of a new month, it's time once again for P.J.'s monthly photo blogging challenge. This month's theme is potpourri, a mixture of things, and boy do I have an interesting mixture of shots that I took last month. In reality, the amount of shots that I actually took was low and the amount of selfies last month was very high, almost 67% of all my shots included my self-serving mug in the frame, so I'm actually pleased that there's only two shots in this month's gallery of photos that has me in the shot.

So anyway, here's my take on this month's theme of potpourri.

1. How hot is it?

This past week I took another road trip, to of all places, Las Vegas. Why you might ask? Well, usually, the only time I ever travel to Las Vegas is when I'm traveling through Las Vegas to get to points elsewhere. It's not a town I really want to spend a lot of time in, but when I have been there, it's always around 110 freaking degrees outside and very unpleasant to walk around, so we get out, maybe for a bathroom break and then hop right back in the car usually on the way to Utah, where it's always cooler.

This time I purposely decided that I wanted to visit Las Vegas and I turned it into a geocaching road trip (but then again, when isn't a road trip of mine geocaching-centric?). Part of the reason was there are several geocaches in Las Vegas with very high favorite point ratings. If you have been following along, you know that I enjoy challenge caches. Find the cache, but before you can log the cache, you have to complete the challenge. One challenge that I've signed requires me to find 15 caches with 1000 favorite points. There are several in Las Vegas and I eventually found three of them, bringing my total of 1000 favorite point caches up to 11. So that gives you the reason why I went to Las Vegas, but the first shot isn't about Las Vegas at all.

No, this is actually in California. I needed lunch, so I stopped in Baker, California, had lunch, then drove over to the "World's Largest Thermometer." There is a virtual cache located here which I had already logged several years ago when it was over 100 degrees, but there's also a physical cache right near the base of the thermometer and so I ended up finding that one for my second find of the trip. Ironically, I didn't even step back to see how warm it was that day, but I suspect it was somewhere in the mid 70s, a very pleasant day to be out in the desert.

2. All Hail Caesar!

Once getting to Las Vegas, I decided to walk along the Strip. It was late in the afternoon and I wanted to find some of the virtual caches along the Strip. One of the caches is entitled Toga Party and is located outside Caesars Palace. You need to find this particular statue of Caesar and take a selfie of you with it. As opposed to some of the other Caesars nearby, this particular Caesar is quite naked and so I wanted to keep my shot family friendly and thus framed the shot accordingly. Not that anything is family friendly along the Strip, but I have some standards nonetheless.

3. Sunset on the Strip

Everything on the Strip is over the top. You like M&Ms? There's a four story building dedicated to nothing but M&Ms. You want to visit Paris? There's a replica of the Eifel Tower along the Strip. Castles, performing fountains and volcanoes, rollercoasters around high rise buildings are all part of Las Vegas and I enjoyed just taking it all in.

As I was heading back to my motel for the first night, I was greeted by this gorgeous sunset behind the New York, New York hotel and casino. I couldn't pass that up. And as noted previously, since this was a geocaching trip, I had certain goals I wanted to accomplish, so riding the rollercoaster, although tempting, wasn't in the plans for this week. Since I didn't accomplish all of my goals, I know I'll be back in the future, perhaps next fall again as I now know that the weather is much more accommodating than in the summer.

4. Annie

No, I didn't go to a play while in town, but I did visit a very dear friend of mine who I worked with for about 20 years before I retired. She subsequently retired a couple years later and she and her husband have since moved to this area. She was our school's media coordinator/librarian. She also owned several "labrary" dogs over the years who would enjoy the library on Fridays during our school year. Our school was very dog friendly and so it wasn't uncommon to see several dogs on campus, especially on Fridays. Annie was the last of the labrary dogs to enjoy the hospitality of the school's library. 

Annie is a very loyal dog and once you were her friend, she would always recognize you and ask for scritches and wag her tail at you. Sometime during the last month of school the year I retired, we had an assembly and I decided that I would be the mascot of the school during the assembly, dressing up in a large cougar costume. At one point, I was resting on a chair on the side of the gym and Annie came over to me and snuggled with me, not something she would normally do when you're so camouflaged, but she recognized my scent.

When I went to visit on my second day there, Annie barked at the door since there was an "intruder" into her humble abode. But as soon as she saw me, she was all tail wags and dog kisses. She remembered and we hadn't see each other in over three years. She's a good girl.

5. Life's short. Eat dessert first.

My last night in Las Vegas was again dedicated to walking along a different portion of the Strip. I found this side alley near the Flamingo hotel that had all sorts of restaurants, so I decided that I was going to eat back in there as there just seemed to be all sorts of gastrointestinal delights, including sushi burritos. I didn't try those, but they did look interesting. 

Before I had a chance for dinner, I found the Ghirardelli shop and entered. Mistake number 1 according to some people, but I looked at it as an opportunity. I wandered around inside, checked out the menu and then decided that life is short and I ordered this sundae, a Cookie Crumb Hot Fudge Sundae. I posted this shot to my family's group chat and my youngest immediately posted back, "I don't know what that is, but I know I want one." 

I decided that I was going to eat dessert first. Well, in reality, I ended up eating dessert that evening as it was a very filling dessert. I know it wasn't very healthy, but it was very tasty and because I don't do this on a daily basis, I could justify it for a one night extravagance.

The next morning, I hosted a coffee event just off the Strip that was fairly well attended by some of the local geocachers as well as two other geocachers from California and two geocachers from Australia who were in town for a conference. Why host an event? Why not? It gave me a way to meet some of the local geocachers, get a tip or two on some local caches that I might try to find and gave me my 8th different kind of geocache find in the state. 

Yes, there's a challenge for that in Colorado called the 8x8 challenge where they want you to find 8 different kinds of geocaches in 8 different states. I now have found at least 8 different kinds of geocaches in 3 states, California, Arizona and now Nevada. New Mexico is the next closest with 7 different kinds and all I have to do is go to New Mexico and either attend an event or host my own event and I'll then have 8 different kinds of caches there. 

Well, there you have it, my take on the theme potpourri for this month. Please stop by P.J.'s blog and check out some other people's interpretation of the same theme. As always, please comment here. I won't bite.

Trail Encounters of a Different Kind

As most of you know, when I go out hiking, I like to encounter wildlife, especially the legless variety.  A couple of days ago, I had a different kind of encounter on the trail. Usually, when I'm hiking, if I hear a rustle in the bushes on either side of the trail, I can be fairly assured that it's a lizard of some kind. Lizards like to hold still until the last possible second, then take off when the danger becomes overwhelming to them. At that point, they aren't very stealthy and make a lot of noise as they travel over dead leaves and such. Snakes, on the other hand, are very stealthy and can travel over dead leaves without make a sound.

So when I heard something in the brush off to my left, I looked over and sure enough I spotted a lizard running across the trail on a trajectory that would take it right between my legs. About a millisecond later, a second sound and right behind it comes a snake in hot pursuit. So now I have a lizard and a snake heading right toward me.

Now, I can hear some of my friends right now exclaiming, "I would have been screaming." Yeah, well, I'm not proud to say that an expletive left my lips and I jumped just a little, mainly because I had been surprised by the snake coming out more than anything else, but once the snake saw me, it decided that lunch, in the form of that lizard, wasn't worth the human that now stood between it and its meal and so it turned tail and headed back to where it came.

I was not able to get a photo of it unfortunately, but I was able to ID as a two striped garter snake, very similar to the photo here.  They are very pretty snakes. I just wish the encounter had been a little bit longer as it was over in a matter of 10 seconds or so.

Road Trip

Well, this one is way late in coming and I should have written some other stuff in here many months ago.  But that's water under the bridge and so seven months have gone by since I've written here. It's not like I haven't been motivated, but I just never got around to it and this has languished long enough.

So why all of a sudden am I writing today?  Well, P.J.'s photo blog challenge for this past month was the theme "Road Trip" and I did go on a road trip last month where I actually took some photos, so it made it easy to get back into the swing of things.

When I retired three years ago, I set several goals that I wanted to accomplish so it wouldn't get stagnant. One was to visit or do one new thing each year. The second was to have at least one overnighter somewhere each month. It didn't necessarily have to be a camping overnighter, but just somewhere different each month.

It was going fairly well, but then the pandemic hit and everything fell apart. But recently, I'm been getting back into the swing of those goals. And I will be the first to admit, that it's easy to come up with an excuse to take off for a long road trip.  

"Honey, I'm going up to visit the grand baby."  And so I go, although both of us went up in April for Easter, but I went up by myself to visit her in July.  June, I did a road trip up the Owens Valley on the east side of the Sierra for a lot of really good geocaching.  July, the grand baby came down here for three weeks and then we turned around and went up there for another week. Why? Because we could. August, I did another short backpacking trip in the Sierra and that brings us to this month.

I looked at the calendar and the weather forecast and it was going to be hot down here, so I decided to head up to visit the grand baby again, then head up to Lassen Volcanic National Park. I've visited this park many times in the past and seven years ago I accomplished a bucket list item by summiting Mt. Lassen in June 2015. So why go back? It's one of the least visited national parks in the lower 48 states, so there's a lot of peace and quiet, especially if you go during the week. My plan was taking me there on a Tuesday and leaving on a Friday before the weekend crowds come in. Second, because it was already mid-September, the crowds were going to be even smaller during the week, because school is back in session so there wouldn't be as many vacationers out.

Third, it's a beautiful park with some fascinating geology, plus there were a couple of new geocaches (a virtual cache and an earthcache) hidden since the last time I was there and because you know I love to go geocaching, that seemed like a no-brainer. 

My long hike day I'd set apart for myself dawned crisp and cold. Temperatures were down in the mid 30s overnight, but it warmed up nicely during the day.  I drove around the mountain and went down to the trailhead for Brokeoff Mountain, which is the second highest peak in the park at 9200 feet (2804 meters). The hike was a little bit over 3.4 miles (5.47 km) with an elevation gain of 2600 feet (792 meters). The third shot is of Brokeoff Mountain from the trail. The trail had some very nice shady spots and I had two small water crossings going up.  I ran into a total of 13 other people on the trail the entire day. Had I opted to go up to the top of Mt. Lassen instead, I probably would have encountered 3 times as many people. It was definitely a road not taken kind of adventure.

Brokeoff Mountain was my new thing for the year. In all of the years I'd been going to the park, I'd never taken that trail before. Of course, geocaching was to blame since there was the new virtual cache on the top of the mountain, which got me going. I probably would have gone to the top of Mt. Lassen again were it not for geocaching, but that's one of the reasons I really love geocaching. It takes me to a lot of places I might never have gone without it.

I'm not sure it's because of my age, or something else, but I felt like the hike up there was tougher than the hike to the top of Mt. Lassen.  Of course, I was seven years younger then, but still in my late 50s. After we got done with Mt. Lassen, my friend Craig and I then hiked out to Bumpass Hell. This time, I really wanted to go out to Bumpass Hell again, because the area really highlights the thermal features of the park, but once I got down off of the Brokeoff Mountain hike, I was pretty much spent. I headed back to my campground with no intentions of stopping elsewhere, at least to hike.

I did stop numerous times on the way back to the campground, however. Summer of 2021 was not a kind one to this park with regard to wildfires. The Dixie Fire burned about 64% of the park's eastern side and there was lots of evidence of the fire as I drove back around to my campground. In fact, the virtual cache at the top of Brokeoff Mountain had me taking compass readings of both Mt. Lassen and Mt. Shasta. As you can see by the shot of me at the top, taking a compass reading of Mt. Lassen was easy, but Mt. Shasta was more difficult to spot through the haze of not one, but two different wildfires that were between us and Mt. Shasta. Fire, it seems, is becoming more and more prevalent throughout the area.

What is really amazing, in my opinion, were the number of trees that survived the blaze.  It's not readily apparent in my last shot, but if you look closely, you can see quite a few individual trees that survived and will be the trees that help sustain this forest into the future, provided the area gets enough rain and snowfall. That being said, when I asked about weather for my trip, they said it was going to be cool at night, which I already knew and that a storm was coming, scheduled to come in Friday or Saturday. Since I wasn't planning on being around, it didn't bother me, but the forecast was for rain, with snow on the summit of Mt. Lassen.  Let's hope the area gets more of this all winter long.

And there you have it.  My road trip for September.  Please stop by P.J.'s blog and check out the links of others who posted about road trips.

Warm Weather Means.....

Today's post is more of a public service announcement, both to you as a reader and to myself, as I've found I've gotten into some bad habits on the trail that need to be corrected now, before the warmer weather really sets in. I was out on a hike today and I literally almost stepped on this guy. As you can see, he's already been in at least one scuffle in his lifetime as he's clearly lost his tail at some point in order to escape getting eaten. Last thing he needs is to be out sunning himself and have some idiot hiker almost step on him because said hiker is too absorbed in his phone. Yeah, that would be me.

As the weather warms up, all sorts of critters are out and about again. I haven't seen a snake since last November, but that doesn't mean they're not out there, it just means I haven't seen one yet. My mindset has always been, if the lizards are active, so are the snakes. So, needless to say, this was a wake up call for me to start scanning the trail in front of me for possible hazards. Just as in driving, the phone can wait, and besides, why do I need to be looking at my phone when I'm out communing with nature?

The second thing I've noticed is an abundance of flowers starting to bloom and lots of new growth along the trail. At this point, almost all of the poison oak has started to sprout again and there's plenty of areas where it's beginning to encroach on the trail and other areas. I had to archive one of my recent geocaches that I hid, because I didn't notice the beginnings of poison oak starting to grow near where I hid the cache. Now the area is overgrown with poison oak and I don't really want other cachers to get poison oak, so I removed the cache. "Leaves of three, let it be."

Because a lot of people don't know what poison oak looks like, I tend to avoid any and all dogs on the trail during this time. It kills me, because I'm such a dog lover, but if their owners don't know what poison oak looks like, then they're probably allowing their dogs to brush up against the stuff. It doesn't hurt the dog, but the oils will get all over the fur of the dog. If you pet a dog on the trail, all of that oil is just going to get on your hands and now you have poison oak. I've had it once and trust me, you don't want to get it as the rash is pretty painful.

And one last thing. Warmer weather also brings more people to the trail. Just like in driving, stay to the right when ever possible and yield to the uphill climber. Going downhill you have all the momentum with you and you can get it back again very easily, but uphill hikers need that momentum and it takes more energy to stop and then start moving against gravity. I guess the key thing is to be courteous. We need more of that in the world anyway.

Photographer's Choice

Four months. That's a long time between posts. In fact, it's the longest I've gone without writing anything here since this started back in June of 2019. Could I blame it on the fact that I haven't taken many photos over the last month? I could, but back in December, I took a lot of photos, but they didn't really meet the themes for the month, so I passed on even writing for the photo blogging challenge. Can I blame the new granddaughter? I could, but I won't. I wonder what I took photos of in December? Yeah, that's a no brainer, but I can't blame her so we'll just chalk it up to being lazy again. It's not like I don't have topics rattling around inside my head, but I just have been busy with other things.

So here we are at the beginning of another month and it's time once again for P.J.'s monthly photo blog challenge. This month, as the title suggests is Photographer's Choice, which means I can post just about anything I want that I've taken this past month. Fair warning right now, that this entire post is going to revolve around geocaching, so if you're not interested in that, feel free to move on.

This blog has always been dedicated to my wanderings and last month, I got to wander again, taking a geocaching trek to Yuma, Arizona. After a year hiatus (for obvious reasons), the annual SWAG (Southwestern Arizona Geocachers) mega event in Yuma was back. My friend Mike asked if I wanted to go with him and I said yes, since the last time I went two years ago, I had such a great time, I wanted to experience it again. I had a friend of mine from high school mention that he'd never seen the words "great time" and "Yuma" ever used in the same sentence. If you're a geocacher, you'd understand perfectly as it's kind of a geocaching Mecca for the area. And so we went, geocaching in Imperial County and Yuma County in Arizona for the entire four days we were out there. 

Part of the fun of the event is the new Adventures they post. As explained in other posts, an Adventure is similar to a virtual cache, except it also similar to a multi-cache, meaning it has more than one point to visit, but you don't have a container to find. The first photo was part of an Adventure in southeastern Imperial county and was called the Araz Station ruins. It was reportedly a stop on the Butterfield Stage route, but there's some debate over that. Nevertheless, we were there at sunset on the first day of the trip and the light made for some great shots.

Over the course of the weekend, we had some great food, found a lot of great caches and did some fantastic Adventures. We also experienced the Discover Yuma event, which is like a large geocaching scavenger hunt for information about Yuma and the surrounding area. Once complete, you bring your scoresheet back and you get a free geocoin, which is a tangible souvenir of the day's events. Mike had never done the Discover Yuma series before, so this was new to him and I did it last time I was there. It made for an enjoyable day on Saturday.

The second shot is of Mike and I in front of the log for the Mega Event which happened on Sunday morning. We did some hiking that morning picking up some more Adventure locations and found some other geocaches, then decided to do more caching in and around town as there's lots to do if you're a geocacher.

On Monday, we headed for home, but did a lot of caching on the way home. I even hosted an event in El Centro at the In-n-Out there as a way to attend an event in that county. There are challenges out there that want you to attend events in 10 contiguous counties. With that event, I now have attended events in 11 contiguous counties. Now I just need to go out and find that challenge so I can claim it. And with all of the caches we found in Imperial County that weekend, I bumped my overall count of finds there to 131, allowing me to claim the 10/100 California County Challenge. Yeah, find at least 100 caches in 10 different California counties. So I had that going for me as well by the end of the trip. Needless to say, it was a great weekend of geocaching.

The month wasn't over yet and geocaching was still a priority for me as I went on several other geocaching excursions over the next couple of weekends. One trip took me up to the high desert north of Victorville where we did a geo-art (caches laid out in the shape of something, like a smiley face). This particular series was called the Orion Series, because it was set up out in the desert to look like the constellation Orion. The best word I could use to describe many of the cache hides is whimsical. It's not often when you're looking for a cache and the cache ends up looking back at you.

But, part of the fun of geocaching besides finding them, is hiding them. So later in the month, I went on a hiding spree, hiding 6 new caches for people to find. The caches have all been found once and I believe there's a hiking group going out tomorrow to find these caches, which I hid in the wilderness park north of my house.

The fourth photo was taken near one of the cache hides. I called the hide 6 Posts for obvious reasons and it's by far, one of my favorite shots I've taken in the last couple of months. You'd think that a photo of 6 posts in the ground wouldn't do much, but I got very lucky with lighting and with the cloud cover that day to get, what I think anyway, is an extraordinary photo. If you look closely, the horizon is actually the Pacific Ocean, probably 40 miles away. It was a gorgeous day, considering I live in the Los Angeles Basin and we're not always so lucky to get such distant views.

Lastly, I've been upping my hiking this month as well. Midway through the month, I got my permit for a backpacking trip up into the Sierra Nevada at Cottonwood Lakes for August. I went last year, but we cut it short due to various circumstances, so I've started hiking more miles each and every day thus far to get my stamina up and to get my legs in shape. When the weather warms up, I'll start hiking at higher elevation as well. 

I took this shot a couple of days ago while out on a hike in the Marshall Canyon area, which is located just to the west of the Claremont Wilderness Park. In fact, the trails link up at the back side and you share some of the same trails if you hike the Marshall Canyon trail. The wild sunflowers are just starting to grow and bloom again and I thought the background of the canyon and the cloud filled sky to the east was perfect. As it is, this view today would look vastly different as there is now a huge plume of smoke from a wildfire that started burning today in about the same direction as this photo was taken. Fortunately, we supposed to get some rain over the next couple of days, so maybe it will be tamped out fairly quickly.

And there you have it, my five photos for P.J.'s photo challenge for this month. Please stop by his page to see how others interpreted the theme for this month.