Checking on Caches

Today, I went on a hike up in the Claremont Wilderness Park. It was the first 5 mile hike doing one of the loops in several months and it really felt good to get out on the "trail." You'll notice I put the word trail in quotes. Park of the trail, as you can see here is a maintenance road leading up to a microwave tower on the hill overlooking this part of the wilderness park. When I hike, I always come up that way as it's pretty slippery and I'd rather slip going uphill as opposed to downhill. I very rarely take that particular trail downhill for that reason.

Anyway, part of the purpose, besides just getting out and enjoying the 75 degree January weather we're having, was to check on some of my caches along the trail since I hadn't been up this way in awhile. I'm happy to report that the ones that I checked on, all were right where they should be. 

I used to always worry about cache maintenance a lot and didn't have many cache hides, because I felt that if I had a lot of cache hides, then all my time would be taken up in cache maintenance and not cache finding. But over the years, I've gotten a different attitude regarding caches. First, you don't have to check on all of them all of the time. Second, pick an area and just check on the ones in that area. It works for me now and I'm still able to maintain a good balance between the two aspects of geocaching.

After checking on the caches along this part of the trail, I then headed into the interior of the park. Most of the hard part, the uphill slog along that slippery road was done and the rest of the hike was predominantly downhill on good dirt fire roads. I got to enjoy the views and the good weather. 

As I started working my way down the other side of the canyon, I descended into one of my favorite parts of the trail. It follows a stream that is intermittently wet and dry depending upon the season. There's lots of sycamore trees lining the creek bank which means it's usually cool, green and shady in the summertime, but today I could see lots of sky since the sycamores have dropped their leaves. I've also encountered several snakes and other wildlife in this section, but saw none today. Even the lizards which seem to be everywhere were only venturing out in the really sunny areas and this part wasn't sunny because of the lateness of the day.

I noticed some of the first weedy plants were starting to grow in this area too. I was particularly intrigued by the patterns on the leaves of this plant. I'm not sure what kind it is and I'm sure I wouldn't want to bushwhack through it. Look closely and you can see some nasty spikes on the end of each lobe of the leaves of this thing. Whatever it is, it definitely wants to protect itself, although, I seriously doubt it would stand a chance against a deer if they wanted to partake in eating it.

With more rain expected in the area in the next 10 days, the next time I get up on that part of the trail, the growth will be substantially lusher and taller. That's perfect, in my estimation.

The Magic of the Season

This one is a couple of days late, but it's because of the season. Yeah, that's my story and I'm sticking with it. Anyway, this is for P.J.'s Photo Blogging Challenge and the theme for last month was The Magic of the Season. Here's my take on this theme from Southern California.

1. Santa Bank

I have no idea how old this bank is, but if I were to hazard a guess, I'd say it's close to 80 years old, possibly older. I do know, however, that it sat under our family Christmas tree every year while I was growing up and it also sat under the family Christmas tree while my dad was growing up. About 20 years ago, my parents gifted it to me and it's held the same position of honor under our tree ever since. Eventually, I'll gift this to one of our children and hopefully, they'll continue the tradition.

2. The Christmas "Star"

This year we were able to be witness a "once in a lifetime" convergence of Jupiter and Saturn. My youngest has had an interest in astronomy since a very young age. I brought home a videotape about astronomy when they were 5 and they watched it over and over again. The quote I'll remember from that was at one point, they called me in and said, "Dad! This guy's an astronomer! And he gets paid to do it!"

Career choices change over time, but my youngest has had a large scale telescope since they were 5 or 6, so we hauled that out into the back yard to take a look at Jupiter and Saturn. The photo is exceedingly poor because we didn't have the right set up. I was aiming my iPhone through the eyepiece in the hopes of getting a decent shot and this was as good as it got.

What the photo doesn't show was the magnificence of the rings of Saturn, nor does it show three of the four large Jovian moon we could see as we gazed through the eyepiece. It was an amazing show from the heavens and definitely part of the magic of the season, at least this year.

3. Christmas Tree

The weather was good for a good portion of the month of December which afforded multiple opportunities for hikes in the foothills  north of my house. Apparently, it's a tradition by some of the locals who live close to the trailhead to decorate a tree near the trail.

This was new to me, but I found this Christmas tree to be quite festive. It's not often you stumble across a decorated pine tree on a trail away from suburbia.

4. Nativity Scene

The Claremont United Methodist Church has a nativity scene that fronts Route 66 in our town every year. But it's never a traditional nativity scene. It's always thought provoking, and meant to bring awareness to injustice of some kind. This year, the theme was "Black Lives Matter." You can read their 2020 Nativity Theological Statement here.

5. Snow, like clockwork

Every year, it's always the same thing. Right around Christmas Day, usually a couple of days afterwards, Southern California gets its first winter storm, which always blankets the local mountains. Then, after that storm, everything clears out and it's always gorgeous. ALWAYS! January 1st rings in the new year and we have sunny, mid 60s weather, with the mountains as our background.

And of course, the Rose Parade (with the exception of this year) broadcasts that weather to the entire nation. Only twice in the past 70 years, has it rained on the Rose Parade - both times coincidentally, when the Grand Marshal of the parade was a U.S. Supreme Court Justice (Earl Warren in 1955, and Sandra Day O'Connor in 2006). Usually, it's "sunny and mild" on New Year's Day.

And I blame the Rose Parade for the population in California. And I first have to place a disclaimer here because I'm not a native born Californian, having been born in Indiana. So I'm a transplant as well, but I had no control over that, since I've lived here since I was 3. But I still blame the Rose Parade. Every year, the great weather gets broadcast to the rest of the country and the conversation goes something like this:

"MARTHA! Come look! They're wearing shorts again in Southern California!"

"That's it George. It's time to move to California."

And there's my take on the Magic of the Season. Check out P.J.'s page and read how other people interpreted the theme this past month.

The Great Outdoors

For those of you who follow me on Facebook, you've already seen this, but I thought this was rather apropos for P.J.'s photo blogging challenge for this week, The Great Outdoors. So yeah, I'm cheating a little bit since this is actually a collection of 10 photos that I took on a hike this past week, but they work for the theme. 

The hike is an extended hike in a park up in the foothills above my house called the Claremont Hills Wilderness Park. It has a nice 5 mile loop that I extended to make it almost 7 miles. The trails up in the foothills intersect at various locations and the first photo is the sign where the parking lot for the park is located. From there, the trail then splits into either Burbank or Cobol Canyon and those two trails meet on the back side up in the hills. I went up the Cobol Canyon side and then extended it into Johnson's Pasture, which is a large portion not really part of the loop, but has several trails that run through. The hike then continues through Johnson's Pasture and back into the neighborhood where I parked my Jeep.

In June of 2019, I wrote for another photo challenge about encountering a bear on this trail near the back side up at a higher elevation. I've encountered a variety of wildlife on this trail, but it was relatively quiet on this hike.

I found a new app called Relive, which takes your data as you walk and then puts into satellite images to give you a 3D video of your hike. This video is the second video I've created. Neither one is perfect. The first one, I forgot about the aspect ratio and so the edges were cut off so you couldn't see the data. This one has all of the photos interspersed on the hike, but I think it breaks up the hike aspect of it too much. I'll be working with this app in the future as I go on more and more hikes now that the weather has finally started to cool down again.

So here's my interpretation of The Great Outdoors. Please stop by the link at the top of the page to see how others interpreted this them for this month.

Badlands

Back in the 60s, my dad's best friend took a sabbatical from teaching to pursue an advanced degree. He ended up getting his degree from a university in Wisconsin and they ended up taking the entire family back for the year. When they returned his son, my friend had new decal stickers, one of which was from Badlands National Monument. Being the map nerd that I am, I was intrigued and looked it up and thought at some time in the future, it would be interesting to visit the park. Since that time, Congress has upped the status of the monument and now it's a national park located east of Mt. Rushmore in South Dakota.

As we approached Badlands National Park, we kept seeing advertisements for Wall Drug, which is a major tourist trap just north of the park. Yeah, we stopped there, only to look around, find a tee-shirt of the place, mainly because I like advertising weirdly different stuff I've visited and then headed south out of town into the park. The park is a geologic wonderland of erosion and there were pullouts along the road with many interpretive signs. We ended up stopping at several, including one where there was a herd of young bighorn sheep. The sheep are very hard to see mainly because they blend in so well with the browns of the badlands, which is why there are no photos of them here.

At another turnout, we stopped and took a walking tour of an interpretive loop trail while we gathered answers for an earth cache based upon fossils. The area is rich in fossil life and we weren't disappointed, getting to see several different varieties of fossils in the rock layers. What was also outstanding about the day was the weather. As you can see from the photos, we ended up driving through the beginnings of a large series of thunderstorms as we made our way across southern South Dakota that day. The first storm started while we were on our way out of the visitors center at the east end of the park heading back to the Interstate (third photo). The clouds made for some gorgeous photo opportunities. And, as always, I could have spent more time there, but we had an itinerary to keep to and were actually attending a geocaching event in South Dakota later that evening (who goes to a geocaching event several thousand miles from home?).

I'm sure I'll get back to the area in the future and the plan will be to camp a couple of nights there to fully enjoy the park. We got an appetizer of the park that day, be enough that made us both want to come back.

On our way back out to the Interstate, we got pelted with rain, as we had earlier the day before coming from Wind Cave National Park. This time, the storm got a little bit more severe as we drove across the South Dakota prairie. We had the radio on and we kept getting the weather alerts, those alerts that we rarely get in Southern California because we don't get any kind of severe weather, but scares the bejesus out you when they come on. These were coming every fifteen minutes detailing thunderstorms and worse, hail storms, with hail the size of ping pong balls.  Later, the size of the hail stones were "upgraded" to golfball size hail. Fortunately, they also listed counties where this was likely to happen and my youngest was tracking it using the atlas and checking out where the counties were and all of the major alerts were south of the Interstate, so we missed the hail, but did get an entertaining thunder and lightning storm accompanied by very heavy rain. Fortunately, the geocaching event was under a covered shelter in a park, so we stayed high and dry for the entire event except when we were walking to and from our car. 

I've attended five geocaching events out of state and every one has been very enjoyable. We share a common hobby and it's always fun to swap stories with the local geocachers. We'd had problems with a cache near our motel and I mentioned it to one of the cachers there and he pointed me to another cacher who was the owner. The owner of the cache met up with us back at his cache after the event and we discovered that the cache was indeed missing, so he replaced it with another one he'd had in his car. He had been intending on giving it to us, but instead, gave us a couple others that he had made using his 3D printer. And so I have a cache container that looks like an oak acorn and another one that looks like a pine cone. They are my souvenirs from South Dakota geocaching.

The next day we left South Dakota behind and headed into Minnesota and Iowa, spending the next night in northern Iowa in Mason City.

My World

I don't participate every month is P.J.'s Monthly photo blog, but this month's theme (Your World) made for a fairly easy set of photos. I know I really should attempt them every month, so I'll try to do better in the coming months. I've picked up my DSLR again since I've been in "shelter and place" and I have a lot of photos to choose from this month. I think I could probably come up with at least 10 different shots, just from my walks around the neighborhood over the past month, but here's my 5 that captures my world this month.

1. Weathervane

I'm a sucker for cool things like sundials and weathervanes. This particular weathervane is located on top of a house north of me, but in the same general neighborhood. Since I don't take the same route, I don't see this every day, but I noticed it early in the month and thought I really should take a photo of it, since it represents some interesting architecture, especially for Southern California. You don't see too many of these and I like that it gives off a New England kind of vibe. The only give away is the palm tree in the lower left hand corner of the shot. I could have edited that out, but that would have meant cropping some of the cupola out and I wanted that to be the main focus of the shot, and so the palm tree remains.

I remembered the next time I was out to take a photo of it, but the quality of the iPhone shot wasn't what I considered good enough, so I ended up throwing those shots away. I don't take the DSLR out every day, so the next time I walked around the neighborhood with the DSLR, I made sure to walk up that particular street. Because the weather had changed, we had some clouds in the sky which made for a more pleasing background to the shot.

2. Amusement Park

Twenty years ago, I was really into Roller Coaster Tycoon and particularly, Roller Coaster Tycoon 2 (RCT2). The game is one of many out on the market that allows you to play amusement park scenarios, while creating an amusement park, maintaining a budget, building roller coasters of various kinds and making sure your peeps are happy. The thing about Tycoon 2 that made it so good as you could also create buildings into your park and really make your park look like the real deal, with interesting architecture and themed areas.

There are other programs out on the market now, but there's also OpenRCT2 which emulates RCT2 perfectly as long as you have the original disks, however it also comes with enhancements that allow you to play in Sandbox mode. In other words, instead of playing scenarios, you can just create your own landscape and build your own park. Needless to say, I've been playing a lot of OpenRCT2 the last couple of months and this is a screen shot of a flying roller coaster (one where the peeps lay down and it makes it feel like they're flying) that I built in one of my sandbox mode games.

3. Family FaceTime

Our immediate family is spread out with some in the Bay Area of California and the rest of us down here in Southern California. Under normal circumstances, I probably would have visited my daughter when she had her birthday at the end of last month, but couldn't due to shelter in place, so we FaceTimed. That has grown into a weekly event so that everyone can touch bases with each other and enjoy each others' company. My daughter suggested that we have weekly themes. Last week, it was crazy hats, this week, it was Toga. It's amazing what a couple of actual olive branches from the tree in the back yard and a sheet will do to help you win the theme for the week. 

This image got posted on Facebook earlier this week and everyone has had a good laugh at my expense, but it was worth it. I got my wife to smile/laugh in the background of the photo as well, so it's all good.

4. Ornithology

I don't claim to be an expert on birds, but I do have an interest in them and with spring here, there are lots of birds out and about, probably more due to the lack of people out and about. If the theme for the month had been birds, I would have been able to have five different kinds of birds with ease. I have a book that was published by the National Geographic Society entitled Field Guide to the Birds of North America and it has been quite helpful in letting me identify most of the birds I've seen while out on walks around the neighborhood. This spring, I've seen California Towhees, Spotted Towhees, a Cooper's hawk, hummingbirds, scrub jays, two different kinds of sparrows, two different kinds of finches, and several Western Bluebirds, such as this one who posed ever so nicely on a branch in the park just north of my house. 

I'm pretty sure the Spotted Towhees and the Bluebirds are both nesting in some trees in the park. A friend of mine says that I've been lucky with the Spotted Towhees as they are usually heard and not seen, but I've been able to spot them on two different occasions. There are more than just a couple of bluebirds in the park. I've seen at least three different ones, which is why I'm fairly certain they're nesting somewhere in the park as well.

5. Earth Day

This year was the 50th anniversary of the first Earth Day. I was in 6th grade at the time, so yeah, I know I'm old. Once again, under ordinary circumstances, I probably would have celebrated in some other way than sheltering in place, but there's not much I could do at this particular time. And so I take photos.

Besides birds, the insects are also out in force, particularly, the ladybugs. Insects and creepy crawlies give me different sorts of challenges, as unlike birds, you can usually get quite close to insects. I've been using a variety of lenses to take photos of ladybugs, honeybees, bumblebees, butterflies and other assorted insects and arachnids. This particular shot I used my 250 zoom macro lens to get up close and personal with a couple of bugs doing what nature intended them to do. I'm very pleased with the focus on this particular shot.

And that, my friends, is my interpretation of the theme, "Your World" for P.J.'s Monthly Photo Blogging challenge. Please click on the link and see how other people interpreted the theme of their world. As always, please feel free to comment. I won't bite.

Whimsical Art

The next day was devoted to driving to Denver, Colorado. The plan was to visit the Denver Art Museum (DAM) the following day because there was a large retrospective exhibit of Claude Monet paintings that had just opened up the third Monday of October. I had heard about this exhibit months before I retired and had decided that I wanted to see it and this was the perfect time to go. Other works of art that are temporary exhibits I hadn't been able to attend because of time restrictions mainly because of work. Now, with the time off and this exhibit only going to be at the DAM until February, I made it a priority to attend. I'll be writing about the Monet exhibit in a future blog post.

Those of you who know me well, know I like a variety of art, with photography up near the top of the list. I also enjoy whimsical pieces and temporary pieces of art. Usually, temporary pieces of art tend to be environmental pieces and so they blend in with the landscape. The Field of Lights that I wrote about here or much of what Christo and Jeanne-Claude have created, fall into that category. Because environmental art is usually outside, you get to watch the play of light or weather on the pieces, which creates different moods to the piece.

There were several pieces of art outside the DAM that fit this description. The first one that caught my eye was the Giant Broom and Dustpan outside the entrance of the museum annex. As you can see by the photo, it's a giant broom and dustpan with a couple of pieces of rubble caught up in the bristles of the broom.

The beauty of art is that it's open to interpretation. What some people find fascinating, others will look at it and go "Huh?"  Art is subjective. I like art like this. I also enjoy a good sense of humor, which the museum definitely has, based upon the sign at the base of the Giant Broom and Dustpan.

I get that the museum doesn't want people climbing all over the sculpture and they could have just posted a sign stating quite clearly, "KEEP OFF THE SCULPTURE." But where the fun in that? And so we're left with this sign posted at the base of the Giant Broom and Dustpan, giving appropriate behavior when around such a thing. Clearly, a lot of thought went into this, because it's appropriate to verbally abuse the broom, but it's not OK to skate on the broom. Looking at it, I could see where skaters might be able to grind on some of the bristles, which could damage the sculpture and probably put the museum in a liability bind. Better to be safe than sorry I suppose. And what's the difference between touching, fondling and caressing? Yeah, we could get into a lengthy discussion on that, but I don't think I really want to go there, do you?

I have a couple of regrets regarding this piece of work. First, I should have gotten a photo of the piece with a person near it so you could see the scale. This is actually a pretty large piece of art. Second, I should have gone back to see it after the snow fell that night. I was back in the same general area the next day and could have easily walked over and seen what it looked like with snow covering it, but I got involved in a couple of other things and it completely slipped my mind. And so it goes. 

My next couple of posts will be dedicated to art on the inside of the museum.