Since I was visiting Fort Bragg’s Mendocino Coast Botanical Gardens in late October, I was surprised at how many brilliant flowers were blooming in the Perennial Garden. And even though shooting flowers wasn’t my main purpose for being there, it was impossible to walk past these beauties without stopping to check them out. I couldn’t always find signs to identify […]
I really wasn’t sure what to expect when I started the trail known as the Ecological Staircase at Mendocino County’s Jug Handle Reserve, but it turned out to be a really great hike — not too physically demanding and yet a decent workout. All the way out to the Pygmy Forest and back, it totals about 5 miles. After taking […]
At the Mendocino Coast Botanical Gardens in Fort Bragg, I was surprised to find so many different varieties of fuchsia, and each one of them more beautiful than the last!
This episode of California’s Gold, originally aired in August 2001, finds Huell discovering two very different pieces of history relating to California and China. I’ll admit when I read about the bonsai I was confused at first, since I’d always heard that it was Japanese in origin. However, it turns out that the related Chinese art of penjing is just […]
Today I’m taking a look back at an outing back in late October 2020, when the Big Guy took me down through the Sacramento Delta via roads I had never explored before. We stopped to look at the Old Sugar Mill on the Sacramento River in Clarksburg, and then meandered along to the Grand Island Mansion, sitting on a bend […]
You may have noticed I’ve been taking a break lately from Memory Monday; I haven’t been feeling too much inspiration from the material I have on hand. Maybe I’ll come back to it later on or something new will come up. In the meantime, I’ve still got loads of more recent memories that I enjoy looking back on. At the […]
Western Branded Skipper on rabbitbrush — Eagle Lake, Lassen County, September 2023
It’s not the type of terrain I normally fall in love with, but just look at the beautiful sagebrush hills and plains near Lassen County’s Eagle Lake! This is California’s second largest natural lake, and although the lake is low right now, I saw butterflies everywhere I looked. Cattle were bawling from somewhere across the fields. A cool breeze kept […]
During our brief stop at the Grand Canyon last June, the Big Guy and I were hoping to find a picturesque spot populated by a minimum of people; the site we chose was Shoshone Point. I think we were very lucky — it was still fairly early in the morning when we arrived, and in order to find the view, […]