A few days ago I was watching television and happened to see a familiar episode of California’s Gold — one that I featured here on my blog last May about the historic bells of the El Camino Real. You may recall that the last 30 minutes of that one-hour episode included a visit to the foundry where new bells were […]
One thing I love about the Northern California coast in the fall and winter is the changeable weather. In a single day, you might get rain, then sunshine, then fog. On this day in the middle of November we arrived on a warm, bright afternoon at the north entrance to the Stornetta Public Lands, along Lighthouse Road. In less than […]
I found quite a lot of the colorful Amanita muscaria or Fly Agaric mushrooms while hiking along the coast near Point Arena. I’m not sure why, but I just couldn’t seem to resist photographing them in this scenic setting.
Although the two sites have very little in common, I found that the erosion along portions of the Mendocino Headlands reminded me a lot of certain spots along the shoreline at Folsom Lake’s Rattlesnake Bar, seen in the two photos below, shot in December 2020.
I think I saw more ravens than gulls during our visit to Mendocino Headlands State Park earlier this month. While hiking around, I pulled a muscle in my lower back, so I left the Big Guy to wander while I limped back to the car. I was perched sideways in the driver’s seat, feeling more than a little sorry for […]
Last Wednesday I featured an exciting episode of California’s Gold in which Huell climbed to the top of Half Dome; and this week he’s also in Yosemite. This time he spends some time at a much lower elevation, learning about the original inhabitants of the Yosemite Valley and exploring some of the structures similar to those I’ve seen at Indian […]
Later this week we’ll be celebrating Thanksgiving in the US. While I have plenty to be thankful for personally, I also can’t help thinking about what this holiday must feel like from an indigenous perspective. Like most places in the world, California’s history contains both great feats of bravery and terrible acts of destruction and cruelty. Indigenous people and pioneers […]
Near Anchor Bay, Mendocino County, November 2021.
Back in early May of this year, I shared some slide images from 1985 featuring the area around Jackson, California — specifically Daffodil Hill and Indian Grinding Rock State Historic Park (Chaw’se). This week I’ve got a handful of previously overlooked slides from that same Gold Country trip. I can’t tell you exactly when they were shot, but the processing date […]