When I visited Capitol Park in Sacramento, I was overwhelmed by all the different varieties of trees covering the grounds. I actually didn’t get a chance to see them all; so I have at least one good excuse for going back again. Luckily, this episode of California’s Gold stuck in my memory, and I spent a few minutes hunting up […]
Cee’s Black & White Photo Challenge last week was about All Things Farm Related, and that inspired me to share this fun episode of California’s Gold. I also just happened to hear a Capital Public Radio report the other day on the ways California vineyards are transitioning to new machine-based harvesting methods. It got me thinking about how technological change […]
Half the fun of this episode of California’s Gold is the mini road trips between stops, as Huell searches along the beautiful Lost Coast for the historic Cape Mendocino Lighthouse. He briefly revisits the small town of Petrolia, which you might remember from the episode I featured last week, California Firsts. He also discovers Honeydew, California, and is introduced to […]
You may have heard that oil wells are a Southern California thing, and the discovery of gold happened in the foothills of Northern California. Well, in this episode of California’s Gold we learn that just the opposite is true! The fact is that gold was first discovered on a quiet little rancho just north of Los Angeles; and the location […]
I’m a little embarassed to admit that after living my entire life in the Sacramento area, I had never actually visited the state capitol building until today. I became inspired to go explore it on Tuesday after watching this episode of California’s Gold, and I have to say I was not disappointed. In fact, I’m already looking forward to my […]
It’s a very odd feeling to look down in the dirt and spot a long yellow weed casually making its way across your path. As soon as I realized I was looking at a stick insect (Phasmatodea), I knelt down with my camera. Unfortunately, this was the best I could do, since he had no interest whatsoever in posing for […]
Salmon season is an annual event in my life, since we live relatively close to the American River, and The Big Guy is basically obsessed with catching and eating salmon rather than buying it at the supermarket. So every year — usually from late August through October — our normal schedule begins to revolve heavily around salmon fishing. I was […]
Coit Tower is such a famous part of the San Francisco city skyline it’s hard to imagine it not being there atop Telegraph Hill. Yet as much as I love seeing the tower and climbing to the top for the amazing views of the city, it’s the murals in the lobby that I most wanted to contemplate on my recent […]
When I was in San Francisco last week, one of the things I decided I had to see was a fairly nondescript intersection in North Beach. Maybe the reason was a little bit nutty — the TV show Monk (2002-2009). Of course, even though the series was set in San Francisco, very little of the actual filming took place there. […]