Blog

Sporadic dispatches from the hinterlands.

April Weekend around Santa Cruz

Wrentit, Waddell Creek

We spent this weekend exploring the area near home. It was like being on a camping trip, except we camped in our bed at home. On Friday we trekked out to Henry Coe State Park near Gilroy, and spent the day doing a leisurely hike, with numerous stops for listening to birds and looking at flowers. After several years of extreme drought, we finally got some rain this winter, and the flowers were out in profusion.

We didn't see as many birds as we had hoped, but there was plenty to look at along the trail.

Bobcat, Henry Coe

On Saturday we were still inspired to be outdoors, so we headed a short distance up the coast to Waddell Creek and Rancho del Oso. We braved the mosquitoes of the Marsh Trail long enough for Joy to get the photo of the Wrentit at the top of this post, then retreated to a drier area to watch juncos and chipmunks.

Sunday we went out for one more, spending a few hours walking around the UCSC Arboretum and farm. We found some nice birds near the farm buildings.

Overall, a pretty good weekend, considering we stayed home!

Yosemite Valley

We went to Yosemite Valley for a weekend trip, hoping to see Yosemite in winter and take a few pictures. We didn't want to camp, so we got a room at Yosemite Lodge. This required making a reservation several weeks in advance, so we gambled on the weather. January in the Sierra could mean anything, but in an El Nino year like this one, the odds favor precipitation. We hoped for some spectacular light in between storms, but what we encountered was more quietly cloudy.

We took a long walk in the rain on Saturday, with only occasional glimpses of El Capitan, Cathedral Rocks. and Yosemite Falls. Overnight, the rain turned into snow, and we enjoyed a beautiful snowy stroll on Sunday morning.

Lone Pine, the Inyos, and Panamint Valley

We went camping over our Winter break, spending Christmas in the southern Owens Valley area. I wanted to try to get some pictures of sunrise on the east face of a snow-covered Mt. Whitney, and we wanted to get out of town. We headed to the Alabama Hills, just outside of Lone Pine, California.

It's cold over there in the depths of winter, and especially so when you get up before sunrise to take pictures. We sleep warm inside the rooftop tent, so that's not a problem, but it does make for some long nights when we retreat into the tent by 7 pm or so. The first couple of days were good, but once it got windy, we decided to head for a motel in town.

After enjoying pizza and old movies in the motel room, we were ready to head out again. We drove up into the Inyo Mountains, east of Lone Pine. We enjoyed the views of Owens Lake and the Sierra from the Inyos, passed through the old mining town of Cerro Gordo, then went down the steep east side of the Inyos on a rough jeep road. At a couple of points on this excursion, I was very glad to have the locking rear differential on the truck; I was spinning the tires in 4 low until I used the locker. We ended up in a Joshua tree woodland called Lee Flat, inside Death Valley National Park, just before sunset.

The morning temperature was about 19 degrees F (-7 C), but the day soon warmed. We decided to go look at one of the side canyons off Panamint Valley. The road into Wildrose Canyon was blocked as a result of flash flooding earlier in the year, so we ended up in Surprise Canyon, which had a nice flow of water but too much mining debris for our taste.

On the way out, we took the back roads past Darwin Falls, China Garden Spring, and the town of Darwin in Death Valley National Park. I was intrigued to visit a town named after Charles Darwin, but I quickly realized that this wasn't the case. The town was founded in 1874; Charles Darwin's Origin of Species was first published in 1859. The town of Darwin was actually named after a fellow named Darwin French, apparently named after Erasmus Darwin, Charles' grandfather.

After Darwin, we went back for one more might at the Dow Villa Motel in Lone Pine. It's close enough to the Alabama Hills that I was able to get up before dawn and go shoot more photos. Finally, we headed home, with a stop to sample the beer at Firestone Walker Brewery in Paso Robles.

Welcome

Welcome to our new site. We're starting up this new site as of January, 2016. We're trying out Squarespace as a new way to show off our photos. We hope to use this site as a portfolio and for our occasional blog entry. This site is going to be public, unlike our old one, which required sign in.

We're mainly making the site to share with our friends and family, but if you don't know us and you just stumbled on the site, welcome. We hope you like it.

The technical side:

We've had our old blog and photo site (joyandbrian.net) up for years now, but we've been having some problems with it. We were using SlideShowPro to display the photos in our galleries, but it depends on Flash, and many browsers now block Flash by default. We tried another some other gallery software (Koken), but it was very slow. We ended up deciding to have our new photo site hosted at Squarespace instead of hosting it on our own server space at our old site. We'll see how it goes.

For now, the old site is going to remain online but dormant.