Looking forward, sideways, and backward

While on an April Fool's Day hike in the South Park area north of Chandler Road, I had a flashback of the kind of view that got me excited about hiking up mountains when I was a teenager.  Click on this first photo for a closer view of my pickup which we could first see after hiking a mile or so. When I add a little imagination, I can still see the White Mountains of New Hampshire where my younger brother and I loved hiking through dense forest and every once in a while getting a new, distant view of where we parked our car.  I've enjoyed that sensation many times since while hiking the trail to the top of Lassen Peak.  Every few switchbacks provide a new, distant view of where we came from.  I get a similar feeling when hiking or driving to the top of nearby Mt. Hough where the town I live in looks more and more like a airplane view and the people look like ants and the cars look like toys.  Back in 1981 I published a two-part essay called "The View from the Top" based on "scaling" Mt. Hough both ways.

I brought my camera on yesterday's hike in case I found my first photogenic wildflowers of the season.  And I did.  However, on these wildflower hikes, I'm constantly looking every which way for anything that I might find interesting, such as the ants in the above photo.  Besides the ants, we also saw lots of baby fence lizards, but they were too fast for me to get a good photo.  Plus, it was  getting too hot for me to have Ansel Adams' patience.  We hiked onward, still looking sideways.

Then I started finding patches of leaves that forecast the next wave of wildflowers.  These lupine leaves were among at least a dozen species of flowers that should be blooming in the next few weeks in this area.  They also whetted the appetite for my first photo trip of the season down Feather River Canyon where some of them might already be blooming.  Thinking Wednesday so I can beat the next rainstorm that's been forecast.  Destinations - Caribou Road, Bear Creek Falls, and points between.  This year's first major test of my peripheral vision.

Rite of Spring

 I got that exciting feeling back, looking for spring wildflowers.  Three locations during a warm, sunny afternoon.  The first three wildflowers I found were in the Southpark Trail system above Chandler Road.  Above is the Spring Whitlow Grass, all of 1/4" in diameter.  Below are two views of Henderson's Shooting Star.

 Finally, Shelton's Violet.  After hiking in this area for about an hour, I drove down the Old Keddie Highway, then on the Golden Eagle Avenue, the main road leading into Feather River College.  Too 54 photos altogether, and I'll be posting more tomorrow along with anticipated hikes for the remainder of the week. 

Transitions

 On a cloudy Sunday morning, I am multi-tasking.  Snow in my front yard, but just a few hundred yards away, the Crocuses are blooming in front of Patti's Thunder Cafe - formerly known as Morning Thunder.  Back at home now, I am writing about John Muir for my summer class Nature Literature in America.  The topic at hand is the transition in Americans' views of nature at influenced by Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, and Aldo Leopold.  The transitions represented by these three amazing writer/philosophers stretch my mind anew every time I read them.  I feel especially fortunate that I can still energetically wander in the woods and couple my reading with close contact with "wild" nature.  I can experience the transition from winter to spring by simply walking down the hill from my wintery house to the harbingers of spring at Patti's.  Not nearly as dramatic, and certainly not as daring, as Muir's scrambling over a range of 4,000 feet in elevation in a single day, nor my own round-trip hike to the bottom of Grand Canyon and back in a single day, yet sufficient to stir memories and provoke philosophical meanderings.

 The Crocuses will be open by this afternoon, the forecast for which is Sunny.  The daffodils,

however, will bloom later, maybe after the rains expected later this week.  I'm experiencing my physical and mental wanderings in a linear fashion, but am frequently reminded that what is really going on is cyclical.  It is also political.  I am hopeful that the current political winter we (or I) are experiencing will turn into Spring.

Stone Age Snow Gauge

 Looks like about a foot, but I don't think they had rulers back then.  But it matches my foot, and it's still snowing.  I was about to write "we return to normal," but I think normal is undergoing revision. 

 I got my 2WD pickup stuck at the side of my driveway, then went out to do some necessary errands in m wife's AWD Subaru.  Although I had no trouble getting around, the other drivers scared me.  A woman in a small red sedan tried to change lanes in front of me and did a 360.  Luckily, I had enough traction to avoid her, but I couldn't help but wish I had avoided her big smile.  Since there was no collision, she'll probably remember the event as fun.

This shot reminds me that I haven't thought about snow loads for several years.  With another storm forecast for latter half of the week, I am thinking about snow loads again.  Much needed moisture is welcome despite the surprises and inconveniences.

Forever Young

A young White Fir on a trail in Boyle Ravine. Made me think about a Bob Dylan song I first discovered on a Joan Baez recording.  When I walked by it the first time, there was a single, dead Dogwood leaf resting on it.  On the way back, it was gone.  The ground below the sapling was covered with last season's Black Oak and Big Leaf Maple leaves with a sprinkling of Dogwood.  It felt good to be in a place that reminded me that I was enjoying a moment in time in a place where some things have not changed for thousands of years.

Do good fences make good neighbors?

 Took a short walk up Boyle Ravine this morning and came across this "fence."  It was apparent that is purpose was to prevent fallen branches and other debris from clogging the culvert under the dirt service road.  That makes sense from a water management standpoint.  If the culvert got clogged, water would build up upstream from the road.  Eventually it would overflow and break through the road and flood residences downstream.  But building the road in the first place invited the problem. There are many complicated issues with managing Boyle Ravine which was threatened by the huge fires at the end of last summer.  However, for me, on this casual walk, it stimulated memories of Frost's poem, Mending Wall, in which the narrator questions his neighbor about why do we have this wall between us anyway.  Every winter "something" tries to tear it down.  he question is posed several times and the neighbor responds the same every time: "Good fences make good neighbors." That neighbor probably never visited the USA/Mexico border.

One stirred memory usually leads to another.  I grew up among New England's stone walls, so I remember why they were built, and used to enjoy running across the tops of them until one day I tripped and smashed my forehead on my way off the wall.  But walls mean something different to me now.  As fourth-grade engineers, we used to enjoy building little dams across streams and raising the water level a few inches to maybe a foot. One day we found a spot on a stream with high banks and thought we'd try to build a taller dam, just to see if we could.  When the water depth reached at least three feet, after a long afternoon of rock work, the dam burst and flooded a neighbor's corn field.  We were very frightened of getting caught and ran quite a ways before we were pretty sure no one was chasing us.  An experience with power over nature.  For some people, there's never enough power and hubris.  Thus, we have the Oroville Dam fiasco.  Now I mostly see dams, fences, and walls as dividers between peoples. I also remember in high school days crossing from Vermont into Canada dozens of times with no more inspections than a quick look at my driver's license.  Gone are the days.
Not too long ago, I crossed easily into Tecate, Mexico, and even Tijuana.  I wouldn't even try it today. 

Trying to understand the past

 I'm reposting these two images from my January musings by way of explaining the absence of posts for nearly a month.  I've re-named the above image "Age 6" and the one below "Age 70 something."

The first clearly is connected somehow in my memory bank to the second.  Also rattling around in the mix is the influence of Richard Dawkins' book Unweaving the Rainbow."  The central issue in that book was the question of whether scientific understanding of natural phenomena enhances or diminishes one's experience of said phenomena.  Newton's demonstration that white light (AKA sunlight) is composed of a mixture of many wavelengths (colors) that can be separated as by a prism or in nature by raindrops and mist.
These thoughts are all connected to my attempt to put together a kind of memoir of my life's experiences in education as student, parent, and instructor.  Wish me luck.  See the column to the left of this post for another version of this update.