travel

| Emily

Happy Birthday To Me – now that I’m officially “old” (I’m sure you can guess what age I just turned), I’m hoping things will improve this year. The birthday weekend in question was spent in the “high dry mountain desert” of central California. Quite an odd landscape, wedged in between flat-as-a-pancake agricultural  fields and foggy windy coast. The dry and crumbly mountains are striated sideways due to tectonic forces and the crumbly dry sandstone and conglomerate is full of old sea rocks and fossils. Today, it’s mostly full of bullet casings (shotgun, 22, 44, and more!) and mineral encrusted rocks with not a drop of water to be found.

BLM lands were a wonderful find if you want to get away from the horrible user interface and overpriced suckage that is Reserveamerica (the contractor for the state, and national park systems). Since we didn’t decide a year ago that we wanted to camp this weekend, I’m pretty sure the state, county, and federal parks systems are all packed with RV and family vacation reservations from last January. Obviously the parks don’t care about tourists, odd work schedules, last minute through hikers, budgets or basically anything that should make our taxpayer funded parks accessible and open to all. Oh, and I didn’t have $43 to dump on a patch of dirt that I’ll be driving to myself, and pitching a tent on that I brought myself, to sleep on for the night. I’m not sure what the value added is to that patch of dirt that requires an $8 reservation fee and a fee increase of $2-4 every year?

No, I have found the wonder that is the Bureau of Land Management – if only it weren’t for all the damn ranch fences, it would have been downright perfect. We went equipped with the offroad vehicle, food, tent, water, and a tarp with poles for shelter, but we never even needed it! All these wilderness management areas had campsites that were completely open and completely free of charge, including really well designed shelter with a picnic table constructed of steel – complete with short benches for cooking under the waterproof metal shelter should it be raining! What a find. Sure, there’s not much to do there aside from walk, sit, hike around on a dirt road and it’s hot and dry as hell, but at least you’re alone. That’s the point of camping, right?

We saw and heard a variety of creature while there, from shrub jays to coyotes, and a tarantula (!) as well as tons of annoying giant gnats. We basically enjoyed ourselves until we came back to foggy, freezing San Francisco and the reality that is my foot pain, ongoing and extended rehab process, neighbor who wakes me up at 2 am every day and the hellish job search. At least the BLM adventure afforded the opportunity get out in the woods – especially since I still can’t hike – and have a couple night’s peace and quiet (aside from the damn coyotes, that is – it was a full moon.) 

| Emily

See how few people there are in that picture? That’s where I’ll be this weekend and I can’t wait. It’s going to 90 degrees, dry, dusty and desolate. The perfect antidote to cold, damp, windy and crowded with people who couldn’t be bothered with me unless I paid them to. Did I mention I’m going camping – or shall I call it “crutch-camping”? If I’m brutal enough to go camping when I can’t even walk, I can probably handle sitting at a desk and typing on a computer. It’s no big deal. (That’s a hint – you know, in case you have a job for me.) 

Injured Baby Harbor Seals! The Marine Mammal Center.

| Emily

Solar panels over the healing tanks for the seals and sea lions

Visited the Marine Mammal Center in the Marin Headlands this weekend. It was a gorgeous, sunny day before the fourth of July and I figured it would be mobbed! There were plenty of volunteers on hand and I found out the MMC is open almost every day except for two major holidays. 

The MMC rescues injured marine mammals, like harbor seals and sea lions, from all over the California coast. Reading through the exhibits, we learned about Niblet, the elephant seal and other patients of the MMC – animals that had been shot by humans, abandoned by their parents, injured by boats, or entangled in fishing line and plastic trash. As it turned out, plastic trash is a major focus of the Center – so much so that they were hosting a really unique exhibit of sealife-themed art sculptures created from ocean debris and plastic trash collected from beaches. 

That’s me inside the artistic recreation of the Pacific trash gyre

A great community art project headed up by Angela Pozzi, the Washed Ashore Exhibit is still open, so check it out! It is disconcerting to see such elegant and colorful sculptural forms recreated entirely from ocean trash – some pieces many decades old. The diversity of shape, color, texture, and size of trash collected makes an impact on the viewer. 

Fish created from the soles of foam flip flops. 

A seal!

The take-home message, of course, is to reduce trash disposal in our oceans – and to reduce our consumption of plastics. This isn’t always possible – I bought a product from the drugstore today, for example, that was enclosed in one of those horrible plastic clamshells – and you don’t always have a choice in how your products are packaged. However, plastic bags – which can easily drift or blow into the ocean – plastic water bottles, which are often thrown out instead of recycled, and discarded fishing lines and lures, are culprits in many of the injuries and deaths seen by the MMC. These products are also easy to avoid using if you choose to reuse a plastic or cloth bag or a resuable water bottle – the fishing nets, lines, and lures are a bit more difficult a problem to be sure. 

A fish of trash.

Make sure you visit the sick seals next time you drive across the Golden Gate Bridge to visit beautiful Rodeo Beach. If you’re lucky, this exhibit will still be up. 

P.S.

It’s handicapped accessible!

Tennessee Valley Trail – newts, birds, thistles, and waves.

| Emily

Went for a wander on the Tennessee Valley Trail in Marin County yesterday. There was sooo much to see and hear! It was uniquely wonderful being away from the constant onslaught of background noise in the city. I could actually hear the waves crashing in the distance more than a mile away from the shore … in addition, meadowlarks, hawks, ravens, insects, wind in the grasses and just the silence. I saw many unique plants including springtime’s burgeoning pussywillows along the stream, splashy striped milk-thistles, and waving marsh-grasses. 

 

Milk thistle beside the path – the white stripes really do look like drizzles of milk on the glossy green leaves. 

We also saw many animals – a long legged heron of some sort standing upwards of the path, his feathers ruffling in the wind (probably just got done fishing in the freshwater pond), odd grape-clustered barnacles clinging to rocks by the roiling waves, tiny brown limpets crammed into all the cracks in the rocky face of the cliff, little brown thrushes or sparrows flitting amongst the pussywillows, and finally at the end of the trail, a cute tiny little lizard in brick red with lime green eyes. It turns out, when I got home, that it might be identified as a Rough Skinned Newt (juvenile phase), although I’m not sure if they have green eyes. It looks about the same though, and was crawling along the path nearby the stream where it might have originated. Of course, I picked it up and put it off the path so no runners would stomp on it, and realized after getting home and looking it up that it’s a toxic little beastie (tetrodotoxin to be precise). Oops. I suppose I’m used to living in Maine where nothing out there is really poisonous/venomous/dangerous. I will have to read up quite soon on California flora/fauna. What is a good resource or book I can get from the library? 

| Emily

Very old rosemary (bush? tree?) in the San Francisco Botanical Garden. They had several of these in the “fragrance garden”. Lovely!!