Day 3 (Saturday 25 March 2017): Highway 25 We spent our second night on the coast in Morro Bay and came home via Highway 25. I would have enjoyed a drive up the coast, but given the road closures in Big Sur that wasn’t a possibility. Highway 25, however, proved to be a very pretty…
Month: March 2017
The hunt resumes
Day 2 (24 March 2017): Tehachapi, Antelope Valley, and Wind Wolves We spent the night in Bakersfield and the next morning (24 March 2017) headed up over Tehachapi Pass and headed into Antelope Valley. It had been many years since I’d driven over Tehachapi Pass, and I didn’t remember ever having seen Joshua trees before….
The hunt continues
Day 1 (Thursday 23 March 2017) cont’d.: Carrizo Plain National Monument The Carrizo Plain is an enclosed grassy plain in the southernmost “toe” of San Luis Obispo County, lying between the Temblor Range to the northeast and the Caliente Range to the southwest. Its average elevation is about 700 meters (2200 feet). The main geological features of…
The hunt begins
RAIN + SUN = WILDFLOWERS That’s one of the truisms of life in a Mediterranean climate such as ours. The official water year as measured by NOAA runs from 1 October through 30 September, and along the central/northern California coast most of the rain falls from December through March. The rest of the year, April through the summer and most…
Complexity in small packages
Last week I went up to Davenport to do some collecting in the intertidal. The tide was low enough to allow access to a particular area with two pools where I have had luck in the past finding hydroids and other cool stuff. These pools are great because they are shallow and surrounded by flat-ish rocks,…
Just a human, being
Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about our species’ relationship to the natural world. These musings have been brought on not only by my own impairment and inability to spend as much time in the field as I would like, but also by the current political climate in the U.S. Recent Executive Branch appointments and…