Spring Break – It Must Be Death Valley Time
Over the past few years I have made it a habit to head to Death Valley to do photography during the spring break. As a faculty member at an institution that is on the quarter system, my break is always right around the first week of April and just a week or so into spring.
I have such a plan this year. Right now I’m finishing up the end-of-winter-quarter business at school, and at the same time starting to think through my plans for this little trip. Odds are I’ll be there for 4 or 5 days, but I like to stay a bit flexible so that I can respond to interesting changes in conditions – weather, word of a wildflower bloom, etc.
To my mind, this is pretty much the tail end of the Death Valley “high season.” By early April it isn’t unusual to already start to encounter days where the temperature rises into the 90 degree range. I’m of the opinion that only crazy people (and, apparently, European tourists) would want to go to the Valley in the middle of summer – but they do. From what I hear some folks want to face the challenge of experiencing the truly extreme conditions of the hot season there. To be honest, there is a part of me that understands this, but my preference is to go during the “cool” season that extends from late fall up until right about now.
Revving up the blog
Now that spring has arrived – and my spring break approaches – it seems like time to start posting here once again. It is not that I haven’t been out and about. (I have – see my photography blog.) But for some reason I just haven’t been making the time to post here as often as I used to this past winter.
Hey, More Wilderness!
SF Gate reports that congress has voted to expand wilderness areas in nine states, perhaps the largest such moves in about a quarter century. Is that a breath of fresh air I feel!?
(Predictably, Republican opponents described the protection of a few more remaining bits of American wonder as a “land grab.” Funny, I thought they supported “land grabs…” But I guess that is only as the ones doing the grabbing are their corporate donors. ;-)
California Spring Flowers
Despite the concerns about low rainfall this year in parts of California, there are some hopeful signs of a decent and perhaps even quite good spring wildflower bloom. A few notes:
- I have visited Muir Woods twice during the past few weeks (some photos at my other site) and last weekend spectacular trillium flowers were just beginning to bloom
- There have been reports of some very spectacular – though perhaps a bit early – blooms of the California Golden Poppy. One that is getting a lot of attention is in an area of a recent fire along the highway following the Merced River up into Yosemite Valley.
- Today I saw some fairly good photographs of flowers in the southern California desert, where there actually has been some real rain this season.
For my part, I’m afraid I didn’t get at all so far this weekend to look for flowers – I seem to have a pretty nasty cold!
A Good Sound on the Trail
Today, for the first time in almost a year, I heard the sound of running water during my hike in the Calero Hills. Here in dry California that is a special thing!
To Quote Muir…
“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything in the universe.”
This thought occurred to me just now as I came across a story in the New York Times about a possible link between earthquakes and dam construction in China – Possible Link Between Dam and China Quake.
Nearly nine months after a devastating earthquake in Sichuan Province, China, left 80,000 people dead or missing, a growing number of American and Chinese scientists are suggesting that the calamity was triggered by a four-year-old reservoir built close to the earthquake’s geological fault line.
A Columbia University scientist who studied the quake has said that it may have been triggered by the weight of 320 million tons of water in the Zipingpu Reservoir less than a mile from a well-known major fault. His conclusions, presented to the American Geophysical Union in December, coincide with a new finding by Chinese geophysicists that the dam caused significant seismic changes before the earthquake.
While the story reports that a quake on the fault would occur eventually in any case – that’s what happens on earthquake faults – the realization that human endeavors of this sort are not without unpredictable consequences could be extrapolated to other important (very important – e.g. climate change) environmental issues and argue for some caution.
A Passion for Nature
In the New York Times, John Wilson reviews a new Muir biography, A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir, by Donald Worster.
The nature lover and conservationist John Muir is at once famous and indistinct in the minds of most people. Doubtless there are ardent souls who could give a credible account of his life, but not many — not even among those who share the passion that led Muir in 1867, at age 29, to embark on a thousand-mile walk from Indiana to the Gulf of Mexico and drove him to continue rambling hither and yon throughout his long life. Muir is revered but remote. He needs a substantial biography to bring him into focus.
It is incorrect to suggest that this is the first Muir biography, but this does sound like an interesting book for those who want to know more about Muir that that which the Muir myth tells us – and I count myself in that group.
Boy Scouts, Nature, and the American Way
From an article in SFGate:
The last large stand of woods in a Seattle suburb. A scenic canyon just outside of Los Angeles. Rangelands deep in the heart of Texas…. All are set to be felled, filled and bulldozed so that stately homes, a reservoir and perhaps even a hydroelectric plant may one day rise in their place.
Aside from their now unspoiled, ecologically sensitive settings, the lands share a common bond: The Boy Scouts of America sold them for development.
Sigh…
Think climate scientists disagree about global warming? Think again!
A post in Dr. Jeff Masters Wunderblog sheds some light on the overwhelming agreement among climate scientists that human activity is affecting the earth’s climate:
According to a 2007 Newsweek poll, 42% of Americans believe that “there is a lot of disagreement among climate scientists about whether human activities are a major cause” of global warming”. I posed the same question to members of the wunderground community on Monday, and even higher 56% of them thought so. However, the results of a poll that appears in this week’s edition of the journal EOS, Transactions, American Geophysical Union, reveals that the public is misinformed on this issue. Fully 97% of the climate scientists who regularly publish on climate change agreed with the statement, “human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures”.
Follow the link for the full story.
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Dan's Outside 
Mt. Umunhum Umpdate
Sorry. Couldn’t help myself.
There is a post today at Two-Heel Drive about the possibility of cleaning up the summit of Santa Clara Valley’s (or Santa Cruz County’s, if you live on the other side of the hill) Mt. Umunhum so that the stunning views from this ridgetop location can become available to hikers and others. (And, no, Tom, I’ve never heard anyone call this place “Mt. Um.”)
When I was a kid growing up in Santa Clara Valley, Mt. Umunhum housed a military base of some sort – we all understood it to be some sort of radar station guarding the west coast. On “Armed Forces Day” the base opened to the public, and on at least one occasion my father took me and one or more of my siblings up there for the open house. I recall going inside the concrete block building on the summit and watching – with the awe that children can have about such things – the technicians sitting in front of screens watching radar. I also remember being very impressed by a low-level fly-over by some military jets as part of the festivities.
I did get back up there once some years later. For a few years early in college I played in a band – who didn’t right? – and we were once hired to play in some sort of club on the base. As a result we were authorized to drive up there, play for the very small number of folks looking for something to do on the base on a weekend night, and then drive down after dark.
There are other stories about that area. Apparently the road to the top of the peak was not actually owned by the military. If I understand correctly, they got an easement of some sort from a landowner up there who supposedly owned a very large tract. After the base closed, there were many who felt that the road should be public – quite a few of them treated it that way, especially certain bicyclists. Some of them told stories of being met by this landowner and/or his hired hands with guns and being arrested for trespassing.
In more recent years areas around the peak became accessible. You can now drive the road to a very high point though not all the way to the summit, and there are trails in the area. Finally opening the whole ridge and peak for public use would be a wonderful thing, and the sort of development that future residents of the valley will regard as evidence that we made at least a few good decisions “back in the day.”
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March 29, 2009 Posted by gdanmitchell | Commentary, Places | 1 Comment