missbeebotany

i put pictures up for Piedras Blancas, in case you're interested.

Should have been clocking hours while I have a job and sending out cover letters, but I needed a hike too, was having a glorious weekend with my sweetie already and hated to ruin it with working on memory errors and trial arm widgets and unemployment stress.   So me and birdie went for a hike, and ended up at the Kent Lake pump trail, the trail that starts at alpine lake that we’ve never taken as far as kent Lake.    

The last time I went on this trail was my getting back together as friends hike with Larisa.   Although I already had my horrendous crush on Lari by that point, I was apparently not doing so well with the courtship, having brought along a dog and not really removed the fur from the car seat.  For my part I was a little disappointed that Larisa wasn’t the sort of person who would let bee ride in her lap.      And then the dog was kind of gimpy, and it was hot, so we did more sitting than hiking.   That was in May, the first time I went may have been around January or February, in a rain anyway, and I spen the whole time thinking about what the guidebook said, that it seemed like you were way off on a mountain hike, and I kept thinking… but this looks like standard douglas fir/bay kind of forest, what’s so montaine about this?

Anyways, it was a good hike.   To review the area, it’s a valley  a couple of miles down the road from the chapparal serpentine trail I do often, downstream from the falls I hiked to with Tab.   It’s pretty open forest in most places, not closed over and gloomy like redwood forests often are, mostly a mix of douglasfir and bay.  Just a few big old douglas fir, and lots of mossy bay, currently starting to flower btw.   Some bigleaf maple, oak (probably coast like oak), madrone, big leaf maple, tanoak, and a few bunches of redwoods, less than I’d remembered.     

I was hoping maybe the first flowers were out.   A white flower with four petals was pretty common, and that’s about the only thing that was—this may be California toothwort (dentaria californica).  Saw one of the neon blue western hound’s tongue (cynoglossum grande), one of something unopened like bee plant, some flowers on the redwood sorrel.  A few more things were big enough to identify from the leaves, coast hedgenettle mainly and wood rose.  The bay’s also, were mostly in bloom.     Mostly it’s still not spring yet though.

But the interesting parts today were the seedlings, everywhere dense and carpeting flat areas between the forest duff and the trail, and the mosses (and lichens?) and small leaved plants of the cliffs and seepages.   If you added up the green tissued biomass this time of year and subtracted the trees, I’d bet you’d find it similar to summer, when a lot of the seedlings have died back and the moss is dried up.    I can’t really begin to ID the mosses yet, but finally really sat and looked at them and got a lot of pictures.   Several varieties at any rate of mosses, several small leaved plants, and lots of interesting microniches in the seaps and stone, where the rock changes to soil the moss changes, and in little indentions in the rock, and at different sun exposures and amounts of moisture.    The moss is all over trees, especially the bays, but it’s really mostly on wet rock, and with the trail cut into rock in a lot of places, the river carving out the canyon below and water flowing everywhere there’s lots of that.   I’m not sure why I don’t think of this area as rain forest—it still looks like it, complete with the understory of ferns in the darkest places (sword fern and deer fern mostly today, and ample polypody, no bracken fern that I noticed).

Some good mushrooms too.  Some very big slime molds, big, and gloppy, maybe twenty centimeters wide?  Lots of bracken fungi, two different gilled mushrooms, one of those spindly mushrooms growing on wood (for my own reference like the one from the stop in the alder rainforest near Westport).

Every rill this time of year has a rushing stream, and there’s even more coming from the spillway, so the creek below was running as high as I’ve seen it.   We didn’t go down the hill today, but we did poke around in some of the pools beside the trail.   In one of the ones with slower current, there were maybe six or seven salamanders I could count.  

A banana slug, and whatever made the smelly things that birdie rolled in pretty much covers it for the flora and fauna.  

I think we were almost on the edge of kent lake when I looked at the clock and realized we’d have to race to make our dinner date tonight (Janet’s coming over!) so once again still haven’t made the lake.  

Moss on the laurels


bracken fungus


( mushrooms, flowers, salamanders... )( mushrooms, flowers, salamanders... )( mushrooms, flowers, salamanders... )

( mushrooms, flowers, salamanders... )

( mushrooms, flowers, salamanders... )
( mushrooms, flowers, salamanders... )

( Salamanders, fungus, flowers... )

And the last bit... sorry for all the pictures... but it's nice to have recovered these.... the drives over the coast hills from westport:

southern edge of the alder rainforests

Not a good picture, but the sense of the place, big trees and trampled ground underneath


Eel river


view up the canyon, and my still unidentified red stick willows


your standard looking straight up the giant tree picture

Here's the lost pictures from my christmas trip: 

From Jackson SF, redwood forest near chamberlain falls

a little recruitment




ok, then the reason I went there, mushrooms!




This might be Gomphus clavatus, pig's ear

the significance of the above unrotated picture is it's one of my lost ones, lost with the laptop and bag.     However, last night, someone called.  She'd seen this rolley bag on the sidewalk, and really wanted one... so perhaps that led to her rationalizing away the weight inside the bag for a few days.  At any rate, she had my bag, and Lari picked it up for me today.  No lost pictures!

On the down side...  I'm likely to lose my job.   My boss point blank said the other exec is thinking about canceling my project, and if that happens my boss said I'm likely to be cut from the budget.   And that part could happen next week (when they have a meeting), or I could end up with work for a couple months while I do a shortened version of the project... but one way or another I'm out of  a job soon.   The economy is still poor, and frankly I'm scared as I've ever been... I'm middle aged, and though probably a lot better at my profession than when i was younger, the bias against age is intense.   And besides the economy's bad.  

On the other hand... I'm trying to listen to Lari and be open to change.   We can probably squeak by on her income for a while ( a new situation for me, that's for sure), though it'll be a bit grim.   And sooner or later I am going to end up out of this profession, it's not like there's a path to retirement here.   So something will have to happen.   Maybe I can get in law school, maybe I can do that teaching credential plan (though that requires the job market in teaching to come back).   The last contractor to get laid off has a business where he sells e-trees, you give someone the gift of a tree, and he uses the money to fund planting projects in Southeast Asia... I'm going to go talk about volunteering for him.  Or I'll just get another job, it's not like I was going to work happy.     It's not like it's all good, I might be in for extended unemployment on one income while my domestic partner is pregnant.    But it's change, at any rate.

ok... I haven't been on here much, because this has been a month with pretty much no botany/dog trips. I'm trying to spend the month on the house instead. But since I've written anything
- I moved to Oakland. Really the place is looking pretty good, a few boxes around, the spare bed not yet assembled (there's always one piece of IKEA furniture lost in the move), but otherwise comfortable in all but the second bedroom, pictures up, working ok.
- I think for once in my life, I am succeeding with my housekeeping in relation to a neat partner. My strategy has been to run with my strengths relative to hers (she hates dishes, I find doing dishes satisfying... so I just do all of them), so that my weaknesses get looked past (leaving cabinet doors open, say).
- The dog tried out for a new day care, and passed with flying colors... they wanted to say she should go in with the small dogs, but of course, we all know you pretty much want byrdie in with the large ones. There were a few corgis in with the small dogs, but they looked awfully effete. For some reason I'm not so thrilled with this day care... they have a lot of good services, stay open later, have three days of supplies for earthquakes, etc. but someone the woman who gave me the pitch seemed a little soulless. Also, really, evian water for the dogs? Filtered air in the vents? Whatever east bay.
- but we discovered, actually, according to the google, it's only three minutes longer to go to the old day care. In fact the whole commute is actually well, shorter than my old commute within San Francisco according to google, but in actual practice working out roughly the same. And that's witha slower way, I get on the freeway at the grand entrance to avoid that terrible death merge of 24 and 580, and it's still faster. Then the BART commute is virtually the same, and I'm reliably finding parking nearby.
- I'm not quite liking Oakland yet... it's kind of seeming to be a bit more Berkeley than I'd hoped, at least in this neighborhood. None of the sophistication of the Ethiopian hipsters from the Lake neighborhood, this is kind of more students and mostly white, with the tensions from being close to the mostly black neighborhood a few blocks away.
- As a more specific example, me and bee went out to Sibley Volcanic park last weekend. Disappointingly disturbed, mostly eucalyptus land with fews of the mansions. But I was excited for a few minutes, realizing it was probably a good time for mushrooms. Then, looking ahead, I realized four righteous nature looking people were methodically going along the path and side paths uprooting and bagging all the mushrooms they saw (irritating to be doing the mushrooming in the first place, but that's at least described as a destructive practice by even the mushroomers). I'm hoping they will not make me hate nature over here.
- We're not doing so well vis a vis our environment, and material possessions. A couple of days after moving, Lari got her car towed... cost close to a thousand to retrieve. Yesterday either spaced out and left my bag unattended for a few minutes on the curb, or else left it in the trunk unlocked. At any rate, in about five minutes, it had been stolen, with laptop, $500 worth of ecology and computer books, and I'm just discovering, probably my cell phone. For once I was kind of prepared, I've put money into having a backup laptop so I wouldn't lose my livelihood in this situation, I had a complete backup from about a month ago, and I was up and doing work again by 1 pm, and back setup by 3. The biggest lost so far is I lost pictures from Seattle (which I did at least upload), and from my trip to the redwoods at Christmas. Not the worst tragedy ever, but I did have some beautiful pictures in the redwood forest I hate to lose, and the trip itself is something I'd like to have memories of. But it also will cost me on the order of $2500 to replace everything. Update: I just heard the cell phone ringing in the other room somewhere
- but the bigger material scare worked out ok. I always consider my most important possession to be my grandfather's walnut, the walnut he carried in his pocket so long it wore smooth, and then apparently at some point gave to my dad. I always pack it up carefully for the move. This time when I was unpacking it was missing... I went back and ransacked the old place a few times to make sure, but figured maybe this was it. But it turned out I did pack it carefully in my travel luggage, as I usually do, just my new roommate put the box in another box under some clothes.
- it's been raining cats and dogs, as it should this time of year. But in Weed they've declared a snow emergency, have special warm shelters for people in case the power goes out. So Dolores isn't coming down for the weekend, as we'd hoped.
- I finished my month long slog through Grasslands and Grassland Ecology, a book so obtuse when he said there were a thousand articles on a certain subject, he described this as "1E3 articles." Just nearly finished a book on Big Sur before it was stolen, and now I'm reading about Oaks waiting for my replacement copy of "Tropical Biomes" to arrive for Saturday delivery. Lately I've been worrying more that, as much as I have an instinct to teach myself new fields of study, there's actually really virtually nothing I can do with learning about plants and ecology. There is no path through academia for a forty year old, and few paths anyways in these fields for employment. Aint going to happen.
- And it's not like I have my political life going again. As usual, I'm enthusiastic about doing things, and if I had the ability to organize a hundred people again, I've got some tactics sitting around that would work... in fact the fall of US democracy (the supreme court decision) and of the centrist democratic party strategy (fillibuster proof half assed health care), my lefty instincts are kind of more useful for the world. It's not like I'm just having an ego here, the press is still over there kicking the lembi's, the largest SF landlords, while they're down, and repeating the talking points I made sure were in the press. I kind of think sit ins at health insurance claims departments would work, as would protests at european embassies in concert with european student organizations to demand disinvestment while the US continues not to have a social welfare system, as would putting the six week vacation on the California ballot. But at the moment I've feel like my current organizing ability is on par with, let's say when I was homeless and disabled in NYC in my twenties.
- Which is one reason I'm grateful to be able to help the Yuba-Sutter equality organization. I promised to raise a thousand this year to at least keep them in good photocopying supplies for a while. I think I never posted about this here, but I'm so deeply excited by QueerByChoice's meeting in Marysville I drove out there for. C is amazing and brave, and the young man who grew up in town and lives in SF now, but drove up for the meeting is also amazing. The Courage Campaign organizer wasn't that good at reading the local situation, but they still have a winning method (ally yourself with other groups by supporting their causes, training volunteers to be organizers), and her heart's in the right place. I was never super into the idea of sitting in the Castro feeling smug. Calling up churches looking for allies, setting up student gay organizations, and tabling at Walmart for queer marriage, all of which they've already done, feel like the right, brave, world changing things to be doing, I felt honored to be there to meet that group of people.

Since Howard Creek lets you hang around on their property after you check out, and since it wasn't raining, we got to hike up their hill. I didn't think we'd make it so far, but byrdie kept going with rests up to the redwood forest they have--amazing that this is theirs. We sat for a little while looking at the sheep, looked in the salt clipped douglasfir (a pretty cool habitat), went up through some more fir and presumably planted monterrey pines, then into their honest to goodness redwood, fern, clover, etc forest. The best part was the mushrooms.. by surprise this was the good mushroom day, and I maybe saw 8 or 9 kinds of mushrooms. I'm not sure if mushrooms are like butterflies, they don't always show up where you'd expect them, or whether they grow faster after rains than I realized (like the next day). Anyways, enough hike for the day.

We drove back on Brandscomb road from Westport to Laytonville, which I remembered as a white knuckle hairpin drive from ten years ago. Instead it was a nice little road, big, wide single lane, lots of pull outs. The forest was a bit different, went from an alder valley, to redwoods to douglas fir, but then into oaks, and if they weren't all planted, ponderosa near laytonville, so a lot dryer. Also figured out the members only signs... they're Wilderness Unlimited, which the web says is a service where people pay to come in and shoot bears and pigs and such, wearing camoflague. I'm wondering though if you can pay the same people to go to land in non hunting season.

Uneventful drive home... I spent a while studying the interesection thation Emily designed, 101 an 20, and yes, it does have nice pedestrian crosswalks. I'll have to ask her which features are hers. Oh also, for future references, another area I've been trying to suss out is the big canyon, that may or may not be the Russian River. Notes on it from the car I'll add later, because now I still can't remember which town it was and the creek that was one of the canyons. But also this is the area where 101 is crossing a band of grey pines, so even dryer than mountains on either side.

You can't go that far up the river here, or rather, the owner agreed she wouldn't encourage people to, there's someone else's property (makes them nervous because they're growing pot), then "you can walk for miles." Then you have lumber company land and 4000 acres owned by UC California and the nature conservancy. So I guess there is some "public" land in there, meaning conserved in some way, and I guess custom is a little flexible out here, you can potentially just walk through both private property and lumber company land. I wonder how I can figure this out? It's kind of a social problem really... I have a feeling despite the host's openness it might take a while to really get her to call up the neighbor and vouch for me, tell me the real deal with avoiding lumber company cops, or whatever. Doubtless the hard way in would be the UC way, who'd almost certainly want you to lay down a hundred grand while still being 20 and having a relevant degree from yale, nor would I guess my brother is a weak point in the nature conservancy administration... I'm betting the lumber company is less on it's guard, followed by the medical supply farmers, and with the pot growers at least I kind of start with a political record. Maybe if I work on the legalization initiative next year I can get some ins to see the alder-redwood transition.

It's stopped raining, and they're ok with us wandering the grounds after checkout, but bee was worrying at the leg half the night, so I won't be pushing her on climbs. I'll see if she seems to want to go up there after I pack up, and otherwise we're off in the general direction of home, maybe stopping somewhere if the weather holds. one possibility is drive straight over the hills from here, at Brandscomb Rd, just to see what that looks like again (drove it a decade ago with a little snow falling), or I might drive the google way back through Jackson SF, might stop at Sonoma Lake or Cow Mountain this afternoon, or might just drive back home.

I'm feeling the urge to post things, since my main contact with the world is this here internets. Bee's guts improved just in time to have a gimpy leg... probably because we did a lot of climbing and stone walking, I should have carried her more.

I just found my entry in the B&B guest book for this room from when I was here for the millenium... I'll spare you the tacky writing (apparently I need to make a life goal of finding some synonyms for magical when describing mendocino coast inns), also that of my ex-wife, who was always super cutesy right up until she committed some act of violence.

Instead I'll share from the packet that bee arrived with from Iowa, which I uncovered packing up just before I left. Along with pictures of her daily dinner, which included ham and eggs on top of dry food, there is information like "outgoing, friendly, curious, loves to play with people, cats and her canine family. She is also quite storng willed, especially when she doesn't want something to be taken away by one of us. She will sometimes growl and then you need to immediately tell her "no", grab her by the scruff of the neck, and turn her over on her back..." We come into the world with our personalities, apparently. Also, the pictures reveal that her birthday is actually 1-14-05, not the following day, as I always thought, and that on 1-15-05 she still looked kind of like a naked mole rate or some kind of tuber. She had "sunglasses" in her fur, dark fur around her eyes, when she was one month. Her brothers and sisters are Bennett, Flint, and Risca. I will need to scan these pictures.

i was thinking, reading the motorcycle threads about Usal Rd, although i don't think I'd have as much fun as they were having tossing bic lighters into their fire, i think I would enjoy going down those roads, and frankly my lifestyle isn't that much different. maybe I should get a dirt bike? can you strap them onto the back of a yaris? how about a corgi, is there someway to get a corgi on them?

ruh roh, sounds like 18 people with stupid laughs have moved in for tonight to the roomoverhead. Elven magic may not be sufficient to protect us tonight.
Today, well, probably wasn't a hit with bee... too much time in the car, plus then pop let it rain.

the morning though was great, lots of racing around on the beach off leash, pops and dog were a team, crossing raging waters in different spots with stays and comes, generally enjoying ourselves.

But then, being bigger, I did what I wanted to do, which is drive up highway 1 to Leggett and see the transition there, and go to the redwood parks around the junction with 101. I actually thought this part was pretty great, the most exotic looking section really is the alder rain forest in the lower stream valley, I think we were following the Cottoneva Creek valley, at least part of the way, and low down the alder breaks into giant alders you would'nt see in the bay area, blackberry furthest down but fern in other parts and a variety of different riparian plants, and that's nestled in big mossy redwood and fern valleys.

Further up you have lots of wet looking coastal redwood forest, some mixed douglas fir and redwood, with more madrones (some very big) mixed in as you get over the first hills. The whole country up there is grand, and it's more example of this vast vast expanse of california that is not owned by the public but looks wild. What I can't quite figure out is who does own it all. I think it' sthe lumber companies... Mendocino Forest Compnay or something like that had signs up and no traspassing signs (leaving a little pitiful wayside picnic park for the people... way to put the effort into whatever deal was involved with that!), but there were also a lot of "members only" signs. I've seen these before, I think to the east of Jackston SF... wonder what that's about, and can I be a member too? But clearly this private land is the great wild area of this part of the state.

By contrast the little redwood state parks were nothing so special. It's kind of like some of the public preservation has been grabbing some random big trees. Standish-Hickey SRA turned out to be truly closed from budget cuts (I thought they hadn't close anything?), sign an chain on the front entrance and everything. The Eel river canyon was pretty gorgeous nearby, so there probably was some interesting views there. But we could only stop at the grove of old trees at Smithe Redwoods. This one almost felt like a rest stop, except that it still was a place with probably multiple thousand year old trees and a gorgeous northern looking river rushing through the floodplain. The area under the trees was mostly tramped clean of vegetation... but then it would probably only mostly be moss, clover, and a little scraggly huckleberry and tanoak in it's most preserved state. The trees were very large and grand. We had trouble seeing that much of the floodplain because the rocks seemed hard on the paws (we got lots of boosts), but we poked around in the willows, figured out a few other trees were maples or alder.

I still don't know how to photograph any of this--I think I'm happiest in the forest, but the pictures never seem to get it... it's dark, or there's no view through the trees, or, since I always seem to be here in winter, it's raining and gloomy. It's still pretty at the time, but the camera seems to fight showing it, plus, like today, often the amazing views are some glimpse through the trees of a canyon or the look of a forest for a second that you see whipping down some windy road.... there just never is the right place to stop. Makes me wnat to buy an ultralight... that'd be the way to see a redwood forest.

I tried to go hike around the grounds here the moment we got back, partly out of guilt towards my dog (who does not like the car),partly because I realized we're in one of those alder valleys, and a few hundred yards inland you get past the coyote brush and into that habitat, and I think their property may go pretty far back there. . I think bee was tired of the rain though, and maybe I'm pushing her new health a bit, so we got to the edge of the hill by the main house and she simply refused to go, and after dragging her a few yards I gave in. The dog is now konked.

Oh, the original plan, drive up Usal Road, not only woul have failed because it was raining and presumably would have been impassible, but because I don't where it is, I saw absolutely no sign of it.

score! what a great bed and breakfast. I'm always up too late for actual breakfast, by the time I've showered, walked the dog, eaten breakfast so my blood sugar isn't too low to talk to people, etc. but usually that means I have to not eat the delicious breakfast they make, although these days you can find yourself either eating an all fruit french toast blood sugar boomerang breakfast, or a motel 6 style continental breakfast. Anwyays, she had a full meal put aside for me. Even BETTER, I now have an excuse to miss talking to people at breakfast, dogs aren't allowed alone in the room, so she'd either have to go in the car (which she is not going to do, I'll just say right now), or I'll have to grab a plate and run.

Also, she thinks Usal Road is passable to a passenger car unless it rains... she went up on the balcony though and looked the ocean and came back own and said she thought it was going to rain though. Probably better if I stick to highways and their property. I think we'll walk to the beach, then decide if the redwoods 45 minutes up the highway are more exciting than the ones on their property, and if once again I'm going to be right next to the lost coast and not go any further.

Bee's still gut sick. :( No point in racing for the vet, I know the drill by now, but we may be fasting for some tests on Monday.

I really do have to stress the closeness of the analogy of this place I'm staying to Elron's last homely house in the lord of the rings--there's really no closer analogy than Tolkien's sense of the way elves create space. Little lights strangely light the whole house, bridge, walkways, but somehow it's not bright, it's just points of lights in a vast expanse, like stars. A grandmother, mother, and daughter run the place, as I remember, and have lived here at least the more than ten years I've been going here, the prices are still the same, though i think she tried to haggle me down a little tonight. Everything is strangely delightful, artificial and perfectly natural. There's no city around for many miles, you can hear waves crashing, little notes tell you anything you might need, it smells a little like wood, the birch forest wallpaper is improbably perfect. When you walk around the upstairs you kind of stumble on little sofas in a coopy common area, a hot tub, or who knows how many. It's an obvious place to come if you were poisoned by wraiths.

Here I am by surprise at the Howard Creek Inn, maybe my favorite place of lodging anywhere. I spent the millennium here with my ex, and used to come up here pretty often, but haven’t been for six or seven years anyway-lately they never have anything free. But I called a whim, because it was a good place to stay geographically and it’s only 20 bucks more than a motel, and sure enough, two nights free, in my favorite room too. It’s unbelievably cozy, dark wood , a forest wall paper you wouldn’t think woul work but makes it look cozier, even the refrigerator an microwave amenities. Outsie you walk over a lighted little swinging bridge to get to the main house, the house is lit up everywhere like the last homely house, there’s a little path out to the beach, no city around for miles, and the only couple I’ve met so far was happily drunk, and knew that corgis were sheepherders.

Let’s see, to begin with… from the last posting I mentioned the raven in Ukiah that did the gurgling woodpecker noise, I was trying to describe it as shaking a glass with ice I think before. So, we’re at the burger king in Willits, 20 miles away, and I hear the SAME CALL. I look up and on the power line behind us is a raven, the source of the same call. Really, it was the same call, and to the best of my knowledge is not a “natural” raven call. Pretty much any conclusion is impressive, either 1) ravens are magical talisman of some kind 2) the same raven followed us to the next town to meet us at the Jack in the Box or 3) raven’s in this part of the world know the same odd call. 3 seems the most likely right? But maybe that’s just saying 1) when you think about it, really… a little two foot bird that lives off road kill has a regional culture? But I think I’ve even read before that they do have regional calls.

Well, so the hike was simple, we went up into Jackson State Forest, went to a walk we’d been to before on the east side, the trail to Chamberlain Falls, about 5 miles up a dirt road. Nothing startling, a redwood forest with a few old growth trees, occasional tanoak pushing way up to little spaces and occasional douglasfir, easier to find from a cone or two than picking out leaves in the high canopy. It really is truly amazing just how dark these forests are…. At least we were there by 1 pm for once, but it might as wel l have been twilight—do these forests even let in light at noon in June? It’s going to take some work to learn how to take pictures here… with my auto settings I get too dark flash lit pictures or shaky long exposures that make things almost look artificially bright. Anyways, we walked maybe a mile down the trail, winding down the canyon, eventually I assume to the falls—on our first trip we took a shortcut to the falls but didn’t go far own this trail. Bee kind of called it, I think she’s sort of learned her limits, she’ll start stalling going forward at a certain point, and then go quicker on the way back (until we get to the dread car of course). Also I think the quail scared her, at the end of our walk we listened for a long time to what I think was a quail, but one would sound almost like a bark, another answering would sometimes sound like someone banging on a drum I was looking for mushrooms… but it turned out there really were nothing like the number I’d see in the same places before… only a couple of varieties of the cap and stem kind (looking rooted up by some animal), some bracket fungy and that spongy looking fungi, and then a stunning foot sized thing I found on the way back, a gynic if that’s a word looking fungi rather than a phallic one for once, purple and pink.

By the way, I’m starting to grasp how much wild area there is left to see up here. On the map, we’re running out of spots… there’s not much public land between highway 101 and 1 south of highway 20 to the highway to Guerneville… but you can look out there and see it’s pretty wild… is it logging companies that own all this? Private little ranches? It’s clearly hill after hill of forested land. Also the one park I haven’t seen at all in there, Montgomery Woods, I just read last night on the internet that somewhere in there is the largest tree on earth… though sadly it is not the largest tree on earth that one can take ones dog hiking to see legally.

On the way out we stopped in Fort Bragg and found the lodging up the road, and that left us time to go see the McKerricher (sp?) Dunes. This is actually completely rare habitat and one of my priorities to get out and really look at, one of only I think three reasonably sized coastal dune areas in California remaining. We stayed on the south end of those, the very first trip I took with post kidnapped birdie, and then I got a freezing few minutes to go look at it one time with Larisa when she didn’t want to get out of the car. This time it after sunset, so again not good for pictures, but we got to walk out the cool north end across something more like a half mile of dunes with lots of transitions, from coyote brush to sagebrush, to a barren expanse with only a few of a small plant I haven’t seen before, tiny ivy like leaves an tree trunk sized roots, an then to a sea side with probably European beach grass, some beach grasses anyway. Byrdie was an exceedingly good dog, staying with me off leash, and then, when a rabbit bounded up not ten feet from us, she totally and completely stopped in her tracks when I asked her to stay. Plus, I was a little lsot on the way back and she found the right way.

Anyways here I am… I suppose it should be eerie I’m in the place I used to go with my ex, but those are getting to be old memories, and this is a clean and bright and magical place. I am going to have to get my partner up here though, it is just a nice place to be.

Now, my deal with the devil is I have to do some work for corporate capitalism today and tomorrow, at least enough not to have to work all Sunday. So, into the soup of Hibernate confusion I’ve been in for the last couple of days of work.

Tomorrow my plans are a bit vague, but we’re very close to the Lost Coast (maybe 5 miles from the start of the road), and 30 miles up Highway 1 turns inland and meets 101 at Smithe Redwoods. Matole river is probably too far, on the far side of the Lost Coast presumably dirt road, so I’ll probably pick somewhere closer and come back. I should probably poke around their property too, I never saw it before, but queerbychoice had pictures up of it, and they’ve got a redwood grove and other forest back there, something called the Enchanted forest that I can’t remember if it was a bay forest or some coastal krumholz. Also, maybe they’ll let birdie herd their llamas.

Forget bagels, there is nothing better while traveling than the egg, bacon, biscuit, orange juice free breakfast. Ground fog is over the valley fields, looks amazing. On our walk a raven did an imitative vocalization, whatever you call those, it sounded sort of like shaking a glass with ice but gloopier, I couldn't quite place it. She didn't seem very impressed with my imitation. Still have yet to decide where we're going... I'm leaning slightly to Trestle Trail in Jackson SF.

Got in late to Ukiah, because I left late, couldn't stop packing. I've pretty much finished the brutal decisions about what goes to storage for my move--pretty much everything but two bookshelves really. Anyways, we're here in a virtual motel mansion--we were "upgraded" to get a "pet room" which they've never made us do before, but the upside is I'm sitting here in the virtual second room of our Comfort Inn estate. Bee's whining so we maybe better go out again.
Update: walkies, a rousing game of ball, but still, whining.