Week of Camp Ma/Birthday

As is usual, the end of the summer brought both the kid's birthday and a week when Chad was travelling a lot.  We took advantage of it to have our almost-traditional week of "Camp Ma".

The teen wanted to hunt flowers up in San Francisco, so we went to the San Francisco Botanical Garden in Golden Gate Park and spent a few hours wandering about.  Kiddo is 17 now!

There were lots of interesting plants to be seen; these were especially vivid.

During lunch, I found that the phone can do good things to a photo.

Later in the week, Nim and I took a wee backpacking trip up Black Mountain.  We went ultralight, with just a tarp, sleeping bag/quilt, a bag of KFC for dinner, and a box of toaster pastries (aka Pop-Tarts, but these were a better brand) for breakfast.  Our "dissolve a Starbucks Via pod into UHT milk and call it a latte" strategy was, in the kid's parlance, somewhat suss.  One thing we noted was that by this point of the summer, the kid had slept outside, mostly unsheltered under the stars, more summer nights that not.  This semi-feral existence is indeed properly appreciated.

On the actual birthday, we decided to head out to the coast.  It was a beautiful day!

There were still a few elephant seals hauled out onto the beach at Ano Nuevo.  The scale is hard to tell, but this guy was about 12 feet long and probably weighted a couple thousand pounds according to the volunteer who was posted to keep people off the beach.

You can see a second seal poking his nose up out of the water in this one.  He seemed like he was just playing around on this hot summer day.

Further down the beach, we could hear deep rumbling noises, which we found were emanating from a pair of juvenile males practicing some of their dominance moves.  Again, it's hard to tell from this picture, but they were using their tails to counterbalance the fronts of their bodies as they reared up out of the water and slapped chests.  Quite entertaining to watch and listen to!

Back on the beach we were allowed down on, we found quite an armada of birds.  There was apparently an unusual abundance of fish in the water here that day, and the birds are not dummies.

Watching pelicans dive is always fun.  They are such unlikely looking critters.

When asked what kind of cake was desired, the kid replied "I want a confection!"  Chocolate cake with coffee butterscotch, chocolate ganache, and cream cheese frosting, covered with toasted almonds was the result.  (Fortunately Chad made it home from his work trip in time to share cake.)

And thus, summer was over and it was time for school to start.

Wee Bikepacking Trip near Downieville

While the kiddo was off being a camp counselor, Chad and I took advantage of one weekend to do a short bikepacking trip.  This wasn't particularly carefully planned, but we wanted an excuse to try out our new bikepacking quilts -- they are light and small and pack down into teeny tiny pucks that can be easily stuffed into a saddle bag.  We hadn't been up to Downieville for a while, and also had the advantage of knowing that one can ride up Mountain House Roadfrom there and hit a network of dirt roads and trails that are fun to explore even if you don't go far.  So, we drove up on Friday afternoon, briefly said hi to Linda, loaded up our bikes with our new down quilts, and rode on up the hill to find a camping spot for the night.

One nice thing about the National Forest around here is that you can pretty much camp anywhere you find a nice spot.  Once up on the ridge, a nice spot is not hard to find -- as long as you are carrying water.  We were quite conscious carrying spare water, given that the previous year's summer bikepacking weekend was challenged by water sources that were unexpectedly few and far between.

Typical gently wooded, sort of rocky area on top of the ridge, reminiscent of our first night's spot down an old logging spur:

After a restful night, we got started pretty early, as we knew it was going to be hot come afternoon.  After only a couple of miles, we hared off the main road to look at the views from Ruby Bluff.

You can really see how much we climbed up from the river the previous day getting up here.  There were a number of good spots to set up a tent here, but it was too early to stop, so we kept going along Henness Pass Road.  Eventually we hit some pavement, and followed it to the site of the Old Cornish Ranch House.  Built in 1861, Cornish House was a "large and comodious house for the accomodation of the public [which] provided smithing and hay for teamsters" for several years before the transcontinental railroad led to less use of the road.  We ate lunch in the shade and took advantage of the creek to refill our water supply.

At this point, we could have continued on, but decided to head back to the beautiful camping spot back at Ruby Bluff.  On the way, we noted the junction with Galloway Road.  Galloway is the old route into Downieville, which plunges precipitously down the hill into town. It was apparently named after an early inhabitant of the town in the 1850's; I am somehwat amused by the notion of a Gold-Rush-era judge named Galloway.

(Also note the careful packing of gear on the bike -- I made the brown frame pack to fit Chad's bike, and we had spent far too long figuring out how to securely strap all of the various bits and pieces on to the handlebars.)  

After going back to the bluff and spending most of the afternoon lazing around reading and watching birds perform acrobatic tricks as they wheeled around eating bugs, we eventually we got around to setting up the tent and having dinner.

Oh so fancy bikepacking cocktail: dried cherries soaked in a little bourbon.

The sunset viewing from this location was quite nice, as we had hoped.

The following morning brought a few photogenic clouds.

We quickly packed up camp and headed over to ride the fun singletrack in Forest City.  It feels a little different on bikes loaded with gear than it does in our normal unloaded state.  I, for one, found it challenging, perhaps exacerbated by the fact that the stuff I had strapped to my handlebar sort of eclipsed my view of the front wheel whien descending.  It felt sort of like riding by braille.

Of course one can't have an adventure weekend without at least a minor mishap.  In this case, a stick flipped up off the trail at the wrong moment and broke Chad's derailleur hanger off.  Fortunately, he whipped out the spare derailleur hanger that had been kicking around his pack for just such an emergency and rapidly fixed it.  I deemed this item (acquired circa Christmas 2013) to have been the best stocking stuffer ever.

With that, we rolled back down the hill and had an enjoyable dinner with Linda back in town.  It was a relatively mellow adventure weekend, but seemed to be just what we needed at that point!

Fourth of July

Shortly after we got home, the kiddo headed off to embark on the summer's camp counselor endeavor, so Chad and I had a bit of time to ourselves.

On the evening of the Fourth of July, we wanted to do something, but neither of us was in the mood to deal with the traffic and crowds associated with the normal events, so I looked at a map and tried to be creative.  We thought about riding up a hill and watching fireworks across the bay from above, but had a hard time picking a good potential vantage point that would have a clear, unobstructed view from not too high up that would also be legal (parks and preserves all close at sunset). I did, however, notice that there was a stretch of the Bay Trail that didn't have any time-of-day restrictions on use, and remembered a handy bench.  We loaded up our bikes with some snacks and went out to watch the sunset.

This turned out to be an excellent place to hang out -- there good views across the bay and lots of bird activity to watch, and we had the place to ourselves.  Hard to believe on a holiday.

Once it got dark, we could watch fireworks shows in the distance all along the edge of the Bay.  We could see fireworks all the way up to Oakland along the East Bay, around the entire South Bay, and up to Redwood City or so along the Peninsula.  We were reasonably close to Shoreline, so got a good view of their show.

It was hard to casually photograph, but there was a good moon too.

All in all, an enjoyable evening.  We heard from the kid later that small child management duty in the woods precluded any counselors from seeing fireworks from camp, though they could definitely hear them.

TotSW: Long road home

Last post for the vacation.  By this point, there were many many many bugs on the car windshield.  The scenery continued to be spectacular as we worked our way out of AZ.

At one point, I took pity on the kid and moved into the back seat.  Views from here were somewhat obstructed, but still provided interest.

In order to provide contrast to the near-freezing temperatures on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon (and because it was cheap, convenient, and a cultural experience for the kid), we stopped for the night in Las Vegas.  Temperature: 105 F!  Kid was predictably overwhelmed; Chad and I sort of enjoyed the evening crowd-watching as we walked about looking for dinner.

On the way back into CA, we spotted these interesting arrays of solar panels, each fed by a big mirror.  I couldn't help but be reminded of the sunflowers in Ringworld.

Heading back along I-15 through Southern CA, we had one more chance to admire Joshua trees and volcanic cones.

The temperature in Baker was much the same as it had been a couple of weeks earlier.

Instead of staying in the desert, we opted to head towards the Kern River in the hopes that it would be slightly cooler.  This led us to a short stretch of Highway 395, which in my head is strongly associated with Easter Sierra mountain adventures.  Chad and I were so tempted to hare off toward the high peaks; the kid just wanted to get home to familiar things.

One last night was spent in a pleasant campground along the Kern River.

Alas, the river was still running so high that swimming seemed unwise.  I did find one spot along the edge where I could sit on a rock and dangle my feet into the cold snowmelt.

Back home, the cats were glad to have us finally arrive...though perhaps only because we are the providers of kitty food!

TotSW: North Rim of the Grand Canyon

As I planned the trip, the kiddo asked "Are we going to the Grand Canyon?"  It wasn't on the original list of notions (but so many things weren't...) and Chad mentioned that he hadn't ever been to the North Rim, so we found ourselves here:

Actually, if you look at a map and think about where we went, it becomes clear that we *circumnavigated* the Grand Canyon on this trip.  Maybe that is the hidden theme.

On our way in, it was quite cool, given that this area is up above 8000 feet.  The forests and meadows on Route 87 on the way in were just lovely, and quite a contrast to the more desert-like terrain of earlier parts of the trip.

We did note a big swath burnt in the fire some years back.

Instead of starting at the visitor's center like normal people, we opted to head down a side road towards Angel's Window and Cape Royal.  The road snakes its way along the edge of what is essentially an isthmus of land at the edge of the plateau.

A short walk took us to Angel's window.

I liked that you could see the Colorado River through the window, waaaaaaaay down below.

You may have noticed that there were people on the rock above the window.  Of course we had to go look.

 Chad took the opportunity to take lots of pictures.

The distance down is so large as to be a bit unnerving, even for those of us prone to peering off of things.  It's all so big as to not make any sense to the hindbrain.

We found a nice spot for lunch, near the Cape Royal wedding site.

After lunch, we looked at more views.

The big dropoffs were such that the kid wanted a hand to hold.

I got said kid out towards this lip, but at a certain point, there was flat-out refusal to go any further.  Too creepy, apparently.

More big views.  Somewhere in here, we stopped at Roosevelt point for another short hike, and then headed over to the visitor's center and Bright Angel Point.

Definitely near the visitor's center.

Chad the mountain goat, near the gnarled pine.  It seems the air was pretty clear the day we were there; those blue peaks in the distance are about a hundred miles away.

The trail out to Bright Angel Point is civilized.  Not surprising, as it heads out to the edge straight from the big Grand Canyon Lodge on the North Rim.

I scrambled up a small hummock of rock above the point.  Despite the fact that this small outcrop was an easy scramble and had a big flat top, it was remarkably hard to make myself stand up on top -- the drop to the canyon bottom was so large as to really confuse my sense of balance.

Bright Angel Point.  Ha ha.

From my outcrop, I could see Chad and the kiddo at the "official" viewpoint below.

We found a friendly soul to take a picture of the three of us.

On our way back, we noticed this pair taking pictures with their small Buddha.  They were driving across the country with Buddha, taking comemorative pictures along the way.

We got a clear view of the mountains to the south of the Grand Canyon.  The peak on the left is Humphrey's Peak, which we saw back in Flagstaff.

Closer look at Humphrey's Peak, still with snow on top.

If you don't believe me, the magic app on my phone confirmed it.

Back at the lodge, we admired the compass rose in the pavement, stopped in the store to buy camping fuel and postcards, 

and admired the shiny old cars in the parking lot.  There must have been some sort of event, as the near parking lot was full of these.

Our campsite for the night was back in a forest campground just north of the park boundary.  By this point, the kid was proficient at helping put the tent up so had time to run amok and read while we got dinner ready.  You might notice the larger amount of insulation on us at this point -- at almost 9000 feet, it was chilly.  The forecast was for temperatures to drop to around freezing that night.  Very different conditions than most of the rest of the trip!

While I prepped dinner, Chad amused himself by rigging up a balance and doing careful measurements and calculations regarding our near-empty fuel canister,

the upshot of which is that the canister was almost empty.  We knew that -- that's why we picked up a spare in the camp store earlier!  One has to amuse oneself somehow.

Dinner with warm beverages followed, and we were able to watch the stars come out as darkness fell.  Another fine day; what follows is the long drive home.