Get Your Feet on the Table

Get Your Feet on the Table

North Table Mountain Ecological Preserve For a few months of the year, there’s a flat vista rising about 300 feet above Oroville that offers up an intriguing, if short-lived, natural show I find completely irresistible: acres of rugged volcanic basalt rock covered in...
Teaching Old Lenses New Tricks

Teaching Old Lenses New Tricks

Let me start out by saying this post is a little nerdy. Nerdy, but fun. Maybe even practical.  I have a few Mamiya 645 lenses sitting in the cabinet and seeing as there are adapters for mounting almost any lens on almost any body, I bought one to use these large...
Gold Country Nugget

Gold Country Nugget

The desk clerk said “Monday and Tuesday nights are good nights to stay. The rooms are quiet. There’s no Karaoke in the bar on Monday and Tuesday nights..”  I’m guessing that’s a good tip, in a sideways kind of way. I had thought about a trip to...
Little Lakes, Big Views

Little Lakes, Big Views

I’ve wanted to see some alpine lakes in the California Sierra for quite some time but always assumed that would require some serious backpacking and probably a sobering elevation workout to enjoy a classic view of blue water bordered by bold granite features. You know...
Twice in a Lifetime

Twice in a Lifetime

As I’ve confessed before, I’m a bit of a wildflower junkie.  Last year (March 2016) I read an article about the once in a generation ‘superbloom’ in Death Valley. So I dropped what I was doing, took off for Stovepipe Wells and got a pretty good, below sea level,...
Big Basin, Big Trees

Big Basin, Big Trees

The big trees can be hazardous… I spent so much time looking up instead of at the trail beneath my feet that I stumbled at least 15 times on the ten miles of trails we hiked through Big Basin Redwoods State Park. But you can’t help yourself. As the trails put you...