by Susan Bancroft | May 8, 2018 | Blog, Hiking, Photography
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...
by Susan Bancroft | Jan 15, 2018 | Hiking, Photography
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...
by Susan Bancroft | Dec 1, 2017 | Geology, Hiking, Sierra
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...
by Susan Bancroft | Oct 9, 2017 | Hiking, Photography
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,...
by Susan Bancroft | May 13, 2016 | Blog, Geology, Hiking, Photography
The big El Nino was a bit of a bust. We did get more rain than we’ve had in the previous five winters around here, but nothing like the ‘biggest El Nino event in 50 years’ was expected to bring. As it turns out, we had just enough to get the hillsides green, trigger...