Sea of fog sunsets Point Reyes falls, seals, lighthouse
Muir Woods sky-scrapers
GIANT sequoias Rim Trail, peep s’mores, & dyed eggs
Sippin’ the good life
In early April, a group of us went to see the “Big Trees” of Calaveras State Park in Arnold, California. The “Big Trees” are giant sequoias (Sequoiadendron giganteum), and no picture can do them justice, you will have to come see them for yourself.
Cache Creek backpacking
Rolling trail, wild blooms, critters
Vast oak savanna
The last weekend of March, three of us went on our first backpacking trip of 2015. Our travel destination was Cache Creek Natural Area, a 70,000+ acre expanse of BLM land. For our adventure, we selected the 10-mile Ridge Trail hike, which meandered through oak savannas and the occasional stretch of chamise chaparral. It was a beautiful trip full of wildflowers and animal sightings, the latter of which included a coyote, a gopher snake, a ring-necked snake, a squirrel, and more lizards than I could count.
*Weekend Warrior endnote: hopefully now it is clear why there have been a dearth of posts. This blog is still something I intend to keep up, but the spread between posts might continue at the current pace. Thank you for reading!
On Wednesday, January 21, my intern partner, Corey B., and I were on a snail hunt along a partially constructed trail just outside of the city of Redding.** During a pause on the trail, I heard what sounded like a small helicopter come whirring in past my left side. The proximity and sudden arrival of the sound startled me. It’s volume told me the critter was far too large to be a bee, which were also in the area, but then what could it be? I glanced up just in time to see the outline of a hummingbird before it disappeared among the manzanita. Even now, I find the experience a little surreal; the abrupt arrival and departure of such a small, beautiful thing accompanied by an almost unreal sound. My thought as the bird departed: ‘I am in paradise.’
**Our assigned task was to relocate survey sites from 2014 and to establish whether snails – or to be more formal “terrestrial mollusks” – were still occupying the sites. In particular, we were interested in finding Helminthoglypta hertleini, a California BLM sensitive species, and we had to be careful not to confuse it with Monadenia churchi, another species of very similar appearance, but not considered sensitive. The snail hunt came with mixed success, and in the process, we found this really cool lizard!