It has been a busy week on the road. Just before I left the Navajo/Hopi Indian Reservation, I met a Navajo man named Gilbert, who pulled his pick up over to talk when he saw me wandering in a field with Dellie, about three miles from his home. Gilbert welcomed me to take a photo […]
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Dry Canyon, Wet Rock
The walk up Grapevine Canyon in Lake Mead Reservoir recreation area begins on a dry river-bed pocked with drought-toughened shrubs. “Lake” Mead is one of several reservoirs on the Colorado River, formed by dams that redirect its water to agriculture and urban use. Every drop of water in the Colorado basin is allocated, so much […]
Pavement and A-maze-ment
Leaving the L.A. Basin, I drove across a maze of people and pavement that boggled my mind. After four days in a California idyll with my son in Venice Beach a block from the ocean, I was encountering the famed L.A. freeway system – the flip-side of the postcard. With no slow lane for my […]
Standing at Pismo Beach
How to describe the light that erupts along the central coast of California? From the oak-studded ranch land around Pozo, where my mother grew up in the shadows of the Los Padres National Forest, I climbed over the Cuesta Grade through the Santa Lucia mountain range and dropped down to the Pacific shore. There, I […]
Pockets of Agates
The El Nino storms hit Klamath, California hard on Thursday. La Tortue trembled in the force of the wind. Rain pounded on the roof, waking me in the dead of the night. Miraculously, I lay warm and dry. (Thank goodness I am getting too old for tent camping.) For the next several days, I watched […]
Redwood Majesty
I parked La Tortue beside the pristine Smith River in Jedediah Smith State Park last night, a preserve of old and second-growth redwood trees. Today, I walked in a grove where fire had swept through hundreds of years ago; many of the oldest trees were scarred by the flames, but continued to adapt and even […]