Sojourn in Sequoia

Being in California usually makes me feel better and more whole: more of my friends are there, it's easier to do the things I most love to do (hiking, tennis, outdoor swimming all year long, etc.), and though I'm slowly rebuilding a social network in and around NYC, in general it's just easier for me to find things to do and people to do them with in SF or LA than here in NYC. To my long-planned visit to the SF Bay Area for the Cabrillo Festival (see below), I added a leg to Los Angeles in order to attend the wedding of my friends Joezen and Steve. What a wonderful experience to be there with good friends for a wedding that, in the state of California, finally has legal weight! And such a generous, connected and concerned wedding it was -- all about equality and conserving our planet's limited resources, all about friendship and family. I'm glad I was able to be there.

Having added that LA leg, I then signed on for a sojourn in Sequoia National Park, the less-visited and somewhat less-known southern neighbor to California's blockbuster Yosemite National Park. My friends Howard and Gene, along with others whom I enjoyed meeting in the park, had arranged three out of six tent cabins at Bear Paw high sierra camp for a few nights, which dovetailed rather nicely with the wedding: I got myself up to Sequoia with help from Gene, we hiked the eleven miles up to Bear Paw, and spent two nights there before hiking the eleven miles back down. In between, I did an absolutely amazing 16-mile hike with 4500-foot elevation gain going up and then back down, up to Mt. Steward on the Great Western Divide (the crest of the Sierras). The higher alpine-tundra looking shots below and above are from that day's hike, with high alpine lakes and so forth. The rest are generally shots of the Sierras in Sequoia, including a shot of me in front of one of the big, wide redwoods that give Sequoia its name. Believe it or not, I've actually sorted through these shots and excluded many from this entry -- still and all, there are a lot of shots, but I hope you'll agree they're worth enjoying. :-)

California has two varieties of redwoods still growing: mountain redwoods, or sequoias, which grow much much larger in girth but generally not quite so tall as the coastal redwoods, which can be seen just north of SF in Muir Woods, or in other spots along CA's northern coast.

John, David & I took a few short swims in this glacial (almost literally -- there are snow packs that are still melting, just next to it) lake.

I nearly stepped on this six or seven-foot rattlesnake. Eek!

...the alpine flowers, as you can see, captured my imagination.

Above, I'm trying to convey the steepness of the rocks over which this water is falling. That's basically a self-portrait of shadow, with the lower upper body much farther away because it's a few hundred feet down a vertiginous drop.

A waterfall and pools much lower down in which we took a muchj-warmer swim on our way out of the high country.

Music, Missions & Mountains Around the Bay

If it's early August, the Cabrillo Music festival is happening in Santa Cruz and other areas in and around Santa Cruz, just south of the SF Bay Area. My friends Howard & Gene go most years, and I join them whenever I'm close enough to make it feasible. The final concert each year takes place at the old Spanish mission at San Juan Bautista, a small town south of San Jose -- hence the bell tower, above. I take advantage of the week in between the two main festival weekends to enjoy SF and see my friends Amy, Nancy & Kip -- from whose lovely hilltop neighborhood of Bernal Heights these sunset shots of the bay and city, above and below, were taken.



Junipero Serra was the Catholic priest who decided to set up missions a day's ride from each other all up the coastline of what was then Alta California, part of the Spanish colony of Mexico. These days the missions serve as parish churches in many places, and historical points of interest from San Diego in the south all the way to Sonoma in the north. Considering the history of near-utter extermination of the native inhabitants of California (surely an earthly garden of eden in the pre-European-invasion era, I'd think) in very short order after their exposure to Europeans and their diseases and culture, I personally think Junipero Serra's legacy is as freighted with death and destruction as that of the rest of the church. But that's just me. He's certainly an important historical figure, and the missions certainly add interest and history to California. OK, soapbox time, with apologies to those who've heard it before: what is it about American liberals that allows them to feel comfortable driving around in cars with "free Tibet" stickers while living in big houses in the hills of California, on land that's far more stained with blood and cultural genocide than Tibet? I know, we can't roll back history here in the US - or can we? is there some creative we could retroactively create a little more justice and space for the first nations that remain and whose land, culture, languages and resources we have shamelessly stolen since our ancestors first landed on these shores? - but could we at least be a bit more humble, a bit more nuanced in our approach to the complex histories of territorial expansion and conflict occurring on the other side of the world, in regions with millennia of history that make our own expunging of native Americans from most of their former homes and zones seem like a highly-efficient blitzkrieg?

No, these are not Anasazi dwellings in the US southwest. They're formations in a big limestone rock that's been eroded by rain and water to form these fascinating images. I forget the name of the this particular type of rock formation: help me out, someone.

Above & below, me & Russ at the mission concert; Howard, John and Gene on the hike; Howard, Russ and Gene at the mission.

...you are looking, though you may not know it, at the San Andreas fault, which runs right through the valley next to San Juan Bautista.