TRAVEL: The Eastern Sierras: FLowers, Butterflies in Agnew Meadows

Tuesday, July 31, 2012  

Devil’s Postpile Hike and Wildflower Viewing 

Hike from Minaret Vista to Starkweather Lake, then to the Agnew Meadows wildflower walk, using the shuttle service - then dinner at Slocum’s.  Orange sulpher, Satyr comma, Yuba fritillary butterflies, plentiful larkspur, mountain chickadee sightings.

Satyr comma butterfly, wings open

Satyr  Comma butterfly - wings closed

 Amazing, closed: this butterfly looks like ragged shred of bark peeling from a log, but then the flutter comes.

TRAVEL: The Eastern Sierras, Convict Lake

Monday, July 30, 2012  

Fish Convict Lake

This lake was deep iridescent turquoise.  It’s perhaps the most exquisite lake of the Eastern Sierra, in part because the mountains ranged behind it to the southwest reveal such geologic turbulence.  Their folds and wrinkles are zig-zagging diagonals of granite and oxide. We caught few fish, but had a lovely picnic on the water, gazing at the wondrous color of the water, the beautiful aspen-ringed inlet. 

Blue Darner - I used to call them dragonflies.

TRAVEL: The Eastern Sierra, Silver Lake

Sunday, July 29, 2012  

Silver Lake Fishing Day

Drove to June Lake area, and fished beautiful Silver Lake. It was placid and calm in the morning, and quite hot - then the wind came up, we started catching fish, and fished until 1:30pm. Caught 9, using power bait, my favorite - released them all.   Lunch in the cute old Silver Lake Resort restaurant, then back to swim, jacuzzi, and watch the Red Sox. Unbelievable how beautiful the small lake was, with mountains surrounding it on all sides.  Just heavenly, the clarity, the luster, the softness of the water and air and sky.

Global Warming is ForRealForSure - LA Times

“The Berkeley project’s research has shown, Muller says, “that the average temperature of the Earth’s land has risen by 2 1/2 degrees Fahrenheit over the past 250 years, including an increase of 1 1/2 degrees over the most recent 50 years. Moreover, it appears likely that essentially all of this increase results from the human emission of greenhouse gases.” 

This scientist was not a believer, but has changed his opinion after reviewing data - his research was funded by the Koch brothers.

TRAVEL: The Sierras Flowers

These are all my own photos.

ESSAY/THOUGHTS while traveling

 Thursday, July 26, 2012 – Page 1

Crossing the Range of Light today to the Eastern Sierras

“Mr. Pereira is far from alone in finding the time ripe for spirituality. In Ms. Moss’s case, at Lincoln Center, spirituality is merely part of a larger concern: transcendence, looking inside yourself.

“There is a huge hunger for more human connections,” said Ms. Moss, who describes herself as “a secular mystic.” “People are looking for larger experiences in a cyberworld” that becomes ever more “like eating candy.”

“Music,” she added, “is going to end up being the only live experience left in the world.’” - NY Times, review of spirituality as a theme in classical music programming.

Conrad writes that the heart of the twentieth century is black. 

Maybe it’s that the hearts of men that are always black, at least compromised and paralyzed to choose the good, the kind, the beautiful, the unique.

Another terrible public massacre in a movie theater in Colorado - is there something about that state that I don’t get?   Yes, it’s  a wild west gun-toting, water starved, fire-scorched state with lots of primitive disenfranchised homophobic white males moping around feeling falsely entitled.  It’s also cleaved by its close ties to the military-industrial complex, like much of the interior West, which results in a mind-set of defensive protectiveness, economic self-interest, and a hatred of federal government intervention.

VACATION: The Sierras, Hetch-Hetchy Reservior

Our Sierras Vacation Begins: Groveland, CA

A pleasant chatty drive up the central valley and the flank of the western Sierra Nevada to an old western gold-mining town to rest for our first visit to a remote part of Yosemite National Park.  We are going to Hetch Hetchy, a name that is deeply shamed in the water wars narrative of the West, a twinned atrocity to the Owens Valley succubus that the city of the Angels wrought. I gaze through the breakfast room window’s wavy old glass at this town where the construction crews and office housed to build the O’Shaughnessy Dam.  

When it was completed, the Tuolomne River filled the magnificent granite domed valley called Hetch-Hetchy,  a small twin to Yosemite Valley.  If it had been saved, it would have been one of the anchor jewels in American’s crown of national parks, so unique were the geological events that shaped its splendor.  But it was sacrificed for the “greater good”, acquired by the growing city of San Francisco for its eternal water supply after 10 years of intense political and legal battles.  Woodrow Wilson finally permitted the city to claim the water, and by 1924, the dam was built, in just 3 ½ years.

A short but tiring hike along the shore of the O’Shaughnessy Reservoir, viewing the present day beauty of the drowned valley. Kolana Dome, one of three magnificent formations visible from the dam, stands 2200 feet high above the original valley floor.  The maximum water depth is 312 feet, but I think that it probably was about 280 or so today, guesstimating only.  So much more of the granite formations  was visible than I thought. That said, what is gone is sad to think about: the beauty of the Tuolomne, meandering between the valley walls,  all mute and glowing evidence of earthly time’s powerful inevitability to make long slow change.  

The waterfalls were not submerged, and the “bathtub ring” so ugly at Lake Mead, Lake Isabella, and other lakes isn’t unsightly here.  The water itself is bottle green/black, so deep is it, and with sides and bottom of granite, little blue can be reflected from the sky above. We will never stand on the valley floor, eyes raised to geologic forever, to know the intimate and unique forms of this drowned place.   

Wildlife SightedToday 

Black-headed grosbeak, acorn woodpecker,  black-throated gray warblers, California sister butterfly,  purple finch, female mule deer, California ground squirrel.  I was very pleased to have seen the California sister butterfly, a new species for me.  We saw quite a few of them.  The wings folded look very different than when open.The doe was a lovely sienna orange, small and delicate. The grosbeak is also new for me - I thought it was a towhee, but it had that strong beak and less black on its head.

ART: Jeff Brows Exhibit

 As a self-described "visual anthropologist", Brouws recognizes that photographs exist within a socio-economic, political, or historical context. Every landscape can be read as a "field of information" revealing evidence of the external forces that have shaped them. From his Franchised Landscapes series, Brouws references and complements the photography of the New Topographics movement of the 1970s. In addition to studying the newly constructed suburban world, as those artists so eloquently did, Brouws explores terrain vague inner city areas and considers how racial segregation, white flight, disinvestment, corporate takeovers, outsourcing, and other factors have reciprocally shaped urban, suburban and even highway spaces. As he clearly demonstrates, The New West has become a "non-place" landscape comprised of big box stores and fast food chains with their glowing, corporate logos mounted atop skyscraper-high poles. 

The poet Gary Snyder referred to these signs as "...skinny wildweed flowers sticking up...in the asphalt riparian zone." Brouws creates single images and diptychs, as well as typologies such as his Signs Without Signification-portraits of light-box signs from once thriving, but now abandoned businesses that reveal Capitalism's cyclical nature and it tendencies toward "creative destruction."   (from Artweek LA website)