Napa Valley

We also went to Napa Valley. It was my first time there. Generally speaking, it's a pretty touristy area - but for good reasons.


Wine tasting. To be honest, I know nothing about it - but I guess I know what I like.


Cathy tasting. This was at the Francis Ford Coppolla winery. It was actually somewhat of a mix between a museum and winery.


Eric tasting. It was a touristy joint, but cozy, interesting, and the people were friendly.


Food pairings. This was at the Robert Sinskey winery. I liked it a lot. No nonsense, very casual, and very good wines. We left with three bottles.


Barrels o' wine.


We had a fantastic dinner at this place. I left incredibly satisfied and full. Excellent French food.


Napa Valley and more good times.

San Fran, Organic Ice Cream, and Sake Tasting

The day after Santa Cruz, we went to San Francisco to hang out. I've been there a couple times and always had a good time and this was no exception.


After a nice Italian dinner, we went to was Bi-Rite Creamery. They use local and organic ingredients, and generally appear to be eco-friendly - my kind of place. The ice cream is awesome too. Pic taken with Cathy's Sony p&s.


Rie, Eric, Roland, Me, Cathy. My brother got stung by a hornet in San Francisco. Five days rolling around in the woods with swarms of hornets, and neither of us got stung. But A couple hours in the city, and bam - hornet sting. Pic taken by a stranger with Cathy's Sony p&s.


To soothe his pain, Eric and I decided to do some sake tasting. We bought a couple bottles from a place called True Sake, I think. After getting back home, we cracked them open and gave em a taste. We tasted the middle bottle until it was gone. Delicious. One of my first posts, here, on this blog had a photo of booze and my brother, so this photo was taken in the same spirit.


Good times.

Santa Cruz Sea Lions

Time for some non-hiking photos from our California trip. After Cathy flew in, we went to Santa Cruz for a day with my brother. We lay around all day, played some frisbee, watched some weird fog roll in, and had a great seafood dinner on the wharf. Nothing too notable, but here are some photos of sea lions (taken with Cathy's p&s Sony camera):


There was a spot for sea lions to hang out on the wharf. Here's a group of them sleeping, barking, and/or scratching themselves. They kinda look like dogs. Cute little guys.


This one wanted to take a nap away from the crowd. Somehow he was able to get up on this beam on the other side. Funny shit.


Looks like he is really enjoying himself.

Music: Quentin's Trot

I realized that I forgot to announce that Quentin is back in Chicago! My best friend is back and my pack is complete once again.

To celebrate his return, here is a tune that I wrote for him a long time ago. It's a quick and fun little instrumental which I've unofficially called "Quentin's Trot." I think it's quite appropriate in name and sound:

Engaged

Surprise / proposal ring / family heirloom / engaged / happy

Lassen Volcanic National Park, Pt. 7

Last post on Lassen.

The last day: we hiked a bit, ate lunch at Horseshoe Lake, crossed a couple rivers, ambled through the Grassy Swale, and ended up back where we started, Summit Lake.


Trail.


We found an unmarked waterfall along the path. Eric heard it from the path, I checked it out thinking it was just the wind, but then found this little guy. Neat feature: you could jump into the pool in front of the waterfall...


...as my brother shows here.


Kings Creek Meadow. As we drove out of the park, we stopped at a couple places to check out the various views. While taking some landscape photos at this meadow, an osprey suddenly torpedoed into the stream at the right and snagged a fish, all probably no more than 40-50 feet away from us. Craziness. Unfortunately, because it happened so fast, I missed the photo op.


This was the osprey that caught the fish. Although we spent some time waiting around, hoping it would grab another fish, it never really got too close again.


So that's about it for our Lassen trip. Good times.

Lassen Volcanic National Park, Pt. 6

Shortly after climbing up and down the Cinder Cone, we reached our site for the day, Butte Lake. We actually got there ahead of time so we decided to go for the next day's campsite, Snag Lake. We kind of overestimated ourselves and the fatigue made enjoying our surroundings secondary to just finishing the hike.


But we eventually made it to Snag Lake, and it was a great spot. Once again, we were the only people there. Here, Eric is actually standing on the dried lakebed. The shore had receded by 20-30 feet due to the drought.


After relaxing a bit, Eric decided to practice some capoeira. Nice air on a roundhouse.


Meia lua.


The presence of fish was suspected during the day when we watched gulls divebomb into the water to catch them. At dusk, it was confirmed when we saw some trout literally jumping out of the water to feed on the insects that had come out. Eric decided to give it another try.


He fished for quite a while, right to the sunset.


Finally snagging a juvenile rainbow trout after a serious bout of patience. He ended up catching two of these little guys, and snapped a line reeling in a much larger one. It was the classic "big one that got away." My brother was pissed.

Lassen Volcanic National Park, Pt. 5

Does it ever end? Sorry for all the posts, but I'm going through my photos very slowly.


We finally made it to the top of the Cinder Cone. A cinder cone is essentially a volcanic vent that has accumulated debris (cinder) around itself from its eruptions. So the cone is not much more than a pile of chunks of volcanic rock (which is why, as stated in my last post, it was difficult to climb). Although this picture does not provide sufficient perspective to convey the size of this thing, if you open the image up and look closely, you can see two people on the left rear where the two paths meet.


Ok, here's a closer look at them. Hopefully this gives you an idea of how big it was.


You can get a better idea of how deep it was from the opposite side. Eric was excited because it reminded him of the desert pit monster in Star Wars. I agreed.


You could get a nice view of Lassen Peak from here. It is considered an active volcano, albeit dormant, volcano. I was trying to smile here, but it looks more like a painful grimace.


Turning the camera to the left, you got a fucking sweet view. You can really see the incredible variety of terrain. Forests, desert, volcanic rock, lakes, hills, dunes, mountains...



Looking to the right of the above picture are the aptly named Painted Dunes. Absolutely moving, it was one of the more unique sights in Lassen. You can see the trail off to the right which we hiked on. You can see where I took this picture from the last post, it's not too hard to figure out.

Probably just two more posts of Lassen left...

Lassen Volcanic National Park, Pt. 4

More Lassen.


For the most part, we didn't see much wildlife besides a squirrels, a couple snakes, and some deer. There were lots of insects though, and this butterfly was pretty common. Looks like a California tortoiseshell.


There were a lot of dragonflies near the lakes. Somehow, I was able to get a photo of one in flight. Not sure what species it is, but through some brief interweb research, my best guess is that it's a blue-eyed darner.


We ran into some interesting terrain the second day. The ground transitioned from brown dirt to black cinder, the trees turned from alive to burnt and dead, and the scrub all but disappeared. You can see Eric near the bottom right corner - it provides some perspective of the size of the trees.


Trail signage on a partially charred tree.


Yellow brittlebush barely growing in the dirt and cinder. A tough little plant, you often find this growing where nothing else can.


Eric and I approaching the Cinder Cone, which we later climbed. A great view but we were totally exposed to the sun at this point. It was damn hot. We drank about five liters of water that day and it still wasn't enough. I think I pissed smoke later that night.


Taking a break while climbing up the Cinder Cone. It really wasn't that high up, and the heat, dust, and 35 pound packs on our backs were fine. It was the loose gravel and cinder that was frustrating. Since it gave way with every step, we lost ground as we gained ground. It was one of those things where you keep your head down, try to think about something else, and just keep putting one foot in front of the other.

Next post, top of the Cinder Cone.

Lassen Volcanic National Park, Pt. 3

The first day was a nice easy hike. Most of it was through alpine terrain. The trail, although well maintained, was incredibly dusty. That wasn't much of surprise but at the end of each day, the skin of my legs were caked in dust despite wearing pants.


Many of the pine trees had crazy neon greenish yellow lichen (it wasn't moss) growing all over them.


It's wolf lichen, which is mildly poisonous. Don't eat it.


Rainbow Lake. This is where we set up camp for the day and we had the whole lake to ourselves. After a long summer day of hiking, there is nothing better than jumping into a cold mountain lake.


The lake supposedly had rainbow trout in them so Eric decided to give it a go.


He fished around the whole lake and caught nothing. We decided the lake had no trout. Yeah, that's the ticket.


Really the only thing we found in the water were garter snakes.

Lassen Volcanic National Park, Pt. 2

Eric hiking on the trail. This was about two miles out of the Summit Lake campsite. It was your basic alpine terrain, totally dominated by sparse conifers and scrub. Although the days started off cool, it warmed up quickly. The lack of shade made it a bit hot, but thankfully there was virtually no humidity (as expected) and so it was usually comfortable enough. This type of terrain constituted about 50% of our hike.


There really wasn't all that much wildlife. However, the first couple miles of our hike had literally hordes of these guys. They look like chipmunks, but after looking at some of my photos I realized that they were the ubiquitous golden-mantled ground squirrel. Anyway, they were scampering all over the place, but strangely enough, they slowly disappeared as we moved through the park. I really don't remember seeing any others after the first day.


After four or five miles, we ran into our first lake, Echo Lake. It was relatively small and not all that interesting or significant (except for the fact that it was the first lake we hiked by), but the cool breeze sweeping in over the lake was appreciated.


Since it was towards the end of the summer and the area was experiencing a drought, many bodies of water were smaller than usual, or even entirely dry. This appeared to be a shallow area of Upper Twin Lake that had dried up and was cut off from the remainder of the lake. I went out to take a look since I was curious about the little tufts of grass...


After walking around the dried up lakebed, I saw what I thought to be crickets jumping around my feet. I looked down only to see tiny frogs frantically jumping out of the path of my clumsy feet. There were dozens of them within arm's length. I think they are Pacific Tree Frogs, which I've seen in Oregon - but my knowledge on amphibians is somewhat lacking so I can't be sure.


These guys were tiny. Those are dried up pine needles towards the front of the picture.

More to come...