Labor Day

We took a trip up to Alta, staying overnight with Zoe in the tent. After unshuttering the cabin, chloe noticed something move behind the door and bravely dispatched me to investigate. It turned out be a bat:

which was not very happy to have been woken up, and briefly swooped over our heads before nestling him/her self behind some tar paper.

zoe, as is typical for weekends, was resistant to sleeping and wore both of us out, even before Chloe's friends showed up. She did manage to go to sleep briefly while in the ergo baby though. As an aside, BIG THANKS to our friends Taras and Katie for giving us the ergo baby; it sis so much nicer than the baby bjorn.



Once Chloe's friends showed up, we caravaned up to go to Salmon Lake, but got stuck in very atypical bumper to bumper traffic on I80, and got off the freeway at the next exit (Crystal Springs, I think). We regrouped, and I suggested a hike that I had heard a lot about, but had not done before: the Euchre Bar trail. It's actually very close to our place, and the signs are clear. There is even a toilet at the trail head -- cushy! The trail winds down something like 1600 or 1800 feet of switchbacks under oaks, madrones, and even some bay trees and eventually deposits you at the North Fork, where this an excellent and relatively warm swimming hole





We all went for swims, and dipped Zoe's toes in the water:


before heading back up to the bridge and then back up the trail




The hike back up turned out to be kind of a slog, and we were all totally exhausted by the end. Thankfully, we had Chileno beef blue cheese burgers, corn and a lot of other delicious things (including smores!) to pig out on. We also fired up the soaking tub to sooth our aching calves and thighs.

I probably would have slept quite soundly, if not for the fact that poor Zoe was kept awake by the shriek of trains, which seemed to be coming by every 30-40 minutes or so. Union Pacific had been doing some track work during the day, so I think there were a lot of baked up trains waiting to get out of the valley. In any case, neither chloe nor I slept very much.


The next morning we all headed to the fabulous Oddfellows Sunday breakfast, which they do only a few weekends a year now:


And then drove up to Lover's Leap, to peer over the edge into Giant Gap




The road up the Lover's Leap is a bit worse than I remember it, and the Prius (literally) just scraped by.

Closed!

We closed on our house today! Wheeeeee!

Russell Towle

I received a letter from Greg, Russell Towle's son last week with the shocking news that Russell had died in a car accident on I80. Since then, I, and many others have been struggling to make sense of the loss. Others who knew Russell better than I have described his many talents and contributions to the Dutch Flat area. I won't attempt to improve on these except to say that he was indeed a gifted Hiker, Geologist, Environmentalist, Mathematician, and Craftsman. These descriptions seem inadequate to me somehow though: they imply fragmentation where there was gestalt.

So how did I know Russell? My parents bought a small plot of land in Alta in the early eighties, upon which we built a small cabin. Although the cabin was small, the lack of power tools made building it a laborious task, and I welcomed any visitors who could distract my parents from the task at hand. Russell visited us several times, having been introduced to us by our long time family friends the Woodhouses, and I always came away with some new knowledge about the area.

The first time he visited, he recoiled at the fact that we were in the process of dispatching a shrubby looking evergreen which had been blocking our trail. It turned out to be a Pacific Yew, which was becoming scarce in the region. Of course, the Yew, beyond its utility in bow making has also turned out to yield a powerful chemotherapeutic called Taxol.

On a subsequent visit, Russell took me gold panning in our little creek and explained what kinds of features in the river bed might catch suspended gold. To this day, I remember the exact part of the bedrock where we moved a large river stone, filled the pan with sand, and a few minutes later were left with a few fluttering flakes of gold.

Russell also led us all on wonderful hikes, some of which have become family favorites that I have walked countless times in the years that followed. The trails to Salmon lake and Smart's Crossing are perfect examples of this, and we will hopefully be doing some of Russell's more ambitious hikes (from his wonderful blog) in the coming years.

I only realize it now that he is gone, but just knowing that a person of Russell's erudition, integrity, sense of stewardship and generosity was up there on Moody Ridge was a very comforting thought. It is heartbreaking to know that he is no longer with us.

Oh the embarassment

The other day I went to the Trader Joe's at Grand Lake. Like may other parking lots in the East Bay (Monterey Markert is another good example), the TJs lot is a disaster. This is largely due to people getting confused about which way to turn and the subhumans that back traffic out of the lot because they are waiting for someone to pull out of a space a few feet closer to the front door. Anyway, I was in a hurry to pick up ZZN, so I bypassed the lot and parked on the street *behind* TJ's (I know, this is EXCITING!!), ran in, got what we needed and then rolled the cart towards the car as fast as I could. Unfortunately, the cart came to a screeching halt as I passed out of the lot. I thought that I had run over a pebble and put my back into it, but to no avail. One of the TJs workers who was taking a smoke break was watching me and pointed with a smirk to a sign stating that the carts would stop moving at the edge of the lot! Ah, the sweet, sweet humiliation of looking like a common shopping cart burglar.

I now had even less time to get to day care, so I quickly shuttled everything the thirty feet to my car. I also resisted the urge to check out how the stupid thing worked and/or pick the cart and stuff it into my car just for spite.

I still haven't had a chance to see how they work. I don't remember seeing any big farings over the wheels, so I don't think it is this:

http://www.metroactive.com/papers/metro/06.03.99/shoppingcarts-9922.html

but is this, perhaps:
http://www.gatekeepersystems.com/solutions.php

The Euro method is to chain carts to each other with a small device that only releases when you insert a coin (1 euro). You get the coin back when you re-chain it to another cart.

Kyu's Wedding

not shown: when zoe saturated her diaper and leaked pee all over my pants. sweet!

The pathetic and the sublime

I had lunch with my friend Taras at a so-so phillipino place called Tribu Grill in San Bruno. Parked across the street was this:

The Mercedes high performance division has apparently come a long was with its new Black Series. Who knew it came from such humble origins!
Later that day, on the way to a family friend's wedding I stumbled upon this:

A Ferrari 365 GT 2+2. Beautiful.

One note about AMG. A long time ago, before AMG was part of Mercedes, they made a car called the AMG Hammer, which was a tuned 300E with a massive 5.6 L engine. That a four door luxury sedan could give many supercars of the day a run for the money was pretty impressive, and inspired much teenage car lust. I never actually saw one in real life until much later, when I was visiting my friend Keith in San Francisco. I was still in grad school, so this would have been around 1998 or so. We were walking down Guerrero from his apartment on Fair Oaks and a Hammer came rumbling southbound. The fact that it was a Hammer didn't occur to me at first: I was too busy staring at the driver, who was smoking a cigarette through a long cigarette holder, and at the occupants of the back seat (three prostitutes, or women dressed as prostitutes)! The car pulled a high speed U-turn, then sped off back up Guerrero, at which point we saw the word "AMG" on the left side of the trunk.

Zoe at large

in the artists studio.

Christa and Stephanie visit

And we did a one day alta trip, doing the customary stop at Awful Annies in Auburn



After a brief rest, and an attempt to find the damn northeast corner of the property again, we walked down to Smart's Crossing. We have a new hiking GPS -- a Garmin 60csx with the ultra sensitive Sirf III chipset. The performance of this GPS compared to any other GPS I have used is staggering -- it maintains locks under dense tree cover and acquires satellites quickly. It also has a mode in which it averages readings, and got us down to 7 foot accuracy, if you trust the Garmin error estimates! My workflow was to download shapefiles from the Placer County GIS CD, import into Google Earth, output to waypoints, and upload to the Garmin with GPSbabel.

Anyway, back to Smart's Crossing: It was a hot day, and perfect for a dip in the glacial waters of Bear River. This time, after much shaming and "Baaaaawk bawk bawkbawkbawkbawk" noises from Chloe, I did the jump. The last time I had jumped was in high school, and it didn't seem any shorter of a jump this time. On the way down, I had a 2001: Space Odyssey moment of dilated time, and began to wonder when I was actually going to hit the water. Here I am:


And here is Chloe, doing the by now casual jump off of the ledge (which she did twice)


Christa, being a health care professional, thought better of potentially back shattering jumps and opted out, after conferring with her more reckless sibling

Meanwhile, grandma entertained Zoe, who seemed to really enjoy splashing, trying to drink the water and taste testing the smooth river stones (Zoe enjoyed this too!).