Watching Cattle by Paddle

 

It was great spending some time with the family up here.  They left me this afternoon so...  I lugged Ben's wonderful old canoe down to the lake for a paddle as soon as they took off.  I had been itching to get it on the water since my arrival, but the rain had been so frequent I would have had to bale every three strokes.  My paddle started with nasty headwind that brought back frightful memories of Ross Lake, but it died after about an hour of battling it.  The water turned from gobblygook to glass, and it was perfect.  The light began to penetrate the clouds as well, making for a spectacular show.  It was the kind of light that comes and goes with moving clouds.  And, each time that light came through, bird song would increase.  And when it disappeared they would hush.   It was truly amazing.  There was a large gaggle of redtails, a pair of bald eagles, canada geese, ducks of unknown type as well as wood, and plenty of others I could not name.  

To create range land here, ranchers bulldoze off ground cover and shrubs, and their cattle keep it from coming back by grazing.  The reason some of the hills are still covered seems usually that the slope is either too great for cattle or bulldozer, I'm not sure which one.  On a ride back in the hills today I was able to see big piles of scrub oaks etc. that were pushed into piles to develop more range land on the property adjacent to ours.  Yey!  I'm off to Bishop! Goodbye Lake Don Pedro, I will be back in few months...

The Family Has Arrived!

Syd, Chanelle, and One-Eyed Tony the Jewish Pirate Cat

The water here at the bend has risent to the level of the road after last night's rain.  See earlier pictures for a comparison.

Notice the woody debris just to the right of the falls perched atop the rock.  This thing was probably flowing at 2x the current CFS(already really high!).  Holy guacamole Mr. Sniblecoff!

Notice the high water mark at my Dad's right foot.  It must have been raging!  This year has been a 20 year high for precipitation in the area. 

Beauuutiful.

Pseudacris sierra- Sierran treefrog

Morning Walk

I got out for a nice stroll yesterday morning.  The creek that flows by our place is called Hatch Creek.  Our road is Hatch Creek Lane- oh, lane!  That reminds me about street suffixes.  Look at all these beautiful street suffixes- http://www.usps.com/ncsc/lookups/abbr_suffix.txt  Alright, back to the walk.  The light was patchy so the pictures aren't great, not that I could take good ones anyway.  It was great to poke around a familiar place, it's as beautiful here as ever.  Whoever named California the "Golden State" has never been here in the spring.(this is california's official state nickname, designated in 1968, although it was for the poppies I guess, not the golden hills of dry grass...)  The rolling hills of green grass growing are so fertile right now, the cows are doing back-flips. 

patchy light

gooseheads

two guys, four poles- very sporting d-bags

This old foundation is below the high water mark.  the new Don Pedro Dam was built in 1971, submerging many homes along the Tuolumne and its tributaries.  The old Don Pedro dam, completed in 1923, still stands submerged under current lake levels.  The original capacity was 14.3 percent of today's reservoir.

gbh

still learning...

It was porcelain.  A toilet corner maybe?

Hatch Creek's high water mark for the year.

Green leaves in the litter show it is this years mark.

Aliens!

Eh?

Ohhhhhh...

what are you?

Neighbors.  This is probably the mos beautiful place to live.  Ever.

H. blackberry choked creek.

I was trying to figure out what this was.  At first I thought some sort of strainer for a swollen creek.  But I decided on fence.

This interesting fence was acquired from cargo planes leftover from probably wwii.  I am looking into this with the neighbors for a full history, stay tuned. 

Hmmm

Somebody did some bad grass.

"They are all bred beef: beef heart, beef hide, beef hocks.  They're a human product like rayon.  They're like a field of shoes.  They have cast-iron shanks and tongues like foam insoles.  You can't see to their brains as you can with other animals; they have beef fat behind their eyes, beef stew."  Annie Dillard

It's pretty amazing to see the differences in ground cover of the slopes that the cows can't reach.  Ranching changed the landscape back west.

Ah shit.

And then I heard a laughing noise coming from the hill.  What could it be?

Tracks!

It's wild turkey!  Not that kind of turkey!

That kind!

Come back friends!

And before I knew it I had chased them to the top of the hill.

Not again!

A new type of culvert engineering.

Off my back dammit!

This goes out to all you effers who have been trying to get me to sign up for Facecrook.  This blog is me caving in.  This is as close as it's going to get, so drop it. 

Alright, so I don't have a job or plans to get one.(At least until fall...)  I will, though, be poking around back west for the next six months.  I have grand aspirations of using this here blog to journal about it.  I am typing with thawing fingers, as I just returned from a motorcycle ride in heavy rain heaven.  I'm at the family cabin on Don Pedro Reservoir in Tuolumne County.  I arrived in the Bay Area after a night in Long Beach, WA with Nick.  The morning following our seafood feast as I headed south.  I renewed my truck's tabs first, though, as I was reminded by the officer who issued me a $125 ticket- they were expired. 

I arrived down in the Bay Area and surprised my brother with my presence and stayed the night at his place.   With some very wet weather due to a high amplitude trough over the Pacific(thanks Cliff- http://cliffmass.blogspot.com/),  winds in Pt. Reys reached as high as 79 mph.  Well it's really wet here.  Creeks are swollen, and the reservoir is rising at a rapid rate- It has risen 4ft in the last four days.  That is a lot!  Don Pedro Reservoir has 160mi of shoreline, and submerges 26mi of the Tuolumne River via Don Pedro Dam.  This water is stored mainly for irrigation purposes, managed jointly by the Turlock Irrigation District and the Modesto Irrigation District for several hundred square miles of farmland in the Central Valley.  And thanks to their cooperation with the BLM, they also control the 15 feet of land between the high water mark of the reservoir and our property line.  Much of the land surrounding the reservoir is heavily grazed.  You can expect to see mostly valley oak(quercus lobata) and blue oak(quercus douglasii) when interspersed with roaming heffers.  Gray pines(pinus sabiniana) also seem to proliferate in some areas, endemic to CA it is also known as the bull pine.

The Tuolomne and its tributaries are chocked full of dams.  The Hetch Hetchy Reservoir in Yosemite is its first, recalling the epic battle of John Muir's preservation ethic vs. Gifford Pinchot's conservation idea- the greatest good for the most number of people.  Still, though, the section of the Tuolumne between Hetch Hetchy reservoir (after the O'Shaughnessy dam) remains a National Wild and Scenic River manged by the Forest Service.  This is intriguing as 239 million gallons per day are diverted through pipeline/aqueduct to deliver drinking water to San Francisco.  Take the "Wild" part with a grain of salt maybe...

The Tuolumne River was at one time home to native salmon populations too.  Fortunately, some have survived although they are at risk of extinction.  There is debate over whether the main issue is flow coming out of Don Pedro being sufficient or whether to blame predation by an ever growing bass population.  It's probably both, and more.  Think Washington but worse all you wet mossbacks up there! 

An old mining shaft in a crowd of oak and pine. 

I'm learning to use my camera.  Patience.

So where am I going with this? What happened to looking at landscape?  Humans happened! I will be looking at the landscape in all sorts of ways- observing change(human and nonhuman), etc.  Shoot, this is my blog, and I get to say what I want!  Anyway, welcome to Back West, my blog on observations of the interactions of people and place in the American West.