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.