We drove out to the sea cliffs near Pescadero Beach this morning to see if we could spot some whales. We lost the sun on the way over but we did get to see what I think were gray whales as they swam near us for a while:
After getting the Traveling Cat Adventure Vehicle back from the repair shop (following my close encounter with a falling tree limb), Darlene and I decided to get in another little road trip. I found Carrizo Plain National Monument initially as looking like a nice layover point on our planned way to Joshua Tree National Park, but we ended up deciding to spend our four days just there, exploring the hills and valley.
Carrizo Plain is probably most known for many illustrative pictures of the San Andrea fault cutting across many old creek beds and showing how quickly (geologically) the two plates are moving past each other. It’s also home to some once elaborate Native American rock paintings, at “Painted Rock”. Here’s some great side-by-side images showing the terrible damage these rock paintings have been subjected to over the last century.
In the spring, the valley and foothills are often covered in a brilliantly varied carpet of wildflowers. (See this image search for examples.)
Besides these sights, we got in some hiking, drone-flying and general exploring. I also brought along my newly acquired digital imaging telescope from Unistellar to see what it can do.
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This little road trip to the Eastern Sierra got off to a rough start as I experienced a breakdown in the Traveling Cat Adventure Vehicle far from any service help. I was on US-395 just past the intersection with CA-108 (still closed from snow on Sonora Pass) when I suddenly felt multiple and ongoing jerking motions from the transmission as it seemingly tried to jump between gears. I was luckily right in front of a pullout (which are few and far between) and was able to pull off the highway and try to figure out what was going on. I ended up waiting about four hours as Mercedes roadside service tried to find a tow service before I found I could get the vehicle moving and head back towards Gardnerville and eventually Reno to get the vehicle looked at the next day. (For more play by play on what happened, see this thread in the Sprinter-Source forum.) Anyway, after losing a couple of days to dealing with that and then another day back at the Tahoe house fixing the RV’s refrigerator (which had also started acting up), I eventually headed out again.
I was going to meet up with Hoan and his family in Mammoth Lakes but they ended up bailing out and so I spent a few days in and around the Mono Lake basin. The first night was a little off road on the way up to Virginia Lakes after discovering the dirt roads any higher were still blocked with snow. Still it was looking to be a lovely high altitude spot for star gazing with my telescope – until after setting everything up I realized I had forgot to pack my counterweight – making it mostly unusable. D’oh! Still it was a nice spot to fly the drone around a bit with Mono Lake visible in the distance. And Pan caught himself a mouse. ;-)
The following day I dropped down into the Mono Basin and went off roading a bit to get near the Mono Craters to go exploring on foot and in the air. (I wasn’t going to try take the Traveling Cat Adventure Vehicle up the slopes of the craters!) My cross-country hike turned out to be much more difficult than expected as it was really tough just getting up a step or two without slipping back on the steep scree slopes. But my, such a lovely and fascinating view over the top by flying the drone!
The last day involved some more exploring and flying near Grant Lake – and I found myself pushing the vehicle climbing on some just barely passable rough dirt roads. Once again, I’m really looking forward to downsizing to a much smaller and more capable off-road van. After getting out of there without mishap, the return trip involved backtracking north on 395 to highway 88, Monitor Pass and Markleeville. Tioga Pass was still closed and Sonora Pass and Ebetts Pass would be a really bad idea for a 25 ft. RV! Carson Pass was lovely and snow capped all over on the way back though.
Darlene’s niece, Joslyn, came out from Wisconsin for her spring break from school and I think we managed to fill her time here. We visited Shark Fin Cove, Pigeon Point Lighthouse, the Seymour Marine Discovery Center and saw dolphins while flying the drone from the sea cliffs near Pescadero. We spent one morning to see the redwood trees at Henry Cowell State Park and a deserted Roaring Camp Railroads. We introduced her to the sea otters at Moss Landing and got in a guided walk at Año Nuevo to see the elephant seals (lots of weaned pups at this time of year) and she and Darlene stayed overnight at the Monterey Zoo and fed the elephants. Besides a couple of movie nights and several interesting board games, we also went up to Tahoe for three days so she could learn to ski – and she was careening down the mountain in no time!
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I made a number of additional miscellaneous stops on my October road trip with Pan and Hera in the Traveling Cat Adventure Vehicle, including along a section of historic Route 66 in the Mojave Desert, on the road in northern Arizona and southern Utah, mountain biking outside of Zion National Park, and taking the tour of Hoover Dam. This was over the course of two weeks (October 4th-19th, 2017).
Mojave Desert outside of Baker, CA
Looking down Hoover Dam
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Here are the other separate galleries for this trip:
And here’s a video montage of my drone flights over the trip, including my last flight where I lost control, crashed and was forced to leave it behind:
What happens when the Mavic Pro doesn’t have GPS lock and you’re too high for the down-facing optical sensors to work is that the Mavic becomes unable to hold its position and it starts drifting all over the place. I was trying to compensate and keep it away from the walls but I was not at all successful. It almost crashed into one wall but halted itself when it’s forward-facing sensors detected the wall. As it started drifting towards the opposite wall, I had just decided to try to get it up and out of the shadow of the canyon entirely to hopefully gain GPS lock and regain control but it was too late – and this time it wasn’t facing the wall and didn’t detect it. It crashed and fell to a point immediately below me. While it was only like 35 feet down, it was a sheer drop with only a couple of narrow soft ledges. Without rope and climbing gear, I would have been risking my neck to try to retrieve it. Yeah, very sad to have to leave it behind, though it looked pretty busted up anyway.
Darlene and I managed to meet up with Glenn, Michele and Seaerra in Eastern Oregon this past week to experience the total solar eclipse together. We snagged a nice dispersed camping spot in the Malheur National Forest in an area I had scouted out back in June and we arrived four days early to get ahead of any potential crowds. As it turns out, we were in a remote enough area to only see a scattering of other campers.
We were also very lucky with the weather as there were a number of distant wildfires filling the skies with smoke days before and then it turned cloudy Sunday afternoon. But on Monday, the day of the eclipse, we had clear blue skies! (And smoke-filled skies the very next morning.)
A short video montage of the eclipse viewing experience (2.5 minutes)
And yes, seeing a total solar eclipse is truly an amazing experience. There’s the hour or so of build up beforehand as the light turns queer and dim and the heat of the sun fades away but then, as the last thin crescent splinter of sunlight disappears, you pull off your eye protection and… boom! The sun’s gorgeous corona suddenly appears streaming all around the pure black disc of the moon. It’s an incredible sight to behold. The sky was dark enough to reveal a couple of planets and a few brighter stars. The sky doesn’t go completely dark because of both the sun’s wispy corona and scattered sunlight from 35 miles away or less in every direction, outside the shadow of the moon.
The view was entirely captivating but, before we knew it, our two minutes of totality was already ending: a small bright bead of light starts to form which quickly brightens to create the stunning “diamond ring” effect. And then back on with the solar filters and glasses.
I had several cameras set up and recording different perspectives: one with a telephoto lens, one on a drone hovering out-of-earshot, one focused on the scene of us and one on my telescope to capture a much closer view (an 8-inch Schmidt-Cassegrain with a focal reducer to widen the view) and I’m so glad I did as we were able to see several solar eruptions in progress around the edge. Gorgeous!
Darlene and Michele also took some nice pics and video with handheld cameras. Click through for the full gallery of pictures and videos:
Here’s Michele (my sister-in-law)’s take on the experience: Midnight Sun
Update: Somebody asked me about our white sheet spread out on the ground and whether we had managed to see the elusive “shadow bands”. The answer is no, but this question prompted me to go back to the video that was rolling the whole time to see if I could find them.
They’re supposed to be very faint, thin, moving shadows (aka, “shadow snakes”) that are difficult to see and more difficult to record. We had looked specifically for them on the sheet about a minute before totality and then of course we were completely distracted by the amazing show in the sky afterward.
However, examining the video recording more closely and turning up the contrast, I think I may have found them:
Shadow bands?
I saw this news article in the Santa Cruz Sentinel this morning talking about how active the humpback whales have been near shore off of Santa Cruz and Aptos these past few weeks. So Darlene and I grabbed the drone and dashed down to Seacliff State Beach. I’ve been wanting to try flying the drone to get nice, aerial views of the whales. (A lot of the coastline is protected via the Monterey Bay Marine Sanctuary but flying in this area is allowed.)
There were probably a dozen of them near shore – you could see them popping up every which way! The lighting wasn’t great (completely overcast) as the marine layer had yet to burn off but it was still very fun to hang around with the drone waiting for them to appear.
It’s quite the challenge to find them and stay with them using the narrow view of the drone’s camera – even when you can easily see them from shore. Darlene was helping by watching the feed with the goggles because it’s also hard to see small/distant details on the iPhone or iPad screen, particularly when you’re outside. It’s much easier to see with the goggles but then of course all you can see is what the drone sees.
It was hard tracking them too because once they go under it’s hard to predict where to be looking when they come back up. You want to get closer for more detail but if you’re too close you won’t see them at all when they resurface off camera (which happened repeatedly) – and of course not so close as to harass them. I should point out that the limited view angle of the drone’s camera makes them appear closer than they really are and yet I still had to heavily crop every one of these clips to make the whales appear large enough in the frame – even in the most distant shots.
I did put a polarizer on the drone camera to try to cut through the reflection of the water surface but it didn’t work that well with the diffuse overcast light so it might work better in directed sunlight.
Need more practice! ;-)
Last week, Darlene and I were able to spend six days following the Mendocino Coast (with the cats in the Traveling Cat Adventure Vehicle, of course), continuing north from where we left off on the Sonoma Coast in December, just north of Fort Ross. We discovered that all the state park campgrounds were full going up the coast for the coming days but we kept managing to find something.
We stayed the first night at Stillwater Cove and then snagged a spot in an overflow area at Salt Point State Park, where we spent an afternoon mountain biking up to the top of the park and part of the morning flying the drone around. We visited the Point Arena Lighthouse, which turned out to be more interesting than I expected and we snagged a nice spot in another overflow area on the beach at the Van Damme State Park. We were able to grab a vacated spot in the park the next morning and then headed out to explore the Mendocino Headlands. We also checked out the Russian Gulch State Park.
This area around Mendocino has a lot of cool sea caves – we’ll need to come back some time and book a guided sea kayak tour to check them out. Fort Bragg turned out to be pretty uninteresting and we just passed through, stopping at MacKerricher State Park instead for lunch and to walk around. Our final and fifth night was at Westport Union Landing State Beach overlooking the bluffs. At this point, Highway 1 turns inland and you leave the coast for good. Our last day was essentially spent just getting back home to lots of traffic jams.
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Last stop on our return from Oregon was a couple of nights near and on Mt. Shasta in California. We enjoyed a lazy morning after camping out off a forest road an hour north (with Shasta in view) and then drove up to Bunny Flat on Mt. Shasta at 7000 ft. and spent the afternoon hiking a couple of miles up to the Sierra Club climber’s hut (built in 1923!). We found a nice spot to camp afterwards just below Bunny Flat.
This ended Pan and Hera’s longest outing in the Traveling Cat Adventure Vehicle – three weeks! They seem to have adapted quite well to traveling in it and it seems like we could go indefinitely now. Yay!
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Heading south from Mt. Hood in late June, we stopped off at the Crooked River gorge in the Peter Skene Ogden State Park between Madras and Redmond. We were a bit bewildered by how many people were gathering and setting up lawn chairs as if waiting for a big event. Unfortunately, we made the mistake of asking. ;-) Turns out they were all there awaiting the passing of an historic steam train engine (Southern Pacific 4449) to cross the bridge. It was due within the hour so we relocated the Traveling Cat Adventure Vehicle and decided to wait. After a couple of hours though, it became clear from news being relayed around that there had been delays and it was still an hour or so out. So we bailed.
Our destination was actually the Newberry National Volcanic Monument and this proved to be a nice place to spend a few days. We camped the first and last night on some forest roads and one night at one of the campgrounds in the caldera alongside Pauline Lake. We had a crazy red sky sunset one night, enjoyed some early morning kayaking on the completely still water and a nice trail ride up to near the caldera rim on our mountain bikes. We hiked the mile-long Lava River Cave lava tube and checked out the lava tree casts. There’s actually plenty of other trails and caves to visit too but we had to move on.
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After picking up Darlene from the Portland airport, we headed over to the Columbia River Gorge for sightseeing, hiking and mountain biking. There was certainly a lot to see and do and we ended up spending over four days in the area. We started with the road up to the Vista House on the historic highway 30 (west to east) and enjoyed the view. The campgrounds were full that night on the south side of the river so we had to cross over to the other side to find a place for the night. We snagged a spot back on the south side at mid-day and hiked the lovely loop trail from Multnomah Falls up and over and down to Wahkeena Falls (and various falls in-between). We started the next day with a shorter hike from the campground to Upper Horsetail Falls before heading out to go tour the Bonneville Fish Hatchery and then the visitor’s center at the Bonneville Dam (both very cool and interesting).
We stayed at a great county park outside of Hood River for the next two nights and enjoyed a full, long day of really fantastic mountain biking trails at Post Canyon. And then, on the last day, we burnt up half the day checking out the huge number of old airplanes and cars at the Western Antique Aeroplane & Automobile Museum in Hood River. (I’ve put up a separate post and gallery for this place. We both thought it was really great.) By afternoon, we had made it up to the Mt. Hood ski area for a rest stop for the kitties before heading onwards and south for new adventures.
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After dropping off Darlene at the Portland airport, Pan and Hera and I headed east for a week, to follow the path of the upcoming total eclipse and find a nice possible campsite. We checked out the countryside from Madras to Unity and in the process discovered the gorgeous, extensive and richly varied landscape of the John Day River basin. Along the way, I visited portions of the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument, including the Painted Hills area and the Thomas Condon Paleontology Center. I certainly was not aware that central Oregon had such an important mammal fossil record.
I decided not to try to capture the constantly changing landscape in pictures as I would’ve been trying to pull off the highway every few miles. So this gallery consists only of pictures and video from the places I stopped overnight, or where I went hiking or biking. One frustrating aspect of this area though is how much of the John Day River basin is private land and not accessible to the public – no trespassing signs everywhere, even on county roads that lead to public lands.
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In early June, we packed up the Traveling Cat Adventure Vehicle and headed north to visit Glenn and Michele in Portland for what would end up being a three-week road trip with the cats on board. We took a leisurely three days to get to Portland, stopping overnight at Lake Shasta, spending an afternoon in Ashland, staying at a campground along the Rogue River west of Grants Pass, visiting the surprising Applegate Trail museum along the I-5, and overnight at the Waterloo Park riverside campground before finally reaching Portland in time to greet Glenn and Michele as they finished a half-marathon. Somehow we took practically no pictures on the way up there.
For the weekend with Glenn and Michele, we went out and found the first ever official geocache and discovered that Pan likes to geocache (or, really likes forests anyway), did some hiking and more geocaching in Forest Park, and went flying the drone around Saint John’s Bridge on the Willamette River.
Darlene only had a few more days before she’d have to return to work, so we spent an afternoon in Oregon City, including visiting the End of the Oregon Trail Interpretive Center (fascinating place to visit!), and then two nights at Silver Falls State Park where we enjoyed a really fantastic day-long hike on the spectacular “Trail of Ten Falls”, before returning to Portland to put her on a plane home while I continued the adventure with Pan and Hera.
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Hoan and Quyen returned with their kids to visit over the 4th of July weekend. This time we visited the surfers and sea lions along Cliff Drive, the juvenile elephant seals out at Año Nuevo, the lighthouse at Pigeon Point, the sea cliffs near Pescadero Beach, the whale skeletons at the Seymour Marine Discovery Center and the crabs and sea stars in the tide pools near Natural Bridges State Park.
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Darlene brought over Cindy and Travis to visit for the weekend again in late May. We played around with the drone, visited Seacliff State Beach in Capitola, went out to Año Nuevo to see what the elephant seals were up to and found a hidden park nearby on the edge of Scotts Valley while geocaching.
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When we set out on our mid-May, nine-day adventure in the Traveling Cat Adventure Vehicle, we headed for the Eastern Sierra because a very cold storm front was dominating everything more northerly. Well, with just a few days left, we saw the storms and cold weather were now reaching Bishop so we decided to turn south and escape the storms by heading to Death Valley National Park. With 95+F degree temperatures, we certainly escaped the cold front.
Coming into the park late, we struggled to find some dispersed camping the first night and ended up settling for a space at the Stovepipe Wells “campground” (aka, a parking space). Over the next two days we got to explore some fantastic slot canyons up Sidewinder Canyon, checked out the Artists Palette Drive, hiked up Golden Canyon, camped out in Greenwater Valley, and drove the Traveling Cat Adventure Vehicle all the way to (and through) Titus Canyon.
Oh good grief that was terrifying: driving the 24-mile Titus Canyon Road in a 25 ft. Sprinter-based RV. I’ve driven that dirt road decades ago in a compact 4WD and it was fun and uneventful, but I couldn’t remember what the entire road was like. Mind you, we checked with the ranger beforehand for advice on appropriate roads but there clearly must have been some misunderstanding. As it turns out, it starts out merely annoying with miles of washboard dirt road and the finale in Titus Canyon itself is easy and gorgeous but in the middle you have miles of narrow, very steep and twisty unpaved road with sheer drops on one side or another in a tall, heavy, long-wheelbased RV that teeters side to side over every little uneven track no matter how slowly you try to creep forward and the gravel gives way and the vehicle slips forward under the 10,000 lbs of weight when you try to stop your forward momentum. And Titus Canyon Road is technically a one-way route!
At a couple of points, we had to stop to fill in some large potholes with rocks to keep the vehicle from tilting any more dramatically. I regret not taking any pictures or video while in the truly scary stretches but at the time all I wanted is to just get through it without falling over or slipping over the side. I’ll never do a road like that again in such a vehicle!
We survived though and Titus Canyon itself was marvelous. In hindsight, it would’ve been more pleasant to park at the exit of the canyon and ride our bikes in (which is allowed). A mighty dust storm punctuated our evening departure but we found a place to stop and sleep off a dirt road outside the park.
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