HWY 41 in the news today.
Caltrans complaining that the rain is clogging the culverts with debris from the Rail Fire and damaging the highway. Equipment needs to be pre-positioned now to remove the debris and keep the water flowing.
HWY 41 in the news today.
Caltrans complaining that the rain is clogging the culverts with debris from the Rail Fire and damaging the highway. Equipment needs to be pre-positioned now to remove the debris and keep the water flowing.
"I would feel more optimistic about a bright future for man if he spent less time proving that he can outwit Nature and more time tasting her sweetness and respecting her seniority"---EB White
There are plenty of advance highway warning here on the coast too. Hwy 1 down around Big Sur is already having a fresh slide issue. There are probably going to be serious slide and tree problems in the Santa Cruz mountains. But trees can fall almost anywhere. Mudslides are already beginning across Hwy 101 in the Malibu burn area. They say this incoming storm will have not only a significant amount of rain, but wind too. But with the Sierra snowpack already at 100% of "normal", this should top that off even better. Makes no difference. Before summer is over, Pine Flat will be nearly empty, and nothing will be left in the piggy bank for when the water is needed the most. Conspicuous waste of water is policy in the West. And maybe I'm irritated because the cute little shade town of Minkler down below along the River is going to be turned into a sprawl of Burger Kings and mini-marts and mindless suburbanization once that Railway to Nowhere hub gets completed there.
I didn't know Minkler was going to be a stop. The new highway is going to skirt Minkler from what I saw a few weeks ago when we drove out to the School House/Sherwood Inn or whatever it's called these days(excellent food btw!)Originally Posted by Drew Wiley
The lunch counter at the little market in Minkler has excellent bologne sandwiches (and I don't care much for bologne sandwiches)
I doubt if a Burger King would stand a chance unless it was on the new stretch of highway tapping into the Kings Canyon National Park traffic.
"I would feel more optimistic about a bright future for man if he spent less time proving that he can outwit Nature and more time tasting her sweetness and respecting her seniority"---EB White
Development is almost inevitable because land is being taken away from the orchards to put the high speed rail line through, and the rail will intersect right around that new highway interchange going uphill. Minkler is just a stone's throw away. I can remember being in the old Millerton fish hatchery tank truck, throwing in a brick of ice and time to time, and stopping at the bridge at Minkler to toss in a bucket of 8" trout that would get immediately caught by waiting fishermen, fried, and taste like cottonseed. We kids were always hoping to get some kind of permanent wildlife job. But the hatchery had exactly one job opening and accepted exactly one application - that of the Manager's son! - nepotism as usual. Later I remember getting into a huge rotten grapefruit fight right after a streambed mapping exercise for a Geomorphology class. We pulled onto the highway at Minkler and opened the sunroof and tossed the rotten fruit at the car of fellow students ahead of us. But right at that moment, the Professor in his own car ahead of them happened to brake, and several grapefruit ended up splattering all over his windshield and car hood. He was a great sport, so we simply ended up washing and waxing his car as part of the field trip.
Excellent farm land---plenty of water and fertile soil.
My B-I-L's family had an 80 acre vineyard across the road from the Kings for 100+ years
"I would feel more optimistic about a bright future for man if he spent less time proving that he can outwit Nature and more time tasting her sweetness and respecting her seniority"---EB White
Well, that bottomland where the Kings Riv reaches the valley right there around Minkler is infamous for horribly dense tule fog and massive car pileups. The man who owned the little old hotel there went berserk a few years ago and killed 3 young Fresno cops trying to pick him up; but that would have been all over your local news. What bothers me personally is the leveling of the little stone roadside museum a bit further south. It housed a couple mammoth skeletons my dad dug up during the adjacent canal project, plus some petrified Pliocene palm wood logs from the Ione Formation right up the road past your pasture in Clovis, past the eucalyptus grove where there the canal cuts over from Millerton. I have a set of bookends made from that - a bright yellowish-white opalescent stone with the distinctly lenticular cell structure of palm cell walls still visible under a low-power microscope.
Posting Permissions
Reply With Quote
Bookmarks