Smoke smoke everywhere

[Drew Wiley]

They had Hwy 120 completely closed into Yosemite mid-week due to a fire near the intersection of Hwy 49. The smoke coming over Tioga Pass was miserable, and Mono Lk barely visible from Hwy 395 just a few yards away. Two days later, a completely different story as the wind shifted, and everything about the Lake was clear and sparkly. In Yosemite Valley, the haze is often miserable in summer due to all the damn campfires they illogically permit, plus the smog coming up from the central valley. A hot sneezy place in summer. The last summertime I was seriously in the Park, I was way up in the Lyell Fork, having crossed over the top from the south, with nobody else in sight for an entire week except the guy backpacking with me. A tiny wisp of smoke from fires lower down created just the exact amount of softening in the evening light I was hoping for, at least for the sake of color film. In the morning it was totally crisp, and more suited to black and white work. But I gotta stop pontificating and start developing film, cleaning my gear, etc. Gosh, Vaughn, after this viral mess settles down, I'd sure like to see some of your carbon and pt/pd prints in person.

[Vaughn]

Well, I did not coat last night -- got too wrapped up at looking at negatives and the time slipped by...by the time I got the paper out and went to grab the platinum it was almost midnight. Tonight! Wish I could say this SIP has gotten me busy, but the opposite is true. And so it goes... It would be fun to have a LF get-together up here in the redwoods...but I am certainly not voluntering to organize and run such an adventure, LOL.

Not so yellow today, 75F at noon and probably will be our high temp. Light breeze from the ocean, 6 miles away. A little watering this morning. I have a brown thumb, but I must say I am impressed with my potatoes. Last fall I planted a few sprouted baby potatoes of various colors from my cupboard...all wiped out by the winter frosts, so I thought. They regrew this spring and I had my first harvest this week of the one plant that was ahead of the rest. Now if I can keep the lemon I transplanted alive (it was dying on someone else) and the two Chilean trees alive of my son's he entrusted me with, I will be amazed.

[Drew Wiley]

I have an enormous Chilean Aracaria tree. They are amazing because they're adapted to high winds, and the branches are so limber they never break. But there are thorny fronds everywhere on my driveway after these wind storms. Squirrels like to nest in the tree because nothing else is able to climb it. They're one of the most ancient forms of conifer, and it's hard to imagine that certain sauropods were once apparently adapted to eating their needle-tipped fronds, and others to rough redwood fronds - another Jurassic snack. The cones themselves are as heavy as pineapples, but grow close to the trunk and drop only once a year on a hot day, except that squirrels gnaw them down first. But the tree rains down sticky fluid constantly. I sure miss my hot weather ranch crops from the hills since I sold that place- even had a vineyard, various orchard trees, all kinds of melons, barrel potatoes, all kinds of vegetables and squash, corn rows. Store bought just ain't the same. I do have a cold weather thick-skinned lemon tree here that does well year-round, and an apple and plum tree that do well - and yeah, it is cold today (highs in the low 50's), and smelling like smoke again. Even the damn ants can't stand the smoke and are starting to commute across my shop floor toward the darkroom. A bit of citrus solvent spray solved that.

[Vaughn]

The university I went to in NZ had a giant Chilean Aracaria (monkey puzzle) that blew over in a 120 MPH wind storm while I was there (1975). It was a beautiful tree. Redwoods on campus grew amazing fast, also.

Trees I have are Robles...a fast-growing (30+ meters) deciduous broadleaf. Same genus as NZ beeches (which are evergreen).

[Drew Wiley]

I was just outside raking up the Monkey Puzzle fronds. I've been in hurricane force winds atop mtn summits, but thankfully never anything like that here. There are a number of very tall (200 ft) old Aracarias in Santa Barbara. When I bought this place 40 yrs ago, mine was about 16 ft tall; now its about 80 ft. I bagged a basic field biology degree long ago, but was just one course away from five other degree options, including botany. But can't seem to remember a damn thing now. The botanical garden up the canyon from me has a representative sampling of almost all the California evergreens, including even the Channel Islands subspecies; that's where I go to refresh my memory. The rarest are the Calif nutmegs, with their flat needles and peculiar nutmeg "cones". There was a single example up the road from my place in the Sierras, and quite a cluster around Crystal Cave in Sequoia. The tallest redwood ever discovered was uphill from me, cut down in the 1880's so some scientist could count the rings. Now not even a stump if left, or single old growth tree, except for planted second growth. I wonder if there's a true old growth redwood anywhere in the Bay area (exclusive of Big Basin etc). There are a few enormous bases which have re-sprouted second-growth perimeter trees. And here I am, once owning an all old-growth house, and now looking at my back wall made of true tight vertical-grain wainscoting, and even real redwood ply shop sliding doors. And all that old growth redwood I've been involved with refinishing! Some of the UC Berk buildings have wonderful examples, but so did most of the Julia Morgan classic buildings that I either consulted on, sold equipment for, or earlier, refinished myself. Bernard Maybeck used a lot of redwood too, but unlike his student Julia Morgan, he made a lot of structural mistakes.

[Vaughn]

It was an odd wind storm across the Canterbury Plains. No clouds just the wind...at it's height in the early morning hours, down to 60 mph at sun-up. No gusts...just solid wind. The view out my 4th floor window (new brick building that shook all night) was of windbreaks all shattered in the dusty sunrise. Thousands of acres of planted radiata pine flattened.

Just did some checking...the northwester gale grew over the last 45 years -- only up to a little over 100 mph (170 kph).

There is a new trail, well, a collection of trails and sections of road being put together....and has been walked by some brave souls. Starts in my old wilderness, the Yolla Bollys (from the east over South Yolla Bolly Peak/Mt Linn) along some of the wilderness trails I maintained in the 1980s, and ends north and west up in Crescent City. The Bigfoot Trail -- 360 miles long, thirty-two (32) different conifer species along the trail.

https://www.bigfoottrail.org/

A great book is The Dark Range: A Naturalist's Night Notebook by David Rains Wallace, 1978 -- a night walk west from the Central Valley to the top of the Yolla Bollys.

[Drew Wiley]

Interesting. I assume you know that Radiata pines occur naturally only on three little promontories on the San Mateo coast, where they're all stunted and twisty and small, much like cypresses right along the shore. Then a dairy farmer in a sheltered hollow of Drake's Bay planted a bunch out of the wind for perhaps fence posts or firewood - who knows? And lo and behold, they all grew straight as a telephone pole! Then more recently, as good clear cuts of sugar pine became scarce, and substitutes for moulding and siding were being experimented with via finger-jointed scrap, and all hell was breaking loose because the different pieces had differential rates of moisture expansion/contraction due to varying ring and grain structure, then someone figured out that by deliberately growing and harvesting radiata at the same time, the pieces would be consistent. So plantations started up in Chile and New Zealand, and now even other places. ... That trail sounds interesting. Something I never seem to see here on the central coast is Pacific Yew. I suppose you have some in the Yolla Bollys, maybe some Port Orford Cedar too in wetter areas?

[Vaughn]

Actually, The Radiata in NZ came via South Africa, I believe. No radiata in the Yolla Bollys, no Port Orford as far as I know. A few yew, the foxtail pine, of course.

[Drew Wiley]

Well, the moulding and siding companies who pioneered radiata use, who we were one of the prime drivers of, told us it was CA radiata, because they were behind the first Chilean plantations. And gosh, I was the very person doing jobsite troubleshooting, going nuts trying to get good moisture meters in the hands of contractors before the lawyers bought them! But just like salmon farming, once the cat was out of the bag, experimenting with slightly different species and climates inevitably began. Another big factor was glues. Factories in China and Thailand etc still use more efficient formaldehyde-based glues which are now banned here for health reasons; so having tree farms closer to them would trim shipping costs. So it really depends on who is behind any specific tree farm, which might even involve hybrids or genetically altered trees by now. One of the pictures on the wall behind me was framed in a sustainable farmed hybrid eucalyptus material genetically engineered to resemble true mahogany. But it's actually far heavier and denser, even though rapid-growing. I was one of the first people to test dimensional cuts of it (as opposed to veneer applications), but being high silica, it ate up carbide way too fast to be cost-effective for routine moulding use.

[Drew Wiley]

Now back to fires - a sad point is the loss of the Condor Sanctuary in the Big Sur Mtns. It was up to a 23,000 acre fire yesterday, and appears to have been started by arson. A local thug and illegal pot grower was apparently trying to conceal incriminating parts of his operation by setting them on fire, and has been arrested. Closer to me, the Pt Reyes fire has been basically corralled, but views will not be the same, and one side or other of at least some of the magical cloud forest trails on Mt Wittenburg, a number of moss-draped old growth fir trees have been lost. But other trails are unaffected. A tongue of burn crossed over the top and down a ridge almost to the Visitor Center, so a burn scar will be visible even from there, but it was stopped from spreading.