Category Archives: travel

Kinfolk in November

family, grandchildren, nature, travel


The only theme that I can find in the photos I took this week is family togetherness, but the California weather was mild enough that I could add some shots of the various natural settings in which we happily congregated.

Many of us gathered at Pippin’s place in the woods — the resident deer clan showed up, too, and were gifted with potato peelings and runty pears for their Thanksgiving dinner. They also ate a quantity of willow leaves, sometimes from the patio table.

 

 

Snow had fallen Wednesday night and creatures were storing up for the winter, whether in fat or food or bedding. Pippin called me to the window once to see a squirrel chewing off grass and stuffing it into his mouth. Clumps of grass stuck way out on either side of his fat cheeks even after he rearranged it so as to fit more in.

He looked over our way and when he saw us staring he stopped work and stared right back for a minute, then figured he had enough for that trip and disappeared around a tree.


Arriving a day early meant that I had time to help bake pumpkin pies and read Sunset magazine to Scout.

Mr. Glad had put out a call for people to bring table games, and Soldier brought Jenga. While the pies were smelling up the house real nice I showed the little boy how to play and he immediately learned how to at least look like a serious contender.

When Pathfinder’s group arrived Annie played the piano, and after dinner they revealed the darling candy-and-cookie turkey craft that they wanted to show the littlest cousin.

 

It really was a lovely and relaxed afternoon and evening, with plenty of time for various groups of cousins and uncles to play several games, listen to 49ers football, and scatter the deer when they went out back to throw the football themselves.

We ate pies baked by four different people for supper, and sang “O God Our Help in Ages Past” before we had to say good-bye by passing around kisses and hugs. Four of the Glad Children had been able to come and take this rare opportunity, along with a couple of spouses and five grandchildren.

The next morning we brought Kate and her friend home with us for a couple more days, driving through the patchwork of orange and brown in the Napa Valley vineyards on our way. Kate and Mr. G. listened to each other’s iPod collections and I took the wheel for the windiest stretch of road so that I wouldn’t get carsick.

Today we took them wine-tasting in another valley, where the scenery was rich and the weather was warm enough for us to sit outside for lunch. Strange, though, how the vines in my best photo from today have barely started to turn color.

This picture might make you think it’s all tropical here. But the sun was slanted and we didn’t feel exactly toasty. I was glad to come home and build a good hot fire against the cold. Its warmth is a better metaphor right now for the kind of love that binds our very God-blessed family.

Big Sur

nature, travel, , , , , ,

 

Mouth of Big Sur R. – Andrew Molera Park

Many years ago at the spot in this first photo, Mr. Glad and I watched a group of waterbirds playing. We were having a weekend at Big Sur to celebrate a wedding anniversary.

Here the Big Sur River flows into the Pacific Ocean on California’s central coast. On that day in March way back then, the birds would float down the riffles of the river, then fly back up to the jumping-in place and wait in line behind their fellows until their turn came; jump in, float down, fly back up, over and over. We watched them a long time, and they were still at it when we left.

This week we had made the trip to see family and friends. It was a very short visit, but we managed to take in aspects of both Andrew Molera State Park and Soberanes Canyon.

The Big Sur area features such a profusion of plant forms, not to mention the animal life that I mostly ignore, that it is easy to understand why so many people want to live there where the ocean and trees and flowers make a dramatic but not agitating backdrop for solitude.

Everywhere we went for three days, the air was thick with the aromas of a casserole of natural ingredients, seaweed and sagebrush, redwoods and damp soil, a thousand essential oils in microscopic droplets bombarding my senses and reminding me that I should get out into the woods and the fields more often just to inhale this kind of nourishment.

If I did live near Big Sur, I’d want to go regularly to Soberanes Canyon, where the plant forms overlap in an unlikely and seemingly chaotic way.

Old cactus with baby on Soberanes Canyon Trail

I’ve never before seen redwood sorrel and poison oak growing together, or ferns next to cactus. Those are the most surprising things that jumped out at me, but if I went every month or so along the same canyon trail, other wildflowers or shrubs might eventually get my attention with the changing seasons and blooms. Whether I saw a scene or a tiny part of it in mist or sunshine would also make a difference.

Redwood sorrel with poison oak and nettles

This is a coastal steppe zone, my guide and son told me. The cactus were old and weather-beaten, some of their trunks resembling thick board platforms, but still producing new and fresh green sprouts.

one of the smaller lupines

Venerable lupine “trees” five feet across stood alongside the trail, with trunks four inches in diameter, still blooming mid-October.

Only a couple of minutes up from Highway 1, the trail takes you through dry hills with spreads of cactus all around. We got hot and sweaty pretty quickly, as it was mid-afternoon on what was probably the hottest fall day, but we didn’t grumble, being quite glad that the usual fog wasn’t dampening our spirits.

Soberanes Creek

Before we knew it, we were descending to the creek, stands of tall, thick redwoods and carpets of sorrel, and after twenty paces the temperature had dropped ten degrees.

At the base of one of those huge specimens of Sequoia sempervirens, Mr. G pointed out to us the sponginess of the ground. It was not dirt, but many inches – or feet? – of redwood needles, making a duff that we all took turns bouncing on before we went on down the grade and back to our car.

I just love the way the Father creates these playgrounds for the delight of His children.

 

Of Earth and Altar and Lake

friends, nature, travel, , , , , , ,

Mr. and Mrs. Bread joined us at My Lake for a few days. We canoed and hiked and ate a lot and sat by the fire. On the Lord’s Day we sunned ourselves on the deck while singing hymns to The God of Earth and Altar, praising Him for his Wondrous Love that flows Like a River Glorious.

In the top photo you can see on the left margin the brown needles of a dead tree that was the subject of some discussion between Mrs. B. and me.

There’s a lot of philosophy and theology in a dead tree, did you know? But I spent so much time doing the nature study while barely tackling the philosophizing, that my time-bucket is empty. Maybe next summer I’ll look at it again and write, and figure out what I think.

manzanita

Another dead tree (above), growing out of a hunk of granite that we christened Gumdrop Dome, was more strikingly beautiful. According to G.K. Chesterton, “Anything beautiful always means more than it says.” As I was saying….?

A baby manzanita bush was hugging a rock in a most endearing manner. It’s amazing how often I find a new and lovable manzanita bush in my view.

One night Mrs. B. was working out on paper what she thought about the meaning of things, as the dinner she crafted for us stewed in the oven, and we all enjoyed the fire her mister had built up to a controlled inferno. The thermometer got up past 60 in the daytime but at night dropped to freezing.
Wax Currant – Ribes cereum

Last year Mrs. Bread and I were roughing it alone up there, without our menfolk. I took more pictures then, though now I am finding that so few images in my Lake collection satisfactorily describe the lake itself. Next trip I’ll have to climb to the top of Gumdrop, as I haven’t done in years, and get the wide view with my camera. In the meantime, here’s a picture we took from there Once.

For me the most blessed part of our stay at the cabin was when Mr. Glad and I paddled our blue canoe for a long time, early in the morning when the surface of the water was smooth. The sky was deep blue, and most of the time the only sound was of our paddles dipping. Peace.

California Mountains – How Not to Enjoy a Hike

California, friends, mountains, nature, nicknames, travel, water, wildflowers


If it weren’t for our friend Myriah, this hike would have been a huge disappointment. As it turned out, it was a shared adventure that made me thankful for my friend and for my husband.

Just thinking about the hike to Feather Falls makes me very tired, and that makes me want to write only a short list of ways Not to Enjoy a Hike. Because I did not enjoy the hike itself — only the companions. Sad to say, the short list turned into a pretty extensive one.

How Not to Enjoy a Hike

1. Pick a trail that has its descent on the way in, so that even during the first few easy miles, when you are at your freshest, you can be thinking, “What trail goes down, must rise again,” making it possible to imagine the misery you will know later when you have to hike steeply uphill the last four or five miles back to your car. Even a vague dread of the near future can ruin the present pretty effectively.

Red Ribbons – Clarkia concinna

2. Do it in July and the weather will be as hot as possible. Don’t bring too much water; you want to get dehydrated.

3. Plan to take your baking-dry and long hike just a couple of days after spending time in high places where you got used to singing rivulets of snowmelt all around you. This will encourage you to compare your lower-elevation hike unfavorably with recent ones, to keep your attitude complainy.

4. Hike on a trail that claims to takes you to a tall waterfall (the 2nd highest in California), so that when you are dripping sweat and collecting dust you can look forward to the cool mist that will revive you.

This way, when you discover that the end of the trail is at an overlook so far from the water you think it’s a mirage, you will have the maximum letdown.

It helps, if while looking at the waterfall with your tongue hanging out, you have to sit down in the dirt to avoid sunburn and the jostling of other hikers.

Tincture Plant – Collinsia Tinctoria

5. If there is a choice of a routes, allow only enough time for a long-legged 20-year-old to hike the shorter of the two. This way, when you get to the trailhead and find that the short route is closed, your heart can sink right away.

6. Be sure to have a dinner engagement to be late for, or some other reason to hurry through your lunch and doggedly hike your legs off, with your heart doing double-time, on that last long ascent.

Now, the things that kept me from being a total ingrate:

1. The loss of two pounds in an afternoon (even if it was 80% water).

2. Flowers to take pictures of, many conveniently in the shade of the trees, and few enough so as not to be overwhelming.

3. My dear and faithful companions, who joked with me and gave me water and snacks, and carried the knapsack.

This outing was a sort of add-on to our Sierra Nevada summer vacation. We came home for a night and then drove north to pick up Myriah before going on to our trailhead in the foothills of the northern Sierras, in the Plumas National Forest.

While trudging up those last few miles back to the car we talked about how we’d like to hike more together in the future, say, in April or October. I know that any hike in the foothills would be more pleasant during those months, but I’ll vote for going anywhere but Feather Falls.

Monkeyflower – Mimulus