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Introduction

Most of the photos of people, places and events in these galleries should be able to stand on their own (a thousand words per picture, remember?)

However, a few additional comments are sometimes useful. A friend complimented me on my pictures and said he hoped to reach that level with his new digital camera. I explained that one of my secrets is to show only one of every ten or twenty photos taken.

Sometimes it may be one of nine or even eight, because the purpose of the photo goes beyond what appears in the frame. For example, a bunch of trees in Ohio looks much like a bunch of trees in Illinois or Michigan, but I took some of those pictures to show people back home in California what it was like in the area where I spent much of the summer of 2002.

In other cases, an area or situation is interesting enough to deserve a longer explanation than my brief captions (for example, numerous books have been written about the national parks shown here). In these cases, the caption will be a link which will bring you to the expanded comments which appear below.

The Devil's Postpile is in fact an act of nature. Hot lava cooled around variable centers and cracked 900,000 years ago to form basalt columns 40 to 60 feet high and a foot in diameter. Other basalt formations are seen in the photo of the river and Rainbow Falls.

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Dinner time on the trail from Granite Creek Campground to Devil's Postpile National Monument. Your web host made this 30 mile round trip hike in 1980, descending into the canyon of the North Fork of the San Joaquin, over the divide, and into the middle fork, where the Postpile and Rainbow Falls are located.

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A vacation on the southern Oregon coast in July 1999 revealed numerous rocky coves, most accessible only by trail through heavily wooded spruce forest.

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I photographed this barn in 1966, near the corner of Shaw and Cedar, across from Cal State University. It's been replaced by restaurants and office buildings.

Abandoned lumber mill site at Dinkey Creek, Sierra National Forest. There are 100 or more buildings and worker cabins in various states of disrepair. Photos taken in 1998 and 2001. Receipts found in the old store building indicate the mill last operated in the 1970s. 

Polished granite strewn with boulders gives testimony to the power of glacial action in the Sierra (near Courtright Lake, Sierra National Forest, 1966). Rocks and boulders are carried by the glacier as it moves, and dropped at random when it melts.

The Mariposa Mine operated as recently as the late 1950s, but has been shut down since then. The actual mine (a hole in the ground) is not accessible, but what is there and of interest is the equipment used to crush the ore and remove the gold. Rock was brought out in small ore cars that run on a rail, and dumped into a hopper, eventually landing at the bottom of a stamp mill. This consists of very heavy iron shafts, with larger cylinders at the bottom (as shown here). They are raised by a camshaft, and allowed to drop onto the rock. The crushed rock is then washed down a trough with a screen in the bottom, which traps the heavier gold particles. The mine is built on the side of a hill, and is probably 150 feet or so from top to bottom. It was operated by electricity, and there are giant motors, huge pulleys, and other equipment still there. There are stairs you can climb, catwalks across from one side to another, and a ladder that leads up to the very highest point of the structure.

Several years ago my Grandson Johnny and I went to explore the area. Inside the building we found a number of 3" diameter iron balls, which were used in the stamp mill to help crush the rock. The roof of the mine is aluminum and slopes down, paralleling the hill and the different levels of the mine. Johnny got the idea of going up in the top part and dropping a ball out the window onto the roof. I was standing to the side, watching. What I expected would be a rather unspectacular event instead was an amazing sight. The ball rolled down very fast, flew over a section where the roof is gone, hit another section of roof about five feet lower, and bounced 10 feet into the air and down into a ravine. Regrettably we can't usually duplicate the leap, but at least we get to see the ball roll down the roof very fast.

Sadly, in 2002 some teenagers set a fire in the mine, apparently to keep warm while they partied. Of course, a fire built on a wooden platform has a predicable result, and half the building was destroyed. Most of the big timbers are there, charred and tumbled together, and of course the metal equipment is intact. Most of the lower half of the mine, which was the most damaged by age and elements, was spared from the fire, but the days of the annual ball roll are over.

Update: A visit in the spring of 2007 revealed that more of the remaining wood structure had collapsed, and the site is now very dangerous and now lacks the elements that made it a special place to visit.

Mouse Rock

This "artifact" is actually a collaboration between nature and man. The rocky rodent stood guard along California Highway 41 north of Fresno for a while back in the 1970s. CalTrans later blasted it apart to widen the road.

Arches haunts me. I don’t mean that in any mystical or religious way, but I found it to be a very special place – one where we are reminded dramatically of the powerful forces of nature, and that the earth is not a finished product.

If there were no arches at all, it would still be worth seeing – fascinating shapes, twisted juniper trees, and sheer walls of sandstone. Then there are the arches – over 2000 of them, although the typical visitor sees fewer than 100. Some are close to the main road; some of the most dramatic require an investment of time and effort to walk a mile or more in an area that is hot in summer, snowy in winter, and close to perfect in October.

Not far away is Canyonlands National Park – but much of Utah is canyon lands – the Colorado Plateau, a high desert cut by canyons and gorges, some accessible only at great effort on foot, bike or four-wheel drive vehicle. The Green River joins the Colorado in the middle of the park, dividing it into three sections that are isolated from each other – a trip by road from one to another requires a drive of nearly 100 miles. The Island in the Sky district stands at 6000 feet, and from its edge you look down a thousand feet on the White Rim plateau. The plateau is cut by gorges and canyons large and small, including the dramatic Monument Basin. Another thousand feet below White Rim are the rivers. In the distance you can see the Needles district. The Maze, a nearly impenetrable tangle of canyons and rock formations, makes up the third part of the park.

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The Kaibab Plateau rises from the high desert in northern Arizona. Traveling generally south from St. George UT, the visitor goes through desert scrub, pinyon and juniper forest, a zone of nearly pure ponderosa pine, and finally into spruce and fir near the border of Grand Canyon National Park.

The Grand Canyon's north rim is about a thousand feet higher than the south rim, and draws far smaller crowds, while offering dramatic views and a fantastic vacation experience. Facilities in the park and on the upper plateau close around October 15, in anticipation of an average ten feet of snow.

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The Sonoran Desert is an arid region covering 120,000 square miles in southwestern Arizona and southeastern California, as well as most of Baja California and the western half of the state of Sonora, Mexico. Subdivisions of this hot, dry region include the Colorado and Yuma deserts. Irrigation has produced many fertile agricultural areas, including the Coachella and Imperial valleys of California. Warm winters attract tourists to Sonoran Desert resorts in Palm Springs, California, and Tucson and Phoenix, Arizona. The photos here were taken in the Superstition Mountain area, northeast of the Phoenix metro area.

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This load of old Studebakers was on its way to Texas. A man there was buying about 100 of them, in order to create three or four restored models.

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This deer and four of his buddies (all bucks) visited my mother's yard, as well as those of at least two neighbors, during the summer of 2006. Next door neighbor Ludie even came up with names for them. The yards in question are all on the very edge of Mariposa, a small town in the Sierra Nevada foothills.

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My parents lived in a house right on the edge of the Sierra foothill town of Mariposa. Unwelcome visitors over the years included tarantulas, crickets, bugs of all sorts, and lizards, including this one. Mother would get the broom and unceremoniously sweep the hapless reptile out onto the lawn.

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These photos were all taken at the Butterfly House in Whitehouse, Ohio. Read more about this in Road Trip 2004.

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This lady lived in my back yard for an entire summer, and my friends and I enjoyed going out with a flashlight to check on her every few nights. The web was built against a concrete block fence, and anchored to the lawn. Later that fall there were five or six spiders building webs in the same area, and they had to be terminated with extreme prejudice.

My daughter and son-in-law, Jennifer and Rod Neely, have always had three cats in the family. Starting with Noodles about 2002, and continuing through Buster and Stickers in the next two or three years, they found themselves with the Tiger Trio, three cats who were all gray tiger stripe. Stickers arrived unexpectedly, wandering up from the drainage that runs through their property, abandoned and covered with stickers. Sausage broke the "color barrier" in 2006. Stickers proved to be a rare "snow cat," frolicking in the snow and even burrowing into it.

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William (Bill) Elliott, who turned 90 in January 2007, grew up on the property where this barn is located, and provided the following information in May 2005: Here is a brief description of the barn. The picture you have is what we called the "back horse barn" with the tack room at the right end. If you take a picture of the front here is the general layout. On the left is the "front horse barn" which  has a covered access to that tack room. The center, high part, of the barn is the hay and feed section with access to both horse barns. To the right of the hay barn was sort of a buggy and repair shop barn but we used it as a garage. A lot of those old barns were built pretty much the same.

Barn at Highway 49 and Pegleg Road

The house I grew up in is about 100 yards behind this barn, so I saw it many times, walked by it, but never went inside. As far as I know, it was not in use back then (1945-1957) and does not appear to be now. You can see a corner of our garage through the trees near the lower left of the photo.

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Opened in 1894, the Bootjack Dance Hall stood about a half mile from the Bootjack store, where today's Highway 49 and Darrah Road meet. The hall was home to dances featuring local fiddlers, school events put on by nearby Sebastopol School, and from 1948 until it was torn down, the Bootjack Stompers Square Dance Club.

Although the hall was supplanted by a new hall next to the store, the old hall remained in use until it was razed in the late 1960s to make room for a realignment of the Bootjack Road, which had now become an extension of the Mother Load Highway, California 49.

Read Helen Callan's story about the closing of the hall

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In the late 1800s this gold mining town located at 8,000 feet in the mountains of eastern California, boasted a population of 10,000. The town had a wild and wooly reputation, boosted by the tale of a young girl whose family was moving there. As they packed their belongings, she wrote in her diary, "Goodbye, God; I'm going to Bodie." Residents of the town took issue with this story - what she really wrote, they said, was "Good, by God! I'm going to Bodie!" Click here for more Bodie photos.

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Cunningham Road between State Highway 140 and the village of Le Grand was lined with these poles when I was a kid (shortly after electricity was invented), and they always fascinated me. As the poles wear out, they are being replaced with modern poles with the insulators at the top and sides, and there are probably less than a dozen of the old poles left. I've seen them in a couple of other places, and to me they have more character than any other design.

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This building has seen better days, but unlike every other barn pictured, it is MINE (well, mine and my sister's). Our ownership is temporary, by inheritance, and the property will be sold. But this will always be the only barn I ever owned.

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This photo was found in my mother's things after she passed away. It is not identified, and no one recognizes anyone in it; most likely it was in with something she bought at an action, and they are not relatives. It's typical of family reunion photos from the turn of the century. Note the priceless expression on the boy seated at left. 

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