Willow Creek Preserve, Pacific Union College Forest, and Sept 27-69 - 6:30. by knife

First, and let me be very clear about this, Han Bul is a better restaurant than Soban. If you disagree then I guess you don't really understand authentic Korean food. This means you SS. ZING, HEY-O! (rimshot) (In all seriousness everyone, it's not yet safe to sit in a restaurant - but do support them. Consider getting takeout, or getting a gift card that you redeem later.)

First I stumbled on Willow Creek Preserve by noticing some trails marked on Google Maps that were outside of the (also awesome) Pomo Canyon. I noticed cars parked in a trailhead-like way along Coleman Valley Road and I KNEW you guys were holding out on me, and sure enough I found it.







I'm always struck by the convergent evolution of sorrel and clover, at least in terms of gross anatomy. The former is in the buckwheat family, the latter in the pea family. Per Timetree, their most recent common ancestor was likely 117 million years ago. (For comparison, humans and whales diverged only 96 million years ago.) Sorrel does not fix nitrogen like clover (I assumed there was a symbiosis) but does have a nifty rapid (fast enough to see it move) closure response to direct sunlight, which it's not used to, growing in redwood forests as it does. It's obvious enough why sharks, whales and mosasaurs would evolve convergently, but redwood sorrel is found in the deep shade of redwood forests and clovers in open fields, so this remains a mystery for some keen-minded botanist to solve.

Then I had a little of the ol' patello-femoral recently from a minor acute injury going up stupid Collier Springs Trail in Marin County Watershed land, but still major enough that I don't want to exacerbate it. Was thinking of going up to Wright Peak at Clear Lake, but considering the trail is described as steep and loose, exactly the kind of terrain that caused the injury in the first place, I decided to check out Las Posadas State Forest. Well that's closed. BUT immediately adjacent, I stumbled across the quite-awesome Pacific Union College Forest, popular with bikers, through which the Bay Ridge Trail runs. Even on a holiday weekend-Friday it was still fairly light. It's amazing that I'd never even heard of this place a 45-minute drive from home and it's pretty sweet.







It's interesting to see how each valley over gets progressively drier (Santa Rosa plain, then Sonoma, then Napa, then Pope/Berryessa.) The redwoods and Douglas first more or less stop on the west side of Napa, the east side of Napa looks drier than the west, and once you've over that (into Pope and Berryessa Valley) it's mostly chaparral and a few ponderosa pines and much of it, especially the Blue Ridge on the east side (i.e., the last ridge before the Central Valley) the often eroded-looking dry sandy scrub could pass for SoCal.



After that I gave into my morbid side and found the island (above) where one of the Zodiac Killer's attacks happened. After the dry Mediterranean summer, peninsulas emerge connecting these islands to the shore, as was the case in September of 1969. To take away the fun of figuring it out on your own - it's on the west side of the lake, at the south end of the Oak Shores Day Use Area, near the Lake Berryessa Field Office; nearest mile marker 6.75 along Berryessa-Knoxville Road. It turns out the victims were PUC students as well (I'd never heard of PUC until I ran in their forest mere hours before.) Helpfully, the killer called the sheriff's office that night though boaters had already heard the victims' cries for help (they did not immediately perish) and to further clarify, the killer wrote in marker on the couple's car door "Vallejo 12-20-68, 7-4-69, Sept 27-69 - 6:30. by knife". I've visited the first two locations as well and barely remember what they look like - this one leaves much more of an impression.

Lizard Blood Kills Lyme Disease Bacteria

At least two lizards in California have a protein in their blood that kills borrelia, which has slowed (but not stopped) its spread. When I left PA in the late 90s, I felt like I was escaping Lyme disease - one group of trail runners I knew estimates the prevalence of Lyme in its ranks at 70% - but by the mid-teens I had already started seeing cases of Bell's palsy caused by Lyme - it's here. But still not as bad.


From microbenotes.com. Note that the classic target lesion occurs in only about 50% of cases, meaning that just because you never saw a target lesion, doesn't mean it's not Lyme.

No word on whether therapeutics are being based off this protein but it seems like an obvious move.

International Space Station's View of the Susquehanna and Appalachian Ridges

From ninety miles up. For Penn Staters: on the left side of the image you can see the 322 bridge across the river at Duncannon, where it then starts following the Juniata. You can appreciate how what SEEM like conical mountains as you're driving along are revealed to be just the ends of ridges, dissected by one of the oldest rivers in the world. There is a mountain in central-western PA you can see from the turnpike - only westbound - which looks like a conical mountain that my family officially named "Tit Mountain", which turned out to be another ridge. (There are conical mountains in PA but they are very old and at this point very very worn-down, and they are indeed volcanoes - but there's really only one of them that you can notice as stand-alone.)

East Coast: Where the Trees Don't Lose Their Leaves

I've always wondered where the leaves stay green throughout the year - on the East Coast. Why does this matter? West Coast natives will never understand this, how the combination of the East Coast mentality and continental climate can make you feel trapped by the climate. During a road trip from Philly to Florida at spring break one year, the sun came up right about as we were crossing from South Carolina into Georgia, and seeing the green forest around us, I felt like we'd escaped - like we had cheated the world. It's not even the temperature that can be grueling about a temperate zone winter - it's the colorlessness, the gray clouds and especially the brown trees. A friend from Georgia referred to the Pennsylvania winter's wan sun, clouds and dead trees as the Dead Land. I had the same experience when I moved to California, and drove across the country in December as I descended the Sierras and came into the foothills and Sacramento's eastern suburbs, again there was green. Again I felt like I had come back to life, and I was home.

So I had always wondered: where do the trees stay green?

I started to think I was going to have to learn to program somewhat, and find satellite images from August and February of the East Coast, and then (if I was being rigorous) look at the color value of each pixel and try to correlate that with vegetation. But these maps are already available. (I couldn't find them the last time I did this search.) The first map is from databasin.org. Although weather moves west to east (hence the East Coast being much less moderate), there is still an under-emphasized maritime moderation effect near the coast - for example, the robins don't migrate for the winter in suburban Philadelphia, but one county away in Berks, they do (they come back early February though.) So this map shows how the coastal deciduous zone ends right near the Virginia-North Carolina line, and then hugs the coast, a bit downhill of the Fall Line, maybe 100 miles from the ocean. The pattern continues as it bends around the Gulf Coast, trends a bit north in Louisiana, and then much to my surprise, bends back toward the coast to include Houston. West of that, the mountains and/or dryness of the climate dictate vegetation more than temperature. I can confirm - having flown into Houston at Christmas, I was quite surprised that the trees were brown. (Corpus Christi was still green.) What surprises me most is I think I expected the 40th parallel to dominate more over coastal effects (as the typical dividing line between temperate and subtropical) but this is not the case.

And speaking of the southeast - while you're social-distancing, don't all hike on the same trails! It happened in both California and now Georgia. Come on outdoorsy types. We're smarter than this. And I want more of us to stay alive!



It also confirms what I suspected about Virginia: it's really just Pennsylvania with nastier summers.

Below is a map of the Fall Line from gallivance.net, where the first hills begin. There's nothing like this on the West Coast, where instead of being a passive margin where the land just kind of "gives up" to the ocean, the mountains come right up to the water, sometimes a mile high within a few miles as in California's Central Coast. The Fall Line corresponds to agricultural development historically, the Black Belt, and where the mills were. Almost all of Pennsylvania is uphill from the Fall Line - it's already at the Falls Bridge/Schuylkill Aqueduct, and the Twin Bridges (ie, Roosevelt Boulevard - before Manayunk even!), which is why large vessels don't go upriver past Philly. (Imagine a parallel universe where they dock in Reading. With cruise ships as carriers of disease - norovirus for many years and now COVID-19 - that's probably a good thing.)




Above: from Wiki, the Falls Bridge, aka the Reading Railroad Bridge, and the Twin Bridges at the Fall Line on the Schuylkill in Philly. Below, a typical cruise ship (from Signal Horizon.)



Of course a lot of the non-deciduous forest in the Carolinas is pine forest. This map shows that the vegetation you'll see along I-95 heading south transitions from Loblolly pine to mangroves along the river and patches of chestnut oak.

The Sorted Colors of the United States

Sorted hues from satellite images, from Reddit user OdBx. Average colors of forests around the world and of California here.

Northern Rockies, Western Prairies Road Trip 2008

(I'm back-posting photos from Midwest road trips, partly inspired by an essay on the Midwest I found through Marginal Revolution. Here's a post about ice-fishing in Minnesota.) And if you're curious about why the population drops off west of the hundredth meridian, I think we figured it out here.)


In August of 2008 I jumped in my car and headed east from San Francisco, intending to correct some deficiencies in my experience of these United States - namely, some areas of the western prairies and especially the Black Hills. For many reasons the Black Hills were the surprise of the trip - with some pretty cool caves, and for being a transition area between prairies and western mountains (like Texas Hill Country is a transition between the Gulf Coast, the west, and the Rockies; like Morocco is a human transition zone.) But there were a lot of other interesting areas along the way that you don't normally get to see unless you make a point of seeing them. Given the primitive technology available to me at the time, please excuse the photo quality.


WYOMING

I think I've been to the Grand Tetons three times now and boy do they ever NOT get old. They're not a huge mountain range and the park itself is not massive like nearby Yellowstone, but for my money it's a hundred times better.








After that I headed east to Devil's Tower, which I had been by once before - in dense clouds and fog, in early winter, and not seen a bit of it. The cloth you see in one picture are Lakota prayer flags. Lakota ask people not to climb the Tower out of religious respect, but I'm conflicted about that. If Mormons asked us not to hike up hills in New York because one of them might be Cumorah Hill, would we be obligated to respect that?












SOUTH DAKOTA

The Black Hills are really cool. Highly recommended. You may even have some curious visitors to your car as you drive through certain areas. Though it's pictured here, Mount Rushmore is kind of underwhelming (I don't say that to try to be an edgy unpatriotic hipster, it just is. The Grand Canyon makes me feel like I live in a powerful country, not some actually-not-that-big guys' heads on a rock.) The nearby, ever-under-construction Crazy Horse Monument is only marginally more interesting; American's own Sagrada Familia Cathedral. I stopped for dinner in nearby Deadwood, and there were really not that many Sturgis rally types. Also, when driving in the Black Hills, one can tell that a lot of the other drivers are Midwesterners not accustomed to curvy roads and hills.
















I mean come on.

NEBRASKA

I wanted to see the Scotts Bluff area because of the Bluff (rock towers, cactus - not how I pictured any part of Nebraska) and the Oregon Trail and Pony Express.









Above, the trail up to the top of Scott's Bluff. Next two, vegetation in the area.







There is a Pony Express plaque on the old Wells-Fargo building in the Financial District of San Francisco. I and some other deviants have run the last leg of the Pony Express in the Bay Area, but unreconstructed miscreant Karl Meltzer went and did the whole thing. For my part, I was really quite content to drive back from Nebraska. Below you can see where the wagon ruts still haven't fully grown over.




Above: Carhenge, the Crown Jewel of Atlas Obscura. The wheels on the individual monoliths (autoliths?) still turn with minimal effort. Below: Kimball, Nebraska, the furthest east I have driven since moving to California.

San Diego May 2017: Also, The Sonoran Desert is Better Than the Sahara

When I was in Morocco in April, I went for a run in the Sahara. While now I have points for being in the Sahara, I found myself - underwhelmed. "We've been in better deserts than this!" my jaded wife and I both said. Knowing that in a month I would be in San Diego, I decided to do something I'd long thought about: go running in Algodones Dunes, thus proving once and for all that California's desert is better than the Sahara. If you're reading this though: don't be so quick to go to San Diego - there are all sorts of miscreants, deviants and otherwise unsavory elements of society that populate this place, as I was reminded through various visits in their company - much against my will mind you - to homes, drinking establishments and even the top of Black Mountain. Shudder.


The Algodones Dunes from space, with south basically at bottom - the black lines near the bottom are the All-American water canal and I-8. Thus, witnesseth! that in the U.S. we have our own ergs, AND nearby Mexican food and beer. And San Diego beaches are a mere 2.5 hr drive away, which I also made use of. And even a good Moroccan restaurant if you so desire! See? Vastly better than the dumb Sahara.

If you drive from San Diego to Yuma on the 8, you pass through the Dunes 15-20 miles before you cross the Colorado and enter Arizona, and they extend north as far as Brawley. You can't miss them: high golden sandy dunes, more on the north than the south side of the freeway. At one point I had the brilliant, stupid idea of running the whole thing from north to south, documented on this very blog. People I mentioned this to had several important questions: first, was I on drugs; and second, how many drugs was I on. So I abandoned the idea of running the whole thing, but my experience in Morocco reignited the idea of at least going out there.

My plan was to get the car as close as possible to the ergs off the 8, run out in them to where I was isolated and couldn't see anything but sand, then run back. Original plan: leave SD at 6am to be there at 8:30, since the prediction was by 8am it would be 80 F, 10am it would be 90, with a high of 105. But leaving at 6 would have required an early bed time, and as you know one must hydrate before such exertions! Therefore I went out in North Park Saturday night, and got to Algodones about 11:15. NOICE! SWAYT!





This is from the Gordon Wells exit, #151. The other side is Grays Well #156. (This picture is facing ENE, and those mountains are somewhere in Arizona northeast of Yuma.) You can get to the dunes, which extend north, from 78 just east of Brawley too, about the same drive time from SD. When it's cooler there will be far more ATV's and dirt bikes, other than the preserve north of 78. I should add that when I called BLM in El Centro they were extremely helpful in planning this little excursion (and no I'm not being sarcastic for once.)



When most people (including me) think of the Sonoran desert they think of saguaros and areas that can actually get a little green from monsoon moisture - not this. But then I remembered that the northern end of Baja's Gulf Coast is very sandy like this, and loaded with saguaros, so even by that definition it still sticks. So whatever. (When I was there I thought this was part of the Mojave. Mojave, Colorado, Sonoran, I can't keep them straight.)







Running down a dune isn't so hard, but otherwise, the annoyingness of running on soft sand for any length of time cannot be overstated, which I had forgotten. I will grudgingly give the Sahara a point in its favor for having firmer footing, but then again I wasn't running on ergs there. On the beach you can either run on the packed hard sand near the water, or leave the beach. When you're in an erg zone, there is neither water, nor leaving the beach. (If you've ever run "the sand ladder" during a certain Alcatraz triathlon in San Francisco, that's not even close to as irritating as this.) Even the high dunes, some around 100', have a sharp edge at the top, which always fascinates me.





I only saw one person, a very kind dirt bike rider who was kind enough to ride basically from the horizon to see if this goofy black-wearing runner was okay. (Black? Safety first; always wear light clothing.)



In this area, the border with Mexico is only a few hundred yards south of the 8. Kind of looks like we already have a wall...





And after you're done being an idiot in the desert, you can go to the beach! Pics are between Torrey Pines Beach and Black's Beach. I hate food photos but I'll post one here, to emphasize the basic truth that I was eating rolled tacos at Cuatro Milpas, and you weren't.















CONCLUSION: the Sonoran Desert is better than the Sahara. Thank you.