Unsettled Winter Day at Confluence Area, Auburn, Sierra Foothills

Below: the various shades of the American River at the Confluence Area on a winter weekend, filled with silt and rockmilk. Most of the color variation is from light rather than water content. One of the samples is from a holly berry (and to the expert, it will be obvious.) Average colors of California and of forest around the world can be seen here.



Every year I say "I'm glad we're getting all this rain because we need it" and also I say "I'm really sick of this rain." Today was no exception, as I uttered both during my quickly aborted attempt to get a run in at Auburn. (But it made for some great photos.) For those curious: it was actively raining on 2/17, the trails around Auburn were quite muddy (except maybe on the way from No Hands to Calcutta Falls) and of course No Hands itself had a lake in the middle. But there were a lot of falls and creeks going that are normally just gullies. In this first image you can see the mud slide in the parking area across the road from the lower gate.

Suffice it to say, a much different mood than the warm sunny day in October a bit downriver documented at this link Here is the confluence area in multiple seasons.














True black and white vs grayscale, take your pick. If you like, pretend the one above is from an indie album from the 90s or a scary movie poster. Of possible interest: Rohrschach tests don't have a ton of evidence behind them, but for what it's worth, people with psychosis or learnings there-toward often perceive color in the black-and-white images. When I look at the grayscale version of the photo, I have a strong suggestion of color and have to remind my eyes it's black-and-white.

Minnesota January 2007

(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 a road trip through the Grand Tetons, Black Hills, and western Nebraska.) And if you're curious about why the population drops off west of the hundredth meridian, I think we figured it out here.)

You'll have to forgive the quality of the photos, but it was 2007. And in January of that year I and a number of other hearty folks had the good fortune to be invited to Minnesota to go ice-fishing. If you have never tried this, you should, it's a blast. It remains the only time I've driven a snowmobile (or driven a car out onto a lake for that matter), and I think half the fun was going out to the middle of the lake (Onamia) where it looked like the ice age had returned. Besides the fish that we didn't catch, I got to a boreal forest preserve where I saw some elk and there was a bald eagle perched on an island out in the middle of the lake. Again the transition zone interests me, but the true boreal-prairie line is far to the north of the U.S.-Canadian border. Not pictured here: frozen Minnehaha Falls on the Mississippi in Minneapolis (poor quality.)

Also, state and federal safety laws require that I advise you of the following: do not drink a huge amount, then wander back to land at midnight, spell out a curse word with firewood on someone's lawn, then wander back out onto the ice, only them dimly realizing you have no realistic way of finding the ice-fishing house in the freezing darkness.




Some people forsook the actual real honest-to-goodness snowmobile outside the hut, to play winter sports **video games**. Society is too weak to survive.



Below: there are squares cut out in the floor for the fishing lines. On sunny days the sunlight penetrates the ice outside the hut and comes glowing back up through the holes. Of course we didn't catch anything.