Miner's Lettuce

Our recent spate of cool rain successfully conjured secret gardens of Miner's Lettuce, tucked away where no one will notice it (next to the Odd Fellows building). This native annual herb has disk shaped leaves around tiny clusters of white flowers. The gold miners of the 1850s near Sacramento were said to have eaten these as an early season source of vitamin C, to prevent scurvy. It seems I seldom see them growing wild, except along urban margins like this, and even then only in forgotten spots where someone hasn't "cleaned up the weeds".

Abalone Ash Tray

Outside the front entrance to Anna's Asian House restaurant, guests may stub out their cigarettes in this carefully presented abalone shell.

Sport fishing of abalone is only allowed in California north of San Francisco, and there are strict limits on the number and size anyone can gather. The "bag limit" is only three a day, 24 a season. The edible part is the big foot muscle of this big flat snail, and it has a flavor something like scallops. The meat can be quite tough unless it's pounded thoroughly with a toothy kitchen mallet. My grandfather used to prepare them for us, but it was a rare treat. Because the resource is limited, no commercial sale of abalone is allowed.

Having said all that, there's hardly an old barn or farmhouse in this region that doesn't have a few of these "red" abalone shells around.

Winter Bee

Willow catkins are opening up these days, offering plenty of pollen for bees to gather in their leg pouches.

Lichen With Rust

A collection of valves and other parts rest on a yet-to-be restored open rail car in the work yard of Roots of Motive Power, punctuated by a spontaneous primitive garden. I kept this in my secret stash for a few months, so the dry sunshine is misleading. The blessed rain still falls these days.

Happy belated 200th birthday to President Abraham Lincoln, celebrated along with the birthday of President George Washington, together designated a holiday today in the US.

Heartwood

Up at Howard State Forest, about as far south as I can go while remaining within the watershed of this blog, a young tanoak tree was recently cut up and stacked. We have a cold storm pelting us with hail, accumulating nicely at this higher elevation, and snow is building up on the ridgetops. Many households in the area, especially those outside the city infrastructure, still use wood-burning stoves to heat their homes, and tanoak properly cured packs a good amount of heat. The dark center of the wood is called heartwood, appropriately for Valentine's Day. Sort of. Even better, I love the lush growth of lichens on these logs, even as my heart breaks for their possible destiny in a fireplace.

Bonus Valentine trivia: The movie Heartwood was filmed in and around Willits and these mountains, with many locals involved in its production.

The Flower of February

With our daffodils running strangely late, it's nice to see the violets are right on schedule. I caught this one several days ago, before the blessing of rain now falling. Happy Friday the Thirteenth!

Outlet Creek Heads North

I ventured to the northernmost end of Little Lake Valley to find the convergence of three "paths" leading out of this blog's territory. One of them is Outlet Creek, the destination of the valley's watershed, which all flows north to the Eel River, which flows even further north before turning west to the Pacific Ocean.

I'm sad to hear that this may be the highest water level we'll see in it for the year. More than sad, I'm alarmed!

Deer, Deer, Deer...

Black-tailed deer are very common in our coast ranges, and one of their favorite things to do is cross rural roads at dusk. Smart drivers take blind turns at more moderate speeds in the evenings and nighttime, knowing that to damage a "deer-in-the-headlights"* is to damage your vehicle as well. You can drive past them pretty closely, but if you stop and get out, they "high-tail it" (run away), because you're doing something unexpected.

They can sometimes be seen grazing in the valley pastures alongside horses and cattle, but they mix in a lot of browsing of tender new shrub growth and low hanging tree leaves into their diet as well. Often, an old orchard looks as if someone pruned all the limbs and twigs about five or six feet from the ground, but actually the work is done by deer. In the autumn, they love to eat fallen apples, and rural gardeners need to protect their rosebushes from being completely stripped of leaves.

*This phrase is often used to describe someone staring wide-eyed in confusion in an overwhelming circumstance.

Three Layers

To show the contrast with a manzanita shrub's bark I posted a week ago, here is the trunk of a madrone tree. You can see where two past years growth didn't completely peel away. I'm sure I don't need to point out the delightful moss misguidedly creeping up the transient surface from below.
_______________________________________________

Hilda of My Manila daily photo blog, tagged me day before yesterday to reveal five details about myself so, like peeking at the layers of a madrone, here goes:

1. As student body president of my elementary school, I discovered politics was not for me.
2. My great-great-great grandfather was a Gunner in the Royal Artillery during the Napoleonic Wars.
3. I like my eggs scrambled, soft.
4. I love old Nat King Cole recordings.
5. I'm an Aquarius sun, Aries moon, and Libra ascendant in the Western zodiac, and was born in the Chinese Year of the Earth Pig. (Do you know your astrological signs?)

Now I'm supposed to tag five other people. Let's see if they are up to the challenge!

1. Ron in Fort Bragg, California, USA
2. Kris in Hobart, Tasmania, Australia
3. Petrea in Pasadena, California, USA
4. Sara in Mashhad, Iran
5. Meead in Portland, Oregon, USA

Manzanita Skin

Last spring, I posted a picture of manzanita blossoms with the intention of highlighting the beautiful bark at a later time. Well, it's been harder for me to get up close to any mature and well lit specimens than I thought. They are usually on the other side of slippery roadside trenches, or way up steep slopes, at least when I notice them. Today's photo was taken through a fence along a railroad right-of-way, so I still didn't have perfect access. But this gives you a bit of that smooth, skin-like texture of the living wood, and the bonus bits of lichen on the dead branches mixed in. Some species of Arctostaphylos create big tangled domes with marvelously twisted branches. Others hug the ground.

I Thought Our Air Was Clean

We have had a couple of weeks of a high pressure weather system (called an anticyclone in Britain), keeping the skies clear, the winds calm, and the nights cold. The afternoons have been pleasantly warm, but as night falls the households with wood burning stoves and fireplaces begin to kindle the evening's warmth. The dense air above traps the smoke in the valley, as you see in this view of Little Lake Valley from the Reynolds Highway, also called an inversion layer. Rain is forecast for today, and we could dearly use it.

Cracks and Jack

It's so rare to see custom tile work like this any more, that I grieve to see it drilled into for a pointless railing dividing two shop entrances. The "Colonial" must have been a hotel or apartment building long ago. The crack suggests it could have endured a fairly strong earthquake, and the upper facade, seen in the photo below, shows such evidence as well. When the 1906 quake hit this area, the only fatality happened when a brick hotel collapsed on the proprietor. Residential chimneys fell down all over the area, but the wooden framed houses themselves endured pretty well, being able to flex with the earth. I don't know if the Colonial was around for those events. It seems unlikely with all its brickwork still standing.

Few people realize the epicenter of that shaker was closer to Santa Rosa than San Francisco, and the rupture continued quite strongly up the fault line north. Writer Jack London toured these areas with his wife, Charmian, soon after, and wrote about his observations for Collier's magazine. In her diary (held by the Huntington Library in San Marino), Charmian mentions Jack writing part of "White Fang" while they stayed at a hotel nearer to the railroad depot in Willits.



As Melodee pointed out in the comments, the Colonial name applied to the cinema once operated in part of this building. Thanks Melodee!

Winter Irises

It happens every year. This one variety, whatever it is, of Pacific Coast Iris blooms here in the dead of winter. We've had night temperatures consistently at or below freezing, last month saw weeks of snow, ice, drizzle and dark skies, and yet these flowers felt the impulse to form. Normally, Pacific Coast Irises bloom in the spring and early summer. They are native to this region, if not this far inland, and have been collected and hybridized by horticulturists for garden use in a surprising variety of colors. They should call this one January Survivor.

Old Moon on the Rise

According to the calendar, the Old Moon still had another day to wax full when I took this, but I was glad to catch it in semi-daylight. Willits is nestled against the western side of Little Lake Valley, and the shadows of evening darkness creep across the landscape west to east - first the town, then the valley, then the hills, and finally the high mountains I described on Friday. Here to the east of us, they glow pink in the filtered spectrum of sunset coming from overhead; the endless sunset that never dies, but continues to sweep across the globe to each rock and tree and wave, in its turn, while we scamper about below, remembering to check our watches, or start the fires, growing hungry for supper, perhaps traveling home, or fearing for our lives.

School Bus Loading Shelter

Blosser Lane Elementary School was pretty vacant last weekend, but it gave me a chance to show some of the farthest mountains to the east of us, viewed from the rising western edge of Little Lake Valley. The first ridges visible (see the gap on the right) are in the 2000-3000 foot elevation range, and are the only thing you see when in the center of the valley. (The valley itself is about 1300 feet above sea level.) Beyond those, the higher mountains of the inland Coast Ranges rise nearly 7000 feet at a few points. With any luck, the next two months will bring us cold, wet storms to deposit a thick "snow pack" up there. Our water supply, and the health of the streams and rivers, depends on that bank of frozen water to fill our reservoirs for the summer through fall dry season. The snow that has fallen so far has already melted away. I'll try not to worry.

Groovy Moss

These pavement grooves signal a change in the sidewalk's surface angle, as it slopes down to meet the street for crossing by wheelchairs or the visually impaired. They seem to provide secure footing for some moss as well, but the bits of lichen sprinkled about blew down from the trees in the rain and wind, and won't be sticking around.

MossySidewalkGroov Jigsaw Puzzle

Abundant Lichen

A wooly fleece of lichen clothed a winter-bare stand of hardwood trees just east of town. I thought the horses set off the color of the lichen to great advantage, don't you?

And don't miss this great page of ten things you should know about lichen.

Winter Gold

The last of the yellow willow leaves are finally letting go along the many stream sides in Little Lake Valley.

Let the Sun Shine

As much as we needed the long, steady rain of the past week or more, it was great to see the sun break through the gray blanket of fog and rain on Tuesday. Some people even wore t-shirts, but it was still far too cold for that. Instead, I celebrated by capturing the sunlit moss on the trunk of a tall, tall oak tree. I love moss almost as much as lichen!

Bright Brambles

With so many indoor and in-town pictures this week, I decided to try for something different in the gray, foggy, drizzly valley. My reward was a hedge of colorful berry vine leaves beneath a lichen bedecked young oak.