Escape to Kings Canyon, part 1: fault creep, batholith, sequoia, sarcodes

This post is the first of a series. To see the gallery, click here.

IN SMALL INCREMENTS

Gazing at passing scenery from the back of Bev’s RV, I found myself thinking: Time is frozen inside this vehicle. It was May 2014, and we were starting our annual voyage. Sundari was one of the voyaging party this year, the three of us united in mutual travel for the first time since 2012. On the highway leaving town those two years seemed to collapse into a much shorter time. For a little while it felt as if we’d gone to sleep at the end of our trip to Mexico and awakened just now to resume the same journey.

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2014 miscellanea: taking my camera to the office

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WATCHING THE TREES WATCH ME

At least once a week, I exercise my administrative superpowers at a small home office in Bonny Doon, an area north of Santa Cruz between the town of Felton and the Pacific Ocean. This place is far from cellphone signals and grocery stores. I get there by taking the bus, then walking a few miles through a redwood forest. It’s an unconventional commute to an unconventional workplace.

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2014 miscellanea: Time-traveling in Zayante

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WHERE, EXACTLY, IS IT?

Until 2014, if somebody mentioned Zayante in conversation, I'd have only the vaguest idea of what they were talking about. That’s out in the middle of nowhere, I'd think to myself. Probably near Felton. Then in February I visited my friends Tim and Erin at their Zayante home, and got educated about Zayante. Those two have since moved elsewhere, but my interest in Zayante remains. It's not a real town, at least not anymore, but plenty of people live there.

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Big Sur in summer 2013, part 2: North Pacific High, Julia Pfeiffer Burns State Park, and the beach at Kirk Creek

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WHY THE FOG?

By now I'd figured out that in Big Sur, August is a month in which fog can last all day long. The fog was a constant presence during our trip, breaking only briefly one afternoon. Often it felt like Sundari and I were marooned on an island with an ocean of gray on all sides. We talked about our lives, about fears and hopes and preparations underway. The fog was a constant visual reminder of the limits of our knowledge. We couldn’t see what lay ahead of us in life any more than we could see the coastline beyond that thick enfolding mist.

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Big Sur in summer 2013, part 1: Kirk Creek, Ventana Wilderness, Limekiln State Park

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PICTURING CERULEAN WATERS

It was late August of 2013 and Sundari and I were driving south on Highway 1 in a car packed with camping gear and food. We passed Carmel and Point Lobos, and then the road left the Monterey Peninsula and began to climb. We had reached the Santa Lucia mountains, and our path would now run along cliffs in the narrow space between the range’s Coast Ridge and the cold Pacific ocean, in the 100-mile stretch of coastline known as Big Sur.

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