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Monday, May 16th, 2005 06:22 pm
My camera is still nonfunctional.

Here and here are pictures of the Bonny Doon Ecological Preserve.

I'm embarrassed to say I had never seen a yerba santa before that I had recognized: but it was one of the more common flowering plants in the preserve.

The Moon Rocks are some nice outcrops that overlook this space, which is a unique little habitat with its own manzanitas and monkey flowers and stachys. The ground is deep pure white fine-grained smooth slippery sand overlaid in some places by pine duff (the really sweet nice smelling pines). Walking uphill on deep dry sand that shifts a lot is hard work.

We were never lost. Not really. Well, maybe for about five minutes when we overshot the curve at the turning of the loop because the trail was ten times stronger in the wrong direction than in the right direction. I was the one who figured that one out. The map they provided was terrible and we were always worried that we were lost. The loop was something like four miles, I think. Towards the end we were trying to read the footprints in the sand to make sure we were not going in circles, and then to make sure we were exiting on the correct branch, the one we took when we came in. The nice fellow -- or maybe Zak -- figured that one out. Connie and I were going a little ways on to the next most likely branch while they checked that one out. But it wasn't like in a horror movie -- we didn't really split up, we stayed in eyesight of each other, and we weren't really lost. When we first came in there was a sinister watching quality to the breeze, but that got shed after the first half mile or so of manzanita.

Green green fern fronds (bracken?) growing right up through the sand is a miraculous looking thing.

I wish I had been able to take pictures. The nice fellow said "These plants will be telling their grandchildren about this year and how juicy it was."

I want to write a story about the miraculous green summer that never went yellow. I've wanted for a long time to write a story about the winter that never came. I don't have a story for either, though, just that idea.
Tuesday, May 17th, 2005 10:44 am (UTC)
You might like a book called _Deep Survival_--along with a lot of other interesting stuff, it's got a typology of degrees of getting lost.