Sunday, September 05, 2004
Elky Summers
I’ve finally finished the Hawaii Photos Project, wherein I cleaned up and generally fiddled with about 150 of the best photos from the vacation; the next thing will be to burn them to a disk so I can take them someplace with a high-speed connection and upload them to ofoto or some such thing.
Meantime, just to keep my hand in, and in celebration of the last weekend of unofficial summer, we dragged the 300D out yesterday to Tomales Point, where we drove to a trailhead at the Historic Phillips Ranch (1857, that’s old for rural california) and hiked five miles out and five back along a ridgeline trail to the tip of the point out by where the San Andreas Fault plunges into the blue pacific. The water was clean and the sky was sunny, or at least, not cloudy (it can be cloudy like nobody’s business up there; last time out there we didn’t even see the ocean and we were next to it). It was a refreshing, invigorating hike and if that was all there was to it it would have been enough.
However, once we got on the trail we found conditions to be somewhat “elky.”
This frisky fellow was herding a bunch of fee-males around like he owned the place. Those pointy things on his head look really sharp. As far as I’m concerned, he does own the place.
This cheerful specimen was doing the exact same thing, elk-woman crowd control, but on the other side of our path. He looked pretty impressive against the eerie orange sky.
The sky was an
eerie orange because of a wildfire out in Sonoma County that was pumping a lot of smoke into the air, and an off-shore flow that sent it, instead of inland, out over the ocean. It stained the sun and the sea together and made for a surreal and ominous hike.
Which isn’t to say that we didn’t find a
lovely place to enjoy the lunch we packed in. Some ladybugs flew into our big bag ‘o’ chips, but, if you think of them as just crunchy protein supplements, they are more like a garnish than anything else. Except for “ladybug,” which they like are to an exceptional degree.
You might have noticed that the herds-o-elk I’ve pictured each had only one male, with a whole passel of quadripedal honeys trotting their elky selves around him. This was true for all the herds we saw - four, altogether. Where were the other males?
Up here, buddy. Them fellers that can’t be winning a one-on-one crown-o-thorns free-for-all with the big boys was all hunkered down up here, enjoying a fine view of some lady elk they’d probably have liked to get to know a little better. I know I specifically recognized Elke Sommers and Britt Elkland.
At our lunch spot we got repeatedly buzzed - by
these guys and their ilk (not their elk). Kel caught this lovely shot of a few of them circling around a sea pillar. For clumsy, comical birds, pelicans are beautiful and nearly always cheer me up.
On a final “up” note, I must report that west nile has been found in a dead crow in a huge park three blocks from my front door. Directly across from my front door is a greenbelt with a path that is sometimes used by municipal trucks. These trucks often tear up the pathbed so that water accumulates into little stagnant puddles that last for days or even weeks. Currently, there is a big puddle right across the street from my house and it’s got all these bugs growing and developing in it. When I walk past it a cloud of gnats or something swarms up from the surface of the stale water around the level of my chest and face. I’ve got elks two hours from my bedroom, but potentially deadly disease-carrying mosquitos right next door. Sometimes the prongs I need to be most careful about are not the ones that look the most dangerous but the ones that keep sticking it to me for days after impact. Thanks, infected mosquitos, for that little life lesson!
