FURTHER AFIELD: The Lost Coast

1. The Pacific Ocean from the Guthrie Trail, Centerville Road, Ferndale, California.

Let me try to set the stage. We’re in California, more than 200 miles north of San Francisco and over 400 miles south of Portland, Oregon. “Geotechnical challenges” have made this region even more remote from cities than the miles indicate because it was too difficult to build a highway across the irregular terrain. In this sparsely populated, rugged landscape, peaks rise as high as 4,000 feet and plunge straight down to meet the restless waters of the Pacific Ocean. Behind forbidding cliffs, grassland gives way to acres of Douglas fir forest. A few winding, narrow, pot-holed roads wander the hills above the coast, occasionally dipping down to the shoreline on precariously steep stretches of broken blacktop that make you thankful for daylight. Only a handful of towns dot the region: Petrolia, Honeydew, Shelter Cove. Generous portions of the land are protected as the Sinkyone Wilderness State Park and the King Range National Conservation Area, which features a 25-mile-long backpacking trail tracing the jagged, boulder-strewn beach. It is a wild, natural place, this Lost Coast.

In Humboldt County near the north end of the Lost Coast, the Eel River spreads out into sloughs, wetlands, and fertile soil. Here, dairy farms established long ago still produce prodigious quantities of fresh milk. A small town called Ferndale set in the midst of cow-studded fields offers a handful of places to stay and eat. Our plan was to spend the better part of a mid-October week there with frequent forays west to the beach or east to the redwood forests.

After two days of wading through 500 miles of dim, smoke-darkened skies in our rental car we finally turned west in southern Oregon, the promise of fresh air propelling us down the Redwood Highway and into northern California. As soon as we could we set out for Centerville Beach, a wild sliver of shoreline under sheer cliffs of hardened sand. I can’t begin to describe how good it felt to let the deafening fury of crashing waves wash all the tension from tedious days of highway driving out of our muscles and nervous systems.

Though we spent time in the Redwoods, beaches were the leitmotif of our trip. No matter the weather – cold wind, thick fog, or a spot of sunlight – the water’s edge beckoned. We were exhilarated by the barrage of waves thrashing ink-black rocks, delighted to jump across foamy tide lines, and awed by patches of impenetrable fog that periodically materialized over the rolling sea. Here’s a taste of the Lost Coast shoreline.

2. A hard sand cliff at Centerville Beach.

3. A bleached-out impression of a lonely strip of shoreline.

5. A single strand of kelp punctuates the empty beach as fog settles into the headlands.

6. A singular detail in an indeterminately vast sea of sand grains soaked by countless waves.

7. A black sand beach studded with driftwood and occasional rude shelters slowly settling back into the beach.

8. Rough surf near Devil’s Gate on the road to Petrolia.

9. Brown pelicans soar on updrafts over incoming waves.

“We lack trust in the present, this moment, this actual seeing, because our culture tells us to trust only the reported back, the publically framed, the edited, the thing set in the clearly artistic or the clearly scientific angle of perspective. One of the deepest lessons we have to learn is that nature, of its nature, resists this. It waits to be seen otherwise, in its individual presentness from our individual presentness.”

John Fowles; The Tree. Harper Collins, 2010.

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FURTHER AFIELD: Southern Utah

We’re heading out on another road trip soon, this time to northern California’s Lost Coast and Redwood forests. We’ve been there before but the deserted beaches, forested mountains, and small towns are calling us back. The oversize scale of the coastal scenery and giant trees energizes us and reminds us how truly small we are, mere specks of passing dust on this great planet.

The trip is bound to generate photographic activity – I anticipate returning home with hundreds of photos because trips always produce a surfeit of images. In fact, there are dozens of decent photographs from the last road trip we took that I haven’t shown yet. In April we explored Southern Utah, another place where nature writes her stories with broad, bold strokes. I don’t know whether it’s the mind-expanding spaciousness of the landscape, the splendid variety of colors and shapes, or the spare, hard simplicity of the terrain that inspires me the most. I suppose it’s all that and more. The desert is surely a photographer’s dream.

Here’s a series of scenic views and close-ups of the high desert from the trip. Enjoy!

1. On the Burr Trail, “…the most God-forsaken and wild looking country that was ever traveled…I never saw the poor horses pull and paw as they done today.” A pioneer wrote that in her journal in 1882. We followed a slow route of over 100 miles (161k), connecting Route 12, the Burr Trail, and Notom-Bullfrog Road. This remote desert circuit features jaw-dropping scenery and a series of dangerous, tight switchbacks dropping 800 feet (244 m) in a half-mile (0.8 km) of heart-stopping driving on a rough dirt track. We saw very few vehicles that afternoon. Deeply grateful for the privilege of traveling through some of the most extraordinary scenery in the US, we were also thankful that we didn’t get a flat tire.

2. Three juniper berries; Snow Rock State Park, Utah. We prefer less well-known parks like Snow Rock to busy Zion and Bryce Canyon National Parks. The density of the crowds in the big-name parks makes it difficult to feel the uniqueness of these places. When you’re distracted by movement and conversations around you, it’s hard to ground yourself and allow all your senses to function freely.

3. Another view from the Burr Trail – Notom-Bullfrog Road loop. This part of the road is paved. Needless to say, there are no services and no cell phone reception for many miles.

4. An aspen leaf caught in a tangle of twigs at Capitol Reef National Park. Capitol Reef, a sprawling smorgasbord of delectable scenery, is our favorite place in southern Utah.

5. Snow Canyon SP boasts rock formations that startled us with their beauty and delighted us with their accessibility. Visitors can scramble over gentle mounds of Navaho sandstone. Though fun to walk on, the fine quartz grain surface of the sandstone is coarse to the touch, like sandpaper. In places, it looked to me like the wrinkled skin of a giant orange elephant. The white rock is also Navaho sandstone but has less iron content.

6. A view from Hidden Pinyon Trail, Snow Canyon SP.

7. Timber Creek Overlook Trail at Kolob Canyon in Zion NP. We chose to enter Zion from the north side at Kolob Canyon instead of the main entrance to the south. At a maximum 6,359′ elevation (1938m), our sea-level lungs struggled to deliver enough oxygen to our legs. We trudged up this short trail very slowly, stopping to rest on boulders where lizards slithered out of sight.

8. Weathered wooden posts and fences are a common sight in the high desert. This one was in Teasdale, Utah (population 194). We pulled over on the side of a back road when the outbuilding below, one of a cluster of weathered structures, caught our eyes. A woman walking home from the post office stopped to chat. Finding eager listeners, she spun a long yarn about the history of the place, which she had known since childhood.

9. Part of a complex built many years ago by a woman from Scandinavia who spent time in Japan, then moved here to the desert. She even constructed a small teahouse nearby and sometimes served Japanese-style tea to the neighbors. Now it’s all in ruins.

10. Noble even in its demise, this old tree, probably a cottonwood, makes its last stand near a two-lane highway in southwestern Utah.

11. A cactus at Snow Canyon, intersecting leaves of a yucca and an herb at Snow Canyon, and a lizard at Capitol Reef.

13. In an aspen grove somewhere between the small towns of Torrey and Boulder.

14. A lichen-splashed rock beside a road in Torrey, Utah. Torrey, population 242, was our base for exploring Capitol Reef. Though it’s very small, it has several hotels, a few good restaurants, a terrific roadside espresso stand, and lots of rocks.

15. A view of Route 12 cutting through Capitol Reef NP, seen from the Hickman Bridge Trail.

16. A spreading cottonwood leans over a roadside creek in southwestern Utah. The smooth-surfaced boulder caught my eye, too.

17. The geological wonders of Snow Canyon.

18. Juniper berries on the ground at Snow Canyon, an unidentified wildflower at Red Canyon Botanical Area, where unusual conditions encourage plants that grow nowhere else in the world, and a view of rocks, twigs, and leaves scattered on the ground at Snow Canyon.

19. This is Thompson’s wooly milkvetch, or Wooly locoweed *(Astragalus mollissimus thompsoniaen)* according to someone who identified it on iNaturalist. I saw the flowers at Capitol Gorge, a narrow canyon that slices through the Waterpocket Fold, a hundred-mile-long fold in the earth’s crust that’s about 7,000 feet (2133m) higher on one side than the other. The gorge was a way to cross the giant wrinkle on the earth’s surface for pioneers traveling west.

20. Over the years, many pioneers carved their names and dates on the sides of Capitol Gorge canyon. Some of the earliest European-American settlers in the area made these marks high on the walls of the canyon as they passed through in hopes that flash floods would not obliterate the records. In the upper left of this photo, you can see one man’s attempt to draw his initials by shooting his gun into the rock.

21. Layers of volcanic ash, mud, sand, and silt deposited in swamps or lakes over 100 million years ago make up the softly contoured Bentonite hills. I photographed them from a rough dirt road in Capitol Reef’s north end. Footprints on the delicate surface can take years to disappear so there are no trails over these formations.

22. Extraordinary colors adorn a mountain of rock in Capitol Reef’s Cathedral Valley, a remote area of spectacular, cathedral-like rock forms. This photo was made closer to the main road where there are signs of civilization. After fifteen minutes or so of bone-crushing travel over a washboarded dirt road, hardly any signs of humans remain other than the road itself and the occasional cow wandering through the desert.

23. A wildflower – perhaps Desert mallow – at Snow Canyon.

24. Last year’s seeds still dangled from the trees in April at Capitol Reef.

25. To fly home we had to return to Las Vegas, Nevada, which entailed traveling over desolate, snow-covered high passes. It was a fitting way to exit a region where the landscape dwarfs human activity.

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STATES of BEING: Curved

There are all kinds of curves in the world, but one curve keeps coming back to me. It dwells in my body as a gesture, a wide, arcing swing of the arm that lifts the air. In yoga class I enjoy big sweeps of the arms; I never groan inwardly the way I might during challenging poses. Wikipedia says that “Intuitively, a curve may be thought of as the trace left by a moving point.”* I like this idea of implied motion and I was surprised to learn that it originated with Euclid over 2000 years ago.

So curves aren’t static. They’re traced by all sorts of things besides my arm, of course, and when I slow down enough to notice the world with care, I might find the particular curve that I like almost anywhere. A fond familiarity arises when the curve catches my eye. There must be a neuronal pathway – or more likely, many pathways – where this curve is repeatedly recognized and appreciated, a kind of mirroring of the internal and the external. When I see it my eyebrow might arch in pleasure, yet another gentle curve!

Often a camera is at hand so I make a photograph.

1. Western redcedar trees. Washington, 2012.

Curves slither through my LightRoom catalog, showing up in old images of gourds and grass or in more recent photos of buildings and Bullwhip kelp. There’s a curved wood relief I made in 1972; the photo of it reminds me that the preoccupation with curves is nothing new. I suspect it has deep roots, perhaps even mythical, or at least back to my first days on this planet when my mother’s breast was the curve of life.

2. The Jean Arp-inspired wood relief I made long ago now exists only as an old slide and a fuzzy digitized copy.

I visualize the curve moving outward and upward more than inward and downward. It feels open-ended, generous. It stands alone or is tangled up with other curves and if it’s tangled, the disorder is harmonious, not fraught or tight.

A curved line suggests an indirect way to get from point A to point B. That appeals to me, too. Give me the back road, the side path! The very act of taking a route other than the straightest or most direct implies that there’s more to life than getting from A to B. And when it comes to solving problems, a roundabout route may not be the fastest one but it could turn up discoveries that shed new light on the issue. Physics tells us that gravity causes light to travel in a curve near large bodies. Did you know that there is “a flight simulator for multi-connected universes” called Curved Spaces? It’s freeware you can download that is supposed to enable inhabitants to “see their universe’s contents repeating in a crystalline pattern.”** I haven’t tried it and perhaps I’m rationalizing but it seems to me that there are many reasons to love a curve.

Here is a series of curves I’ve seen and photographed.