Trail Work in Mineral King

Trail Guy and I have a weird hobby. When we hike, we like to improve trails. We toss rocks off, scrape out places for water to drain off the trail, improve water bars and just generally take notes on trails.

A favorite walk of mine is the almost 2 miles to the Franklin Creek crossing. (To refresh your memory, a hike is when you take food and wear a pack; a walk is just a walk.)

 

Franklin Creek in Mineral King
This photo of Franklin Creek was taken in August of 2011. I didn’t want you to be confused about the flowers.

Crossing Franklin Creek can be scary early in the season. If you are lacking in depth perception as I am, it is really scary. This isn’t a very high water year, so we weren’t sure what to expect. I expected to take my shoes off and get a little relief to my stupid Plantar Fasciitis, and then to turn around and head for this:

adirondack chair

When we got to the crossing, there was water flowing down the trail. No no, can’t have that! We began with a little water diversion, getting the water to flow off the trail and back into the creek.

We worked our way up toward the stream, where I removed my shoes and got into the water. Pretty soon, Trail Guy was shouting at me to move this rock and that rock (not because he was agitated, but because the water was roaring.) Eventually, he got tired of shouting and joined me in the stream. He crossed to discover the weak places.

This looks scary to me. If I had to cross, I’d do it barefoot and wade through rather than misstep or slip.

More rocks were moved. The idea was to break down the dam that well-meaning but uninformed hikers had built. If you build a dam for crossing, you will be crossing on a wet wall. If you break the dam and let the water flow through, you will  be crossing on steps that are above the water. So, we cleaned out stones to allow for greater water flow.

See all that dry ground? It was under water when we first arrived.

Now, there are nicely spaced stepping stones across the creek, no water flowing down the trail, and no dam.

Way to go, Trail Guy!

(and I helped)

Tee Shirt Season in Mineral King

Yep, hawking those Mineral King tee shirts again. We are calling them Trail Guy Tee Shirts. Cute, yes?

 

Here is the men’s shirt in action:

This man usually wears a size Large. This is a Large. No problem.

Here is the women’s:

This is a women’s medium, which is the equivalent of a 8-10. This woman usually wears an 8, sometimes a 6. The women’s small is too tight. The medium is sort of roomy. It will shrink and fit exactly right.

We have sold out of Women’s Large. More are on order, and this time we have added Women’s XL, because the women’s run small AND shrink. We’ve had requests for sweatshirts (maybe someday), Children’s tees (probably not), Men’s XXL (yes, coming with the Women’s Large and XL order), white (sorry, we chose these blues), and long sleeved (nope, this is summer).

Anything else you’d like to request?

Something Fun for Color Junkies

A few years ago I was at my local yarn store. There were some bins of sale yarns. I could not concentrate until I had arranged the yarns in those bins by color. The woman working there at the time told me it was because I am a color junkie.

WOW! A term to describe my obsession with color!

I wonder why I was happy drawing in pencil for all those years when I definitely have an obsession with color. Since I’ve devoted this entire year to completing all the pencil drawings for the upcoming book The Cabins of Wilsonia, I really get immense pleasure from working with color wherever I can – knitting, arranging the clothes in my closet in color order (Everyone does that, right?), mixing paint to cover up dress up parts of the workshop, organizing my drawing students’ colored pencils, et cetera.

Awhile ago, I discovered something really fun to do online. It is a color test, and it is free. I scored very high (low, actually, because in the test low is a high score.) Then I forgot about it until last week. I took the test again and look!

Isn’t that thrilling??

You can take the test too. Try it and tell me what you think, either by email or by commenting on this blog. I’d love to hear if it is as fun for you as for me. It’s probably just me. That’s okay, I’m used to being different from the average bear.

Mineral King Road Lore

On the Mineral King Road there are 4 water troughs. Some years I think I will memorize the elevations and mileage markers. More realistically, I can remember their names and order of appearance.

This one is called Trauger’s, after Mr. and Mary Trauger (what was her hubby’s name? She was the one everyone talks about!) who had a home above. It’s my guess they built there because of the spring. Duh.

The National Park Service has spray painted all sorts of information on these historic items. Sanctioned graffiti, perhaps? Back in the olden days, they were places you could fill your radiator after it boiled over on the steep, nay, very steep Mineral King Road.

Mary Trauger planted sweet peas. They bloom near this water trough each spring.

HEY!! What are you doing up there? That is Trail Guy, formerly known as Road Guy. It bugs him when the troughs aren’t flowing, so sometimes we stop on the way up the hill so he can clear junk out of the stream and get the water flowing through the pipe into the water troughs.

He may be known as Trail Guy, but deep down inside Road Guy still exists.

REMEMBER, Mineral King Tee shirts are available through my website and from Trail Guy himself. This is the season for tee shirts. We are the people who have them. You may be a person who needs one. We can help.

A Lavender Painting

Barbara’s French Lavender, 8×10, oil on wrapped canvas, private collection

This is a view of my friend Barbara’s French Lavender in Three Rivers. Livingston Lavender Farms, named after her grandmother who built the home, will be open soon for you to come harvest lavender. June 15? More will be revealed.

Imagine a blank journal with lines inside and this painting on the cover for around $15. Aren’t you just itching to own and use one?

More about lavender

My amazing friend Barbara grows lavender. She opens her lavender gardens (or is it a farm?) to the public each June when the lavender is at its peak. People can harvest bunches of lavender.

English lavender in bloom

The dates of this event are a little squishy, because the bloom is dependent on the weather.

This year, it is possibly Saturday June 15. This happens here in Three Rivers, and you just sort of have to pay attention to the paper and to people who might know.

Barbara and I like to collaborate on art projects. She had me paint lavenders on saltillo tiles for her garden and to sell during the Hidden Gardens Tour. These sold well, so I have painted more for her Lavender Harvest Event.

In addition, I have finished 2 new paintings based on her beautiful lavender. The hope was to have them printed into blank books to be useful as journals. More will be revealed in the fullness of time. . .

Livingston Lavender, oil painting, 8×10″, private collection

I know I said 2 paintings. Guess you’ll have to come back tomorrow.

Color Lesson: About Lavender

First, a confession. I thought “lavender” was spelled “lavendar”. Really! Me, the Typo-Psycho! I was getting it mixed up with “calendar”. This is a prime example of the Middle-Aged-Mush-Brain I am currently experiencing.

Barbara’s Lavender

Now that I know how to spell it properly, let’s talk about it.

Lavender is light purple. I used to hate that color. This was the result of a trauma that happened when I was in about the 3rd grade.

My older sister had a bee-yoo-tee-full lavender dress that I COULD NOT WAIT for her to outgrow. Finally, finally, it came to me. I tried it on, looked in the mirror and was HORRIFIED. My skin looked YELLOW!! I ran to find Mom and told her, “This dress makes my skin look yellow!” She was astonished that yes indeed, it did make my skin look yellow and probably even more astonished that her 8 year old daughter noticed such a thing.

It was a life-defining moment, although I didn’t know it at the time.

In the 1980s, my Mom took my older sister and me to a color consultant to “have our colors done”. (My younger sister was and is too smart to need this and too cute to care.) Doesn’t that sound wonderful?

It was. Turns out that everyone can wear almost every color. The problems occur when you choose the wrong shade. That lavender did not have enough blue in it to suit me. I still have my color swatches from that session, and they have helped me tremendously through the years.

You can learn about it from a book called “Color Me Beautiful” by Carole Jackson.

Penstemmon

I also learned that as we age, our eyes become more aware of the color purple. Sure enough, in the last 5 years or so, I have come to be almost obsessed with the purple color that has a ton of blue in it. There is a version called periwinkle, and a darker version that is the color of my favorite dutch iris and some lupine and definitely a penstemmon and for sure my favorite Mineral King wildflower called “Explorer’s Gentian.


Explorer’s Gentian

So, I’ve grown from “I hate lavender” to “Oh wow, check out that color!”

What else would you expect from a color junkie?

 

Lupine

Official Opening Weekend in Mineral King

Memorial Day is the traditional opening weekend in Mineral King. Sometimes it snows. It can be downright beautiful, or it can be stinkin’ cold. Some years there has been too much snow to open until June.

Not so in 2013.

Favorite knitting spot in late afternoon
Sawtooth Peak at dusk – that pinky color is called “Alpen Glow”.
Sierra Star Tulip
East Fork of the Kaweah along the Nature Trail with Sawtooth in the distance
Mineral King is so very green during its spring season.
The trail to Farewell Gap and Franklin Lake

 

It is tee shirt season, and Trail Guy has the Mineral King tees at the cabin. You can order them here or stop by and ask him, IF you see the Botmobile in the driveway and the front door is open.

Now What Is She Reading?

Salt & Light, or Reading Rabbit, oil on board, 11×14″

 

Took a day or two off, reading. Knitting too. But not blogging. Did anyone actually notice?

Don’t answer that. Thanks.

My stack of books to read continues to grow. So many interesting books out there, and now it is compounded by my discovery of a site called Good Reads. If you type in a book you like, you get recommendations for other books. You can rate the books you have read, make a list of those you’d like to read, read comments and ratings about books, and sometimes get a first chapter to read to on your computer.

Meanwhile, back at the Adirondack chair, these books are in progress:

1. My Natural History: the evolution of a gardner by Liz Primeau is a memoir by a woman who is probably in her late 70s. She is wise, funny, honest, practical, and interesting. She grew up in Canada, didn’t finish high school, and became a gardening magazine editor and writer and even hosted a television program on gardening. She knows a ton about gardening and describes things so well that I am THERE. I want to live where gardening isn’t a war with deer, gophers, bugs, drought, poor soil and weird diseases. I want to spend every spare minute growing things, designing a garden, and watching Perkins catch gophers.

Dream on, Toots.

(Cousin Maggie, I think you would really enjoy My Natural History)

2. Amish Peace by Suzanne Woods Fisher was recommended to me by my dear friend Natalie. It is filled with short chapters about different qualities of Amish life, and each chapter ends with a set of questions to help you examine your life. I leave this book at the cabin where I can read slowly and think.

Or, I could read slowly if I didn’t have that giant stack of books taunting me.

3. Young For Life by Marilyn Diamond and her husband whom she calls “Dr. Rock” is giving me nutritional whiplash. It goes against almost all I have believed and lived dietarily for the past 30 years. (The exception is my aversion to processed foods.) Cholesterol and saturated fat are GOOD FOR YOU?? Not tied to being fat? Not the cause of heart disease? Eating low and non-fat foods is making us fat?? And sugar is the big enemy, dang it. Although some of the writing hints of conspiracy theories, I think there might be something to this.

Bummer. I really don’t like meat very much. On the other hand, please pass the butter!

P.S. I don’t have a Kindle and most of my books come from the local library. If I buy a book, I usually find it used on Amazon. Just saying.

 

 

 

 

More New Mineral King Paintings

Question: How many paintings can one California artist produce about the same area of the world?

Answer: As many as she wants.

Allll-righty- then!

oil painting of sawtooth

Sawtooth X, 6×6, oil on wrapped canvas, $50, available here or at the Silver City Store, aka Silver City Resort

oil painting of mineral king road

Mineral King Road, 6×6, oil on wrapped canvas, $50, available here or at the Silver City Store aka Silver City Resort

oil painting of Timber Gap

Timber Gap IIX, 6×6, oil on wrapped canvas, $50, available here or at Silver City, which opens TODAY.