“. . .Will you still need me, Will you still read me, When I’m sixty-four?”
Because I am now.
Neither Trail Guy nor I had been to the main part of Sequoia National Park since before the fires (2020, 2021) and flood (2022-2023).
I love to climb Moro Rock, so that is how I chose to spend my birthday. The burned parts of the Park looked terrible, but the road is great and the unburned parts are beautiful too.
Enough yammering. Here are some photos.
Some of the dogwood leaves were changing.Normally they don’t color up until the end of October.
Lots of steps to climb
We see Alta Peak from our house in Three Rivers so it is fun to see it closer from Moro Rock.
The red oval is circling two almost invisible plumes of smoke from the current fire at Redwood Canyon.
It looks as if the stairs end here, but if you make a sharp right, they keep on aclimbin’.
On the way up and at the top we heard an English accent, several languages we didn’t recognize, and what I think was Korean. Everyone was polite, helping each other out with photos, moving aside on narrow places.
One last look up.
Crescent Meadow was our next destination.
The road there passes the Parker Group, which is a great source of sequoias to paint, along with Tunnel Log, which I’ve also painted several times.
Tharp’s Log is an interesting spot, just about 1/2 mile from Crescent Meadow. I like seeing the human history in national parks.
It is rare to see the needles from a redwood/sequoia tree because they are usually so high up in the sky that you can’t tell what they look like. This time I kept my eyes open for a baby redwood, and voila! here it is. The needles look fluffy compared to pines, firs, and cedars. (They aren’t.)
I took this through the windshield on the way home when traffic stopped. Four Guardsmen is often a traffic stopper. Apparently people forget how to drive when they are in a national park.
The day was an experience in nostalgia. Trail Guy used to be Road Guy, with 37 years of working for Sequoia. Things now look different, because things are done differently than when he retired 11 years ago. Some are an improvement, and some in the category of Are You Kidding??
It was also a day of comparison. Seemed like Moro Rock’s steps were a bit steeper than remembered, and the handrail seemed a bit lower. The Generals Highway was infinitely better than the Mineral King road. The trails were mostly paved and certainly much flatter than in Mineral King. We talked to someone from Germany, someone from Ecuador, and heard many languages that we could not identify. There were lots of people, particularly for a midweek day, AFTER Labor Day.
What a great way to spend a birthday! And, although I wasn’t driving Fernando, it was a business trip because I got a few more photos for painting from.
In conclusion, “Will you still need me, will you still read me, when I’m sixty-four?”
Because I am now. (But not losing my hair—growing it, actually, to save in case I do lose it!)
“On the Easels” isn’t exactly accurate; it is a euphemism for “paintings in progress”. It has been awhile since you have seen what oil paintings I am working on. With the annual Holiday Bazaar coming up on November 18 (sounds far away but is actually now closer to us than summer was), I have to be ready to fill my booth with little items that folks like to buy for Christmas gifts.
Yes, there will be 2024 calendars.
These current paintings are all about Three Rivers, because what doesn’t sell at the bazaar will go to the gift shop at St. Anthony’s Retreat Center. This is a new location for my paintings. With the Silver City Store closed over the summer, it is prudent to find new outlets.
Kaweah Lake with Alta Peak and lupine is always popular. (6×12″)
Must always have paintings of the Sequoia trees! (6×12″)
I don’t remember where this is but think it might be up South Fork Drive in Three Rivers. (6×6″)
This is a trail on the BLM land near St. Anthony’s Retreat Center. (8×8″)
People often think that an artist must be “inspired” to create work. Maybe. But must a baker be “inspired” in order to keep the display cases full? Must a farmer be “inspired” to keep the trees irrigated, fertilized, and pruned?
Inspiration comes from many sources. Sometimes mine comes from a particular quality of light, sometimes from not knowing what else I could do to earn a living, and sometimes it comes from the fact that Fernando has 248,000 miles and won’t last forever. An artist I greatly admired used to say that his inspiration came from the bills in his P.O Box.
My drawing students get to hear me say this regularly: “You can be fast or you can be good; I get to be both.”
Now I am working on a drawing that is very very important to me, and I am choosing to be good, but S L O W.
What’s with all the pressure? This is a house I met once and immediately admired, belonging to my closest friend in the world at the time.
I began this commission pencil drawing in September.
I got this far and decided that it needs to fill the paper more, because I don’t want to just fill the bottom inch with gravel. So, I have erased the lower parts and will stretch the slate and brick walkway farther down the paper.
The shrubs are being placed willy-nilly as I see fit, because I am working from about 5 different photos, all taken at different times of the landscape development. As long as there are lavender shrubs with color at the end, my dear friend will be happy.
It is normal for us to close our cabin in mid-October. We closed a little earlier this year due to impending road construction.
We stopped at a lower spot so that Trail Guy could move a tarantula off the road.Baby’s breath, around the Conifer Gate.A new-to-me flower along the road: stephanomeria.
There was a weird phenomena along the road: white stuff that looked like thick spider web material was stuck in grasses and shrubs almost all the way to Conifer, the upper gate. It felt sticky to Trail Guy; it felt like unnatural fiber such as acrylic or nylon to me, the way it stuck to my hangnails. My camera stopped working on the close-up setting, so it is a little hard to see what this stuff looked like.
There were definite signs of fall, finally.
We walked up to Crystal Creek, and the normally Yellow Tunnel was still green.
We walked down the road to Cold Springs Campground.
A little bit of work has been done on the Nature Trail, which was blocked by fallen trees and snow patches earlier in the summer. The water is still flowing strong, the aspens are still green, and there is some fall color showing in a few leaves.
We saw some interesting things.
This giant red fir was felled in Cold Springs Campground a year or two ago.This fungus grows on wood and is called “Witch’s Butter”I didn’t find the name of this fungus.
The berries were abundant this year.
Bitter cherryElderberryGooseberryGooseberryI don’t know what this is.Sierra currantSnowberry (white, hard to see in this photo)ThimbleberryTwinberry; has fuzzy leaves (The most thorough book shows 2 varieties of twinberry; this one is new to me.)More twinberry; the type I am familiar with wasn’t bearing this year.Wax currantWax currant was extremely abundant this year; this is the one I was not successful in turning to juice for jelly-making.
Closing has lots of tasks, not all of which I photographed, because why would you want to see all that?? But here is one, peculiar to our cabin. Not every cabin requires a climb onto the roof.
Closing is bittersweet. It is hard to say goodbye to one’s second home, even if it is a seasonal farewell. There is also the relief of knowing everything is securely buttoned up, putting away one’s duffel-bags, being home, catching up on yardwork, spending time with the cats, going to church again, staying current with emails and various internet activities, getting work done. (Knitting is portable, so I didn’t list this.)
Trail Guy is nostalgic; I just knit, unravel, reknit, and enjoy the final moments.
The drive down took awhile because we stopped several times to share information about sites and road construction, to discuss the locks on the gates, to wish friends a good winter, and to just take in the sights.
The water is still flowing along the road, and scarlet monkeyflowers were abundant this year. We also saw Farewell-to-Spring, yes, in October!
This will be one of just two posts about Mineral King because I don’t want to gloat about enjoying it this summer while the public was barred from visiting. However, I know you are curious, so here is a brief look.
This year everything was delayed in Mineral King, due to a heavy winter. Normally, in August we begin to see signs of impending fall. Not so in 2023!
Here is a look at August and September this year. Water was flowing, berry bushes were still in bloom, grasses were green, snow patches hadn’t melted. By late September, some of the ferns had taken a hit in colder temperatures and turned bronze.
Tomorrow I will show you pictures from closing weekend, October 5-8, 2023.
Because Mineral King was closed to the public all summer, I chose to not post about it. There is nothing polite about rubbing people’s noses in the harsh reality of being forbidden to visit the most beautiful place in Tulare County, and in spite of my natural bluntness, I do my best to be polite.
We closed our cabin on a beautiful fall weekend, shut off the water to our little road, and said goodbye to Mineral King for the year.
Road repairs still had not begun, although the contractor was gathering equipment at the bottom of the road on Highway 198/Sierra Drive. There was also a bit of additional flagging where a few wires cross the Mineral King road.
In June, after Tulare County had their lower piece of the road repaired, Trail Guy and the Farmer volunteered many hours, marking the hazards and making the road passable. The Park gave permission for these two hardworking, capable, generous men to do the Park’s work, for free. They were instructed to not clean up anything, because the Park wanted Federal Highways to see the damage and messes.
This repair project should have been started as soon as the road was passable. In the opinions of those of us who drove the road regularly, at the very least, the Park should have sent up a backhoe operator with a shovel-wielding ground crew person to clean out the culverts and clear the gutters. However, they are extremely short-staffed, and Mineral King is not a priority.
The road to Cedar Grove in Kings Canyon has been closed all summer.
The Park hired a contractor, and all summer we kept hearing warnings to not drive the road because we would be interfering with road work. In reality, there was no road work by either the Park nor any contractors.
We were also warned against driving the road because if there was a problem, there would be no way for emergency vehicles to assist or rescue.
An off-duty Park employee thought it was just fine to drive on the wrong side of the road, even on blind curves. Silver City was able to limp their truck to the lower gate for towing; the park employee’s vehicle was still drivable.
We were warned against using our cabins because if there was a problem, no one would come help us. No propane trucks could deliver, and there was no garbage service. Somehow, the resilient and resourceful cabin community made it through these inconveniences.
Eventually, the phone company made it up the hill, but Trail Guy and I opted to not have a phone at the cabin. Several neighbors have phones, which they made available to us. This was an excellent arrangement, and since Trail Guy helps them out regularly, almost as if he is everyone’s (unpaid) resident houseman, he needed their phones in order to stay in touch. In return, we didn’t have to pay $54/month to keep our phone throughout the entire year for 4-5 months of use. Even more importantly, we didn’t have to hear it ring, interrupting our peace and causing us to wonder if yet another Fireman’s Fund was desperate for our help.
The latest missive from the Park:
A quick update on the Mineral King Road construction project. We’ve just been notified by the contractor that they won’t need to begin full road closures until October 17th. They will begin moving equipment and performing some work along the road beginning on Monday, October 9th. They will have traffic control personnel on site during this first phase of work.
Road work impacts will be from the park boundary up to the top of the construction zone at the Conifer Gate. The closure could be reduced over time but shouldn’t extend beyond that.
Work will take place Monday through Saturday, no work on Sundays.
7am-Noon????Road Closed Noon to 1pm? Road Open 1-5pm ???????Road Closed 5pm to 7am ??Road Open
Access will continue to be limited to cabin owners and administrative traffic only. No public access.
In the opinion of the highly knowledgeable Trail Guy, formerly known as Road Guy, the construction zone needs to be extended above the Conifer Gate. You may recall that there was a rather alarming sinkhole in July, which was just 2 miles below the end of the road. We didn’t mention that there were also numerous “tree failures”, and the logs were just moved and trimmed to be one-lane passable.
Although it was mighty peaceful in the summer of 2023, we are not snobs nor are we elitists: we certainly hope that Mineral King is open to the public in 2024.
The painted designs on the wall for a new exhibit called Native Voices at the Three Rivers Historical Museum are finished!
The last day began with little green men, called “The Gathering”. The lighter green was ready for a second coat, and the rest of the shadows had to be drawn in. That should have been very simple, but I struggled a bit on some of the placement. (There was plenty of touch-up base coat paint for erasures.)
This is how the whole wall looked.
Next, I had to figure out how to put the shadows on the far right diamonds, called “Rattlesnake”. Instead of transferring the pattern a bit to the right of the existing diamonds or drawing it in pencil, I used masking tape to “draw” it. This took a lot of thought and measurement. I would think that it was ready to paint, stand back, and see yet another missing strip. Sometimes I was protecting the diamond edge, and sometimes I was shaping the shadows.
Everything took two coats of paint. I wasn’t sure the tape would peel cleanly, but it did fine. While looking here on my computer screen, it appears that some of my spacing is off. Some of those lines got eyeballed, so the entire thing is bound to look hand-painted rather than like applied vinyl. My customer, the Mineral King Preservation Society, looked into vinyl but chose paint instead, a choice which suits me very well.
While the paint was drying, I started touching up the drips and wobbles, along with covering the visible pencil lines and smudges from the graphite transfer paper. The smaller red diamonds called “Quail” had no shadows. Thank goodness, because these were small and detailed. Maybe I should have taped them, but every job is a completely new challenge, and I just bumble through, wishing that sometimes I could have a couple of jobs the same so that the new knowlege wouldn’t be wasted.
Finally, I decided to peel off the tape, risking disaster. (That’s an exaggeration, because as long as there was paint remaining in the necessary colors, anything could be fixed.)
I peeled and only saw a few parts that needed retouching. Acrylic paint (or latex or whatever non-oil paint is) dries so fast, which is a real bonus on a job like this.
Finally, here is a look at the whole wall.
The display will have cabinets in matching colors placed strategically beneath the colorful wall designs.
A few more facts:
The colors were chosen to not clash with the other 2/3 of the room. (The red is magical—sometimes it looks red, sometimes it looks rust, and sometimes it looks pink, and get this: the name is pumpkin spice!)
The other 2/3 of the room is for the Mineral King exhibit, a thorough look at geology, mining, the Disney era, and cabin life in, of course, where else, Mineral King.
The Native Voices exhibit is put together by the MKPS for the Three Rivers Historical Museum. That 1/3 of the room isn’t the responsibility of the MKPS, but the MKPS has paid employees who are real go-getters. They know how to find money, and they wanted the entire room to look cohesive.
This is going to be a great display, and I encourage you to visit the museum!
So far I have only told you about the steps toward painting the display on a wall in the Three Rivers Historical Museum. I finally began applying color to the wall.
It took two coats for the colors to be strong enough to cover. My plan was to freehand the “shadows”, and afterward, use the soft white base coat paint to cover the wobbles, hairs, drips, and smudges.
The bottom center photo shows what was behind me in the Mineral King room. Those are my murals on the walls. It was a real privilege to get to paint in this peaceful place, working for accommodating people, just 1-1/2 mile from home.
The exhibit is on the north interior wall of the Mineral King Room in the Three Rivers Historical Museum. (Really, shouldn’t this be called a “history” museum rather than a “historical” museum? This bothers me. The museum isn’t historical; however, I didn’t name it and can read their sign and website and then call them what they call themselves.)
The exhibit is called Native Voices.
The designer chose the colors.
The designs are from Yokuts baskets.
I will freehand the design rather than tape.
It will take a lot of time to paint out the drips, wobbles, and graphite smudges, but less time than taping and then hoping everything stays in place when it dries and the tape is removed.
I only traced the main designs and will have to figure out how to do the “shadows”.
I would dearly love to know how the designer thought I’d get the designs onto the wall.
This last picture shows the design with its “shadows”, along with three of gray people-ish shapes to give an idea of how the finished wall will look. On the left is The Gathering, in the middle is Quail (but the lighter versions won’t be included), and on the right is Rattlesnake.
The quail design had to be repeated, this time higher and to the right. I was on a roll, had this thing figured out!
Trail Guy stopped by to see how things were going. His timing was excellent, and he helped me place this design higher on the wall, measuring and leveling.
It was too big for the kraft paper, so I only drew half of the design, thinking I’d just flip it over and finish it. However, I had to “scab” another piece of paper and finish the drawing, then trim it when we flipped it over. I was thankful that he was still outside, reading through the exhibit on the New England Tunnel and Smelter Company (a Mineral King exhibit).
After tracing that pattern, called “rattlesnake”, I went home for lunch. Tony’s Taverna has a food truck outside the museum, and I know the food is terrific, but I am too frugal to spend $20 for lunch when my kitchen is less than 2 miles away.
After lunch, I returned to finish the final design, which I called “little men” but learned is called “The Gathering”. This one had only one little man traced, and the plan was to keep moving the pattern over until all three were in place.
Oops. There was a mistake. I fixed it, repaired it on the wall and on the pattern, and then worked the little man across the wall. I didn’t tape the bottom of the pattern, because I had to keep lifting it up and crawling beneath it to place the graphite paper, three positions for each little man.
When I thought I was finished, I could see some problems with the little men’s feet not lining up. This is something I could fudge into place (what a weird use of the word “fudge”, but I bet you know what I mean).
Finally, here is a weird thought. As I was figuring out how to do this, I realized that I learned these skills from my mom. When?? Where?? When?? I don’t know, but I feel certain that I must have watched her create a pattern and transfer it somewhere, sometime.
