If you read my posts last week, you saw the variety of fall color in Mineral King from year to year. This week I will show you all 2025, mid-October. Not much chit-chat, just some photos. Today is a walk up the Nature Trail, which originates at the upper end of Cold Springs campground.
The trees weren’t all brilliant yellow, but it was a brilliant clear sunny afternoon.
To clarify, Mineral King is still open to the public, officially closing in another week (sorry, don’t know the actual date). Trail Guy and I closed our cabin over the weekend, and just in time too. This week will be full of catching up at home and in the studio, so I’ll just fill this week of posts with Mineral King photos and chit-chat.
Heading up the hill, I did a quick drive-by of looking upstream from the Oak Grove Bridge. Supposedly this fall is when the county will begin tearing up the landscape upstream to prepare the way for a new bridge. The old one will become a pedestrian bridge only, not that there is any place to walk on the road. It just happens to be a beautiful historical structure in Tulare County, which doesn’t have very many of those.
How it looked on Friday, just aiming upstream into the sun. Next time we drive over it on the way up the hill (unless we make an unplanned trip) this will be all torn up.
We passed these types of scenic views on the way up. The road construction continues through the fall, and I don’t know when they’ll finish this year. The project is supposed to last through 2027.
Because of the fires in 2020, 2021, and 2024, there are clear views to Sawtooth (unless it is cloudy or smoky or smoggy or. . . )
Trail Guy and the Farmer stopped at the cabin owners’ dumpster to see if it was full. Hiking Buddy and I opted to walk up the Nature Trail to our cabins. (What? Would you rather hang around the dumpster, discussing its capacity, waiting for the dudes to make a decision and then have a ride up the final mile?)
More on fall color along the Nature Trail tomorrow.
The photos from Friday and these photos today were all taken within the first 2 weeks of October each year. I just arbitrarily grabbed different ones from my very extensive photo collection (34,000? maybe 36,000 now?) so you can see the variety from year to year.
I did not choose my very best or think about an equal distribution of scenes. Instead, this is just a random selection to give you a sense of the inconsistency from autumn to autumn.
2025 fall photos will come later this week.
I stayed home last weekend. Our cabin is a summer residence in a summer place, and I am very ready to be home for awhile. So, I went through my photo archives, and today’s post will be random October photos of Mineral King from past years.
That was interesting. Let’s do a few more next week.
I guess you could draw with chalk or a paintbrush or your finger on a fogged up window, but drawing with pencils is what I do.
It’s also what I teach. A returning drawing student had one month free for lessons before embarking on a new chapter of life. We dove right in, and she stayed for several hours each time rather than the normal one hour weekly lesson. The final one took place in my studio, which is where we started about 12 years ago when she was a wee fourth grader. I made an exception to my usual 6th grade minimum age requirement because she was an exceptional child and private lessons meant much more help and attention.
Here’s a drawing she did in about 5th grade.
Here is the drawing she just completed.
She has become an exceptional adult. To quote another one of my drawing students who has known her through the years, “She’s all that AND a bag of chips!”
This is a commissioned pencil drawing I finished in July. I haven’t posted it because I didn’t know if the intended recipient reads my blog. (If you recognize yourself, please pretend to be surprised when you receive the drawing!)
HEY! WHY DO YOU THINK YOU CAN WEASEL YOUR WAY INTO OUR HOUSE??
Five of these pencil drawings sold at my solo show in Tulare, “Around Here (and Sometimes a Little Farther)”. The others were pencil commissions, which I showed you with all the slow developments in painstaking detail.
I love pencil. Did you know that?
Thus we conclude another post about the business of art, because. . .
These “Sold” posts are mostly to reassure myself that I’m not just drawing and painting for the fun of it. They serve a secondary purpose in reminding my tens of readers that I accept commissions (lest you think I am a prima donna who only creates what I “feel like” creating) and that I do sell my work (lest you think I just prefer to cover my walls with my own art.)
Most of these sold at the Silver City Store, four miles below Mineral King. The sequoia paintings mostly sold at both of the stores which sell for me in Three Rivers (Kaweah Arts and Stem & Stone). One sequoia painting was a commissioned piece for a long time friend and customer, and another was to some new friends/customers.
If it weren’t for all those folks passing through town on their way to Sequoia National Park, I’d be sure that only my friends and relatives buy from me. It is thrilling when a stranger likes my art enough to part with their hard-earned pieces of green paper with dead presidents’ faces on them.
Tomorrow I’ll show you all the pencil drawings that sold. You’ve seen most of them already, so it will be reruns for you.
The plan was to finish the 10×30” commissioned oil painting of the two redwood trees. When I set up in the painting workshop, it looked too hard and too big and too daunting. So I indulged in some productive procrastination, opting instead to finish the plein air painting of the pumpkin field.
This meant that I added a few blossoms, detailed some foreground leaves, and signed the painting. Since it is too wet to scan, here is the photograph, which include shiny spots.
No, no, no, REALLY, it looks so much better in person! And it might be a bad idea to title it “Pumpkin Patch” since no pumpkins are visible. Besides, Mrs. Texas and I thought it was a field of summer squash for a few months.
Never mind. Let’s return to our twin redwoods, Sequoia Sisters, Sequoia Siblings, Aunt Tillie & Uncle Pete, Two Sisters. The last title is the real one, because my boss chose it. Who is my boss? Mrs. Customer, of course!
The upper mid section of greenery and trunk was lacking in detail. Mrs. Customer also requested to see some flowing water into the trough, along with a few wildflowers.
The water really flummoxed me because it flows in a little ravine, not right at the surface where it is visible. So, on the way up the hill recently, the idea of a waterfall came to me. On the way down the hill, we did a drive-by shooting of the waterfall. I’ve circled it and messed with the contrast so you can get an idea of what I am working with.
First, I had to paint out the fake-looking stream that I put down in order to force myself to address the issue. Buh-bye, little fake stream. You can see that there are boulders indicating a stream flowing into the trough. However, there isn’t room for a believable waterfall.
Oops, too small to see. Here is a close-up of the bottom left corner.
Allrighty then, let the water fall, and let the lupine bloom!
Will Mrs. Customer approve? (I signed it anyway. . . always hoping for the best.)
Why two photos of the (hopefully) finished commissioned oil painting? Because I photographed one with my inferior phone camera and one with my little Canon Elph, which probably is also inferior compared to most people’s phones. This will be an enormous challenge to photograph. When it is dry, I’ll tackle that aspect of the job. Or, more accurately, after Mrs. Customer is pleased and it is dry, then I will take on that challenge.
P.S. I like this painting a lot. Thank you, Mrs. Customer for commissioning a subject that I’ve never done for some odd reason!
The weekend began with a surprise visit by a childhood friend. I knew she might be coming in the fall, but so many people tell me their potential visit dates that I don’t even try to keep track. That meant it was a wonderful surprise, and I got to spend an hour or so with her and her offspring. Since this is the World Wide Web, and because I want to experience and value life even when it isn’t documented and publicized, I took no photos (except for asking her daughter to take one of us together, which I HOPE her mom will send to me!)
The road construction continues. We waited just below Wolverton Point for about 45 minutes for the 10 o’clock pilot car shuttle which we followed to Silver City. SEE THE NEW SCHEDULE BELOW.
A neighboring cabin had 8-10 hazard trees threatening their place. We went snooping, and all is safe now (but the cabin is exposed), and there is a boatload of downed wood, a real mess. Here is how part of it looked as drawn for The Cabins of Mineral King and how it looks now in real life.
It rained several times and was overcast. We did not hike. People who live in Mineral King just hang out sometimes. Instead of being on vacation, we are simply experiencing cabin life.
We thoroughly enjoyed the warmth from the wood stove, trying but not succeeding to keep a fire going all day. That stove wants feeding fairly often. I would have split more wood, but we kept covering the woodstack due to the rain.
We walked to the pack station and found an enormous tarp all wadded up, and the stock was gone. Couldn’t just waste that tarp, because chances are we paid for it with our tax dollars. So we folded it up and then put it in the storage container.
I saw this trimmed mule hoof on the ground, and the snow stake is now installed for viewing on the winter webcam.
Berries are ripe in the fall. Don’t eat the white ones. Trail Guy loves the red ones, Wax Currant.
There is a specific type of mistletoe which grows in red fir trees. It is weird stuff.
Look at these two huge chunks of the red fir that got dropped a few weeks ago. They got randomly placed in our neighborhood after being moved from the road. One has a thing attached that had something to do with phone lines. I didn’t photograph the messes from the dropped trees, but know I will be dragging brush and sawing limbs for a long time coming.
Now, the funnest of the fun things: I FINALLY* met Kevin Alltucker, author of The Mules of Mineral King, a book that I told you about back in August. He graciously accepted a gift of my Wilsonia book, and then his brother said that he (the brother) is one of my tens of blog readers. This gave me the idea to do this dorky photo (me dorky-looking, clearly too thrilled to think about posing better or controlling my grin) and remind you all who like Mineral King to BUY THE BOOK! It is so well-written. It was also fun to talk about the logistics of writing, publishing and (not) marketing one’s own books with a fellow self-published author.
The Mules of Mineral King is available through Riverfeet Press, (also at that big online store which begins with A and takes a large bite out of an author’s profits.)
2. AT&T is so awful. I have known this for a long time, but it got driven home again when I got a letter from a collection agency saying I owe $666 for a phone number that they NEVER activated, I NEVER had or used (because how can you use something you don’t have?), and they NEVER billed me for it. I’ve wasted so much time on the phone and writing letters, and wasted money sending the letters in a manner that the collection agency cannot lie about receiving them.
3. Seeing the Supernatural by Lee Strobel is so fascinating and weirdly believable. The premise is that there is an unseen world that DOES exist and there are countless stories which are corroborated by evidence. It’s not about UFOs; it is about real miracles, dreams, angels, deathbed wishes, and near-death experiences.
4. Check out these pumpkin harvest photos: it’s like a grown-up Easter egg hunt. (I wonder if my painting needs revision again.)
5. Tony’s Taverna in Three Rivers is finally open!! It took four years to go from buying an old building to making a fabulous Greek restaurant. The food is so good that I wanted to lick the plate, but I found a little restraint and was able to maintain dignity.
6. Through an online friend I’ve never met (Hi WilliamB!), I learned about an organization called Foster Care to Success, which helps kids who have aged out of foster care. They have an annual red scarf project, which caused me to immediately abandon my severe ongoing yarn diet and order enough yarn to knit 2 scarves.
