This may be Trail Guy’s favorite hike in Mineral King. It is White Chief, and then over the ridge down into the Farewell Gap drainage. I wasn’t there, but his photos always land on my computer, so you get a bonus Mineral King post.
Trail Guy’s Hike
So Green in Mineral King
Trail Guy and I took a hike with The Farmer and Hiking Buddy. It was the easiest 8 miles that one can hike in Mineral King, meaning the trail has a good grade and a flat trail bed (not many roots and rocks to trip over). But it felt like a very long distance. (Is this what it means to be in the S’s??)
Where? Good question, thanks for asking. (That’s what most interviewees say these days – have you noticed that?) The junction of Franklin Lake and Farewell Gap trails. We usually choose it for the ease and the wildflowers, which aren’t very profuse this year. There is a good variety, but they are scattered.
11 Things Learned in June
My list for June was quite short and I was about to make an excuse; then I gave it all another think, and here is the longest one in awhile.
- For the very first time in my entire 61 years, I attended an open casket funeral, where the deceased was visible. It wasn’t one of those deals where the attendees file past if they are so inclined – he was fully visible from every place in the chapel. “Disconcerted” might be the best word for how I felt.
- I described A House in the Sky to my hiking buddy, a memoir about a woman’s experience of a 460 day kidnapping situation. Her husband asked me why I would want to read such a disturbing tale, which made me think. My conclusion is that it was interesting, and it caused me to be very very very thankful for my life. (Maybe 4 verys, or even 5).
- Live oaks are dying all around my neighborhood. Drought? Maybe, maybe not. The native trees are “designed” to live in our climate, which historically has droughts (or dry years) every 5-6 years, as learned by studying the rings on Giant Sequoia trees.
- As I dithered on whether or not to get my 25 year old car painted, it occurred to me that I could spend the equivalent amount of money on looking better myself, something that would probably only last for 3 months, as opposed to the car looking good for the rest of its life. (No decision has been reached.)
- Leaky canoes at Hume Lake seem to be a normal thing. Oh well. It was nice on the lake regardless.
- This site is fun and helpful: Everyday Cheapskate
- Secondhand: Travels in the New Global Garage Sale by Adam Minter is an education about what happens to all the stuff in the world when we are finished with it. It can be put in a landfill, incinerated, taken apart for recycling, dismantled for parts, or used by other people. Poor countries import massive amounts and use it in all these ways; of particular interest to me was the innovative ways our junk gets used to build useful items. (Remember, “Junk is the stuff we get rid of; stuff is the junk we keep”.) Some countries have laws against importing secondhand items; other countries have laws against exporting them. Those laws cause a problem for the economies that depend on secondhand products. The planned obsolescence is also causing problems. Having replaced our water heater, washing machine, refrigerator, and the A/C in my studio within the past year, I can relate to this. But then how do I get my broken things to Ghana or Nigeria so they can use the parts??
- Some friends shared some new peppers from their garden, called “Padrone”. Green, wrinkled, and not hot. I wonder if they would grow in Three Rivers. . . maybe I can save a few seeds.*
- A farmer friend told me the way to understand climate and weather is to look up something called “degree days”. I haven’t studied it, but according to my friend, there are going to be a certain number of hot and cold days every year. He gave these examples: if there is a cool spring, it will be a hot summer; if it is mild summer, it will last a long time. I would like to understand it in terms of weather, but it is used mostly to predict energy usage to heat and cool. Here is the explanation from the National Weather Service.
- Big box stores are inefficient, overstaffed with incompetent employees, disorganized, dependent on computers for inventory which waste the customers’ time and prove to be unreliable. I’m talking about Home Depot. Good Grief Charlie Brown. Nope, not going on social media to badmouth them; just hoping I can always plan ahead enough to have Three Rivers Mercantile order what is needed to avoid future aggravation of HD.
- You might be able to have a say in the redistricting of California that happens every 10 years. Why bother? A good example is that Three Rivers is lumped with Bakersfield, Ridgecrest and Lancaster, where no one goes, instead of being with Woodlake, Exeter, and Visalia, where most people work, shop (HEY! We have a great hardware store in Three Rivers!), go to school, go to church (HEY! We have churches in Three Rivers too!) access county and state offices. The site is DrawMyCACommunity.org I say “might” because I don’t have a lot of confidence in governmental requests for public participation. I couldn’t find the already drawn community called “Three Rivers-Visalia COI” to “endorse” it, as the newspaper article suggested. Everything is complicated.
Let’s rest our minds with something less complicated.
*Never mind. Just found a hot one. Burned my mouth.
Hot Mineral King Time
When it is hot down the hill, we also think it is hot in Mineral King. “Hot” is a relative term, but when one is in the sun, with mosquitos and biting flies, one is uncomfortable on several whiny levels.
Here is a brief summary:
- The bottom mile of the road has been repaved; the upper sections continue to worsen.
- The biting flies and mosquitos are out in full force.
- People are still wrapping up their cars since the marmots are still feeding their young; theory (or perhaps it is “settled science”) has it that the lactating females are the ones who damage cars.
- The wildflowers are decent this year and many varieties are appearing earlier than usual.
Jibber-jabber about blogging
“Blog” is a clunky word. It means an online journal, or a “web log”, condensed into the word “blog.
My first web designer showed me how to post to a blog. This was on April 15, 2008, and for awhile, I posted any time that an idea came to me. It was way more fun than I ever expected to have with a computer.
A few years into it, I started chasing down “experts” to learn how to “grow my platform”. I searched for interesting blogs, commented, wrote a few guest posts for other blogs, and even made a few virtual friends. There were formulas to follow about how often to post, how to arrange things, title things, and always end with a question to engage your readers. It took up time that may have been better spent painting or drawing or finding customers and new students. After a few years of this without any noticeable growth in my subscribers, I decided to forget about growing a “platform”. I’d rather grow thyme, rhododendrons, poppies, and maybe a few cucumbers or pumpkins. (Perhaps I am a rogue blogger, along with being a rogue knitter, baker, and painter.)
Now with over 12 years of posting five days a week, mostly about making art and earning a living with unnecessary products in an unlikely place, it is automatic. A handful of people subscribe, mostly friends and relatives, and even a few strangers who have become real friends through the blog over the years. I don’t remember how to check my subscriber list, and it doesn’t really matter. I have no illusions (or delusions) that I will become either the Yarn Harlot or the Pioneer Woman of art. This is just a place for a solo working artist to stay accountable, to write because I seem to have lots to say about what I do, to keep track of what I have accomplished, to gather feedback when working alone threatens to make me even weirder than my sisters think I am, and maybe even to get a commission or a few sales.
I appreciate every single reader of this blog and am particularly thrilled when someone comments. I wish I knew how to thank my readers in a tangible way, but the best way I know is to keep posting, stay quiet about the stuff that divides people, be polite, don’t cuss and resist the pressure to “monetize”. I hate it when people cuss on their blogs, and I hate it when people whose writing I like get rude or political, have pop-up windows that interrupt my reading, have advertising or a begging button, so I will not to go down those dark alleys here.
Thank you for being here with me!
This is how my painting workshop and studio looked when I first started the blog. It was thrilling to have space at home to work and blank places to practice painting murals.
We’ve come a long way.
Mineral King and Somewhere Else
Fridays may be for Mineral King around here, but my last trip to the mountains was somewhere else. However, Trail Guy took a trip up to a spot above Timber Gap to have lunch with our friend Ted. He isn’t there, but some of his ashes might be. They enjoyed this view. (
I don’t know the laws about ashes, and I didn’t participate, so let’s say that they are allegedly in that location.)
A dear friend asked if I have painted this view. Sometimes, nay, often, it is brighter than this. No, I haven’t painted it. It doesn’t strike me as something that people care enough about. However, if you are interested, I can paint it for you, because I paint things and places that people love for prices that won’t scare them.
This is where I was on my last trip to the Sierra Nevada (mistakenly called “the sierras” – to use the familiar correctly, please say “The Sierra” – my dad taught me this, so I know it is correct.) 
Hume Lake is a much different experience than Mineral King. Fancy road, comparatively fancy cabin (electricity, and even a microwave, and now the internet too), many many people, many cabins (most quite fancy), lots of flat miles to cover around and around the lake, various boats to rent (the canoe leaked, I returned to the boat house and found another one, which also leaked but more slowly), church services (both indoors and out), and much commerce. It was a retreat for me with 3 outstanding women from the Sacramento area, now a strong tradition for our little group.
The flowers are a little different because the elevation is lower. There are good wild iris, which surprises me each year. I’ve only found one in Mineral King, and I am not telling the location. You can also see them on the lower 5 miles of the road in early May, in the north facing wet drainages. And that’s all I’m going to say about that.
Mineral King: Tiny & Unknown Flowers, White Chief
Another beautiful visit to Mineral King revealed many new-to-me flowers. Oy vey, a second Mineral King wildflower book will have to be published, maybe this one subtitled “Mostly overlooked boring and tiny flowers”.
Here is a peek, with my most elegant tapered and manicured finger for size:
I also found some other unknowns:
The new yellow one I showed you last week may be called Spring Gold:
For those of you don’t care about obscure and tiny unknown wildflowers but hung on to the end of this post, we went to White Chief, which has been relocated. It is no longer the short hike that I remember, although it remains just as steep. Someone moved that canyon up a couple of miles farther than last summer. Who would do that??
From the top down: Spring Creek; The Farmer and Trail Guy in White Chief; Off -Trail Guy in White Chief; the Honeymoon Cabin as seen from above rather than the normal view.
Mineral King, Opening Weekend
WELCOME BACK TO FRIDAYS ARE FOR MINERAL KING!
Memorial Day weekend is the traditional weekend that Mineral King opens up – gates, campgrounds (only Cold Springs this year), cabins.
- ROAD OBSERVATIONS: The road was well-pruned on the lower 6.5 miles, thanks to fire crews. The flowers weren’t very good until the mid elevations where the bush poppy, flannel bush, and blazing star showed up (all yellow, all kind of look alike). Drivers coming down were uncommonly courteous, but a couple heading up didn’t know the mountain courtesy custom of pulling over if someone catches up to you. (BECAUSE THEY ARE ALWAYS GOING FASTER THAN YOU, DOOFUS!)
- It took 2 axes to tackle the low level of the woodpile. Trail Guy has been up the hill when the weather is cold, and he graciously leaves the splitting to me because he knows I love to do it.
- I walked the Nature Trail (down the road,
up the trail) with my neighbor. We saw a shrub that has always seemed sort of like a currant – turns out it is a Sierra Currant, rather than the Wax Currant that is more common in our neck of the woods.
We also saw yellow violets (called Mountain Violets)
and regular violets (called Violets in my book Mineral King Wildflowers)
- Trail Guy and I walked to the parking lot, where the 2 trees are marked for removal. (Who knows when it will happen?)
- We also walked to Crystal Creek, which is low and spread out, and then meandered our way back where I found a new-to-me yellow flower. The dandelions were out in large numbers too.
Things Learned in May
- Butternut squash – time consuming to prepare, decent eating. A friend once told me, “Squash is the past tense of squish, and squish is not a food.” However, I kind of like this stuff!
- Lung transplants – all aboard the Rachelle Express, with many ups and downs. She and I never discussed the details of what the surgery and recovery might entail, and I am stunned by the difficulties. I am also in awe of Rachelle and Steven’s courage, persistence, patience, determination, and strong strong faith.
Rachelle helped me with Studio Tour in 2014. - I used to get azaleas and rhododendrons mixed up. I think I can tell them apart now, and so far, my rhododendron has escaped the deers’ notice.
- Maeve Binchy has long been my favorite novelist. I found her after I ran out of Rosamunde Pilcher (before she wrote The Shell Seekers — now all those older novels seem so silly). JoJo Moyes’ Me Before You became a very well-loved story, and then I found that she has been writing full time since 2001 and has a pile of very well-written books. (Don’t you just love it when you discover a great author and then hate it when you run out of their books?)
- Did you ever use those colored aluminum tumblers when you were a kid? I bought some reproductions and use them regularly. I left water in one for quite awhile, and then had to soak it with vinegar to get the hard water marks out. IT LEAKED!! Leaked, I say! Developed a bunch of holes in the bottom from the acid in the vinegar. If you have those tumblers, consider yourself warned. (Trail Guy says I had probably weakened the bottom by jabbing something frozen in it with an ice pick awhile ago).
- I learned how to set a gopher trap, the kind called “macabee”. I’ve never done this, because between Trail Guy and our ever-changing stable of cats, the gophers were somewhat under control. Trail Guy finds this task to be repugnant (it is), and our three cats seem to prefer hunting on the neighbors’ properties. Meanwhile, those rodents are just wrecking my herb garden. All the vegetables are planted in wire baskets, but everything else, in particular the ground-cover thymes, went from full to spotty. Caught one, fed it to Tucker, and still, the destruction continues, but I will not stop trying to protect my garden. (Those macabees are crazy hard to set!)
- If the gauge on your propane tank is not working, you can estimate how much propane is in the tank by putting your hand on it, rubbing downward until you feel it turn colder. That is the level of propane.
- Movies are not a large part of my life – we don’t have (or is it “get” or is it “belong to”?) Netflix (or is it “the Netflix”?), and I always prefer the book version of a story. (Yeppers, always.) However, I watched 2 movies in May, both of which were excellent (used Amazon on my laptop computer). Fisherman’s Friends, and Accidental Courtesy, and both of which I recommend.
Remember
