One of the things that a few of us wanted to do during our recent trip to New Mexico was spend a little time in the great outdoors. My brother Dave had never been to New Mexico before and we thought that Bandelier National Monument would be a great excursion. So one day, while others partook…
Last weekend, the Beloved had a business trip to the way north of California and we decided to make a long weekend of it and see a little more of the Golden State. Her business was up in Eureka, but we’d spent some time exploring there a few years ago and opted to make a…
During our getaway the other weekend to the coast near Año Nuevo State Reserve, we saw that there is a well-established elephant seal rookery at Año Nuevo Island and on the nearby beach. And better yet, we found that you can sign up for a guided nature tour and seal observation hike. That sounded like…
Each year, the Beloved runs a big scientific meeting during the first week in January. It’s the most time-consuming thing that she does all year. It’s a little bit of a bummer that it hangs there on the horizon during the holidays, but that’s the way things go sometimes. Because it’s a pretty big deal…
One thing we’ve begun to notice over the past several months is that Penny isn’t quite as worn out by our morning walk to the top of Mt Miramar as she used to be, and that she is almost always ready to go-go-go when we get home from work in the afternoon. At 2 ½…
Remember, a drabble is a very short story of exactly 100 words. Feel free to join in and write your own drabbles on Fridays and tag them with “friday drabble” and on Twitter with the hashtag #fridaydrabble. The Bear There hadn’t been another person all day and that was fine with me. I hadn’t taken this long…
One of the reasons we chose to go to the Eastern Sierra last week and not one of the region’s more well known “west-side” destinations (Yosemite or Sequoia) is that dog’s aren’t allowed in National Parks. But it turns out they ARE allowed in National Forests – and the Eastern Sierra region seemed like it…
Last Monday, The Beloved, Penny and I crossed down from Mammoth Lakes and took a trip across the Owens Valley and then back up into the White Mountains to see the Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest, which is a few miles east and a mile-plus up from the town of Bishop CA. Bristlecone The trip up…
One of the great things about the Eastern Sierra is that they are part of the buffer between the central valley of California and the deserts of the Great Basin, including the Mojave and Death Valley. Because of this you can pretty quickly move from alpine lakes (see previous post) to arid desertscapes — in…
Thanks to the furloughs for State of California employees, the Beloved had a longer-than-usual Memorial Day weekend, and so we decided to use that time to go see some of the State of California that we had never seen. Specifically, we decided to take a road-trip to the Eastern Sierra Nevada Mountains, staying in Mammoth…
Stevil 