Posts searches and the Internetz

Ventura Pirates

So I admit it, I enjoy browsing through the stats on my blog trying to see where folks have come from when they stumble onto my little corner of the internet. I have to say though that the search terms that lead people here sometimes baffle me. Here’s a few recent search terms:

yellow baja bug    
haunted castle halloween    
jenny springs florida cave    
eagle photographer attacked    
map of captain nemo’s voyage    
images spooky tower    
ventura pirates    
sea caves pirate  
tortoise log
auburn photo locations
auburn sunset    
dawn center indian falls apple picking    
cactus v4 triggers and couple    
trail driving with baja bug    
what snakes are on isla holbox, mexico    
pictures of captain nemos cabin    
captain nemo’s prague    
pictures of posey cave blountsville alabama    
bow and arrow grass caving    
back door cave channel islands    
birds mono lake    
captain nemo’s log    
lowered landrovers    
bird in mono lake    
captain nemos mexico    
captain nemo information    
captain nemo’s house in morro bay, ca.

Now going through them most are quite obvious: i.e.

  Yellow Baja Bug

Haunted Castle Halloween

Some though were less then obvious, I have no pictures of “posey cave blountsville alabama ”   however I did post on Cavechat shortly after this post “http://www.forums.caves.org/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=16773&sid=205ec90499230fa359cb762ceba009fd” So I assume that’s how the search engine came to the conclusion I might have.

I have no idea what “bow and arrow grass caving” might be referring to and my attempts to follow this search back to my webpage proved fruitless so perhaps that was one of those strange coincidences that led them there?

“Tortoise log”? that’s a strange term but I assume the search engine found my pics of traveling on the “Green Tortoise bus” and combined the fact that I wrote about it in my Log.

most of the rest of them are pretty straight forward so I’ll just leave you with this

Lowered Landrover (VW bug chassis/engine with Landrover body)

 

Indian Wells Valley

Indian Wells Valley

Since its been a surprisingly warm and dry winter,

last month I headed out to join a group hiking up to Owens peak.

Now this would be no simple task as Owens peak is the highest point in the southern Sierra Madre Mountains at more than 8,400 feet. Also the trail starts fairly far up in Indian Wells Valley at the end of a jeep trail so this called for the bug to do a little trail driving. As it was I totally underestimated the drive time and arrived a good half hour after the rest of the group had already left. I headed up the trail anyway hoping Id see them near the top. Somewhere around 7600′ of elevation (according to my gps) I lost the trail though. It was not well marked at higher elevations and as I scrambled over weathered granite and piles of loose scree I realized I was following what was probably a mule deer trail. I reached the rocks just below the peak (approx 8000′ elevation) and decided that the crumbly nature of these rocks didn’t lend themselves to a safe ascent  so I began making my way back down. A little disappointment I didn’t reach the peak, but that’ll give me a reason to come back and enjoy the wonderful views on a different day. Once back at the trail head I waited around till others from the group came down and i found out that several others had missed the upper part of the trail as well. apparently it veers off to the left even though the peak is to your right as you go up, then follows a ridge around to the top. So now I know for next time.

 

slope of loose decomposed granite

Snow along the trail – not much for January though!

Something got hungry! Prickly pear (opuntia)

 

the peak is just on the other side of those rocks

view

 

Rocks back by the trail head

Baja bug along the jeep trail

 

Windmills on the way home

Joshua tree, sunset

 

 

 

 

 

Monterey

Monterey at night

After our hike in the pinnacles Dan, Martin and myself had a nice quiet day in Santa Cruz, we visited the art museum, wandered around down town and played the new board game that they got.Then I was on the road again this time a short drive to Monterrey. I was staying at the Monterey hostel so it was a short walk down to the waterfront by cannery row to take a few night shots.

seal pup

The next morning I headed out along the beach to where harbour seals had gathered in a cove with their new pups.

I also walked along Cannery row and photographed some of the historical buildings such as “Doc’s” laboratory, this is Ed Rickets original  Pacific biological laboratories building.

Pacific biological laboratories

Pacific Biological laboratories

By then it was late enough in the morning that the aquarium was opened and so I decided to go on in and take a few more pictures.

Monterrey Aquarium

Monterey Aquarium

Monterey aquarium

I still had one more stop before heading on to Bakersfield, but I’ll write about that next time.

Bugarama

Bugarama

Last weekend I took my newly fixed up baja bug and headed on down to Bugarama to check out all the other bugs. There was some wonderful looking cars on display and a massive area of parts for sale so I had a great time wandering around. I came to a stop though when I spotted this lowered landrover though.  Wondering a. why would someone lower a landrover and b. why was it at bugarama?

Land Rover

A quick look at the back answered this question.

Air cooled landrover engine?

Yes, that’s an air cooled vw engine. A pretty impressive mod job if I ever saw one.
Later on they started the races and here there really was more to the cars then meets the eye, as some old beat up looking cars srceamed down the track at speeds in excess of 100 mph while some shiny like new cars didn’t do as well.

This VW bus went over 95mph!

This red bug deployed its braking parachute at the start of its run and still finished going over 90mph!

red bug

I spent a fair bit of the afternoon hanging out with some kind folks who drove up from Manteca and who were nice enough to let me have a seat in the sun shade they’d brought. In spite of that I managed to get to much sun and was a little on the pink side the next day. So notes for next time- bring a chair, bring a sunshade, more sunscreen and more water. Of course then it’ll be raining but hey its worth a try.

Its a dogs life!
Everyone seemed to enjoy bugarama

Can’t wait for the next one.

Related articles

• Baja: Edge of Control (gamespot.com)

Gone to Oregon

The town of Weed with Mount Shasta in the background

    This years Speleo-ed was held in Bend Oregon. A bit of a drive in my Baja Bug, so I allowed extra time for the trip up. Arriving at a rest stop near the north end of lake Shasta I was surprised to see a familiar face, three in fact. Mark, Kadean and Eric were driving up early to Speleo-ed as well. They decided to change their plans to stay near Bend and instead camp out at the state park north of Klamath falls that I had picked out as a good stop for the night. with all of us sharing a camp site this turned out to be a very good deal. They even had hot showers, though there wasn’t a lot of water pressure. We enjoyed a great sunset at a river that flowed past the campground. I heard several loud splashes from beavers jumping in but none stuck around to be photographed.

Sunset

     That night it got really cold. I had packed an extra sleeping bag in anticipation of the forecasted 31 degrees but this was a fair bit colder than that. The next morning there was ice on the freeze proof water spigot! A volunteer at the logging museum informed us it had gotten down to around 20 the previous night. Now I remember why I usually head south for vacations.  A couple of chipmunks came and checked out our campsite as I enjoyed my morning coffee.

Chipmunk, morning stretches

     We had a great time visiting the outdoor displays at the logging museum as the sun was out and the day was warming up rapidly. We even saw an Osprey nesting in a tall tree nearby.

Osprey in its nest

 Next we backtracked a few miles to head up to Crater lake. I had heard they had cleared enough snow to get to the overlook and wanted to take a few pictures of this scenic lake. As it turned out I was very lucky because we arrived when the lake was completely smooth and it’s mirror like surface made for some very nice pictures. I had a great time and even remembered to remove the uv filter from my lens in order to take several shots that I could stitch together later into a nice panorama.

Crater Lake

 From there we headed back down to Jo’s motel for lunch and then it was on to Bend for Speleo-Ed. I arrived just in time for dinner at the Sundance ranch. After dinner we had a great presentation on what the cavers in Oregon had been up to including a video of a cave under a glacier. It looked like a great adventure but when the camera started freezing over it sure looked cold!

The next day we had some great presentations, including Pikas- cute little things, and more info on lava then I could have imagined. Then we got to the good part,  photography! Brent did a great job showing us some interesting lighting that made for wonderful pictures. He showed me how to take advantage of the zoom function in live view which was something I hadn’t played with much. I’m going to have to play with it some more though as I found my external flashes wouldn’t trigger with live view turned on. I found this out when we headed over to skeleton cave to try out the techniques we were learning. Marianne and I commented that the large lava tube didn’t feel like we were caving as we didn’t have to squeeze to get anywhere and for the most part it was just walking in a huge passage with nice flat floors. We found a nice curve in the passage where we got to take a few pictures so I had a great time.

lava tube

That night we had a wonderful dinner put on by the Western Cave Conservancy, the business meeting went on too long as usual, which meant the auction went late but finally we got to the now traditional schnapps and liquor tasting. Shortly afterwards I headed for bed as I knew I was getting up early for a long drive the next day. I was heading to meetup  with parents, my Brother and his family in order to observe the eclipse. Our original plan was to meetup at the visitor center in Lassen but that was such a popular spot they weren’t letting people in. We did find a wonderful little meadow with a store and great view of the eclipse. Only problem was there were about a million mosquitoes waiting for us. We survived the onslaught and thanks to the generosity of our fellow eclipse watchers(one loaned me a welding glass and another a piece of mylar) I was able to get several pictures of the event.

Eclipse

 We then had a good family visit.

Michael

Whos that guy with the beard?

 The next day after dinner at the Cotton Candy diner in Chester my parents followed me over to I5 and we headed south. We made one more stop at Granzellas before I was on my way home. It was a lot of driving but well worth it and the bug did just fine. Another great adventure.

Wild flowers

Sunset along I5