We live a few miles down a dirt road in California. It is owned and maintained by the county, and we are not supposed to do any work on it. Any work done on the road is supposed to be done under contract using union labor. So any personal attempt to improve or maintain the road is illegal…. and we must accept the condition the county leaves it in.
Unfortunately, the county probably has hundreds of such roads to maintain, so they only come along to our five-mile road four or five times a year, and we realize (and are told) that we are very lucky they come by that often. At times the road becomes laden with potholes…. so one must often drive at an idle through the worse areas, to go faster is to invite severe damage to your vehicle because the holes cannot be avoided.
A primary reason for the holes is the people who insist on travelling at high speeds along the road…. each time a tire hits a wet pothole at speed, it will sink into the hole and splash a bit of mud out, deepening and widening the hole. In time, many of them become several inches deep, and may become a few feet wide.
Often people will swerve all across the road in their attempts to avoid the potholes… this makes for distracted drivers who are aware of the holes, but not used to seeing another vehicle on the road… they may concentrate more on avoiding holes than other drivers. Also the potholes have disabled vehicles causing them to veer off the roadway or to become stranded immobile in the roadway imperiling the occupants and other vehicles.
This winter has been one of the wettest we’ve had…. and the road now has more traffic than ever before… so it is seriously the worse I ever recall seeing it. Here’s a few photos of two vehicles that experienced sad consequences for the pocketbooks of the owners…. but luckily no one was injured in either.
The top three photos are a neighbor who was travelling down the road and encountered a vehicle going the other direction travelling on his side of the road to avoid the large pothole in the road…. he ran off the road to avoid a head-on collision… his vehicle rolled while running down the bank, but luckily he was properly belted-in and had no loose items in the cab to strike him… so no one was physically injured.
The lower three photos is one of our neighbors who tried to drive around the pothole in the photo. My little truck can slip between the pothole and the edge of the roadway… but this large truck could not fit… as he tried to avoid the pothole the soft moist soil on the bank started to slip downhill…. and the entire truck started slipping sideways…. he tried to climb back up… but each attempt brought the truck closer to a tragic slide downhill… he stopped before things got worse,,, and with two tow trucks it was possible to slide it back onto the roadway where he drove off with the vehicle undamaged… and he didn’t get hurt… but his pocketbook is a bit lighter after he paid the two tow trucks.
I’ve also seen a couple of vehicles with tires that blew out after hitting a hole at speed, and two that had the shock mounts break in just the last month…. and I only see the tip of the iceberg in vehicular damage as I usually only drive out once a week this time of year. There are likely many incidents I don’t know of.
We had what is to us a large amount of rainfall in January.
Sometimes nature gives to us with one hand and takes with another…. in this case we were given bounty both times… first with the heavy rainfall coming in long and slow, not causing great erosion problems or run-off… for the most part, it came slow enough to soak into the ground. But it seems the last five weeks have given us more rainy days than not. And now, the next month after, we finally got a week-long break in the weather. We used it here to get caught up on our cactus harvesting and fill back-orders, some of which had waited for a couple of weeks for their cactus leaves. The warmth brought swelling in the buds of the fruit trees which will soon burst forth with blossoms. It also stimulated the flowering of many of the native forbes and flowers. The manzanitas are blooming, and the fragrant ceanothus (California Lilac) is in full bloom with the many shades of blues the various bushes carry. We took a little walk through the hills with neighbors, and took some photos of blooming flowers.
We went to check on the ladybugs by the creek.
They’ve spent the winter clinging to these bushes… sometimes they fall to the ground and stay in a thick mat all packed deeply.
They are like red jewels moving slowly and dripping from the leaves to the moist cool earth.
They have to move to regulate their temperatures, they move in and out of the sun which just this week started peeking into the canyon. They are starting to awaken from their dormancy.
I suppose they don’t want to leave too early though… they have a secluded safe spot here in which to rest through the winter…. once they become active they will need to eat. In the great scheme of life, they probably time their dispersion with the hatching of aphids. This will give them some food while they start their own egg-laying. The youngsters will hatch amid a plethora of food. Thousands of ladybugs will spread for ‘who-knows-how-far’ from this one tiny little spot in the middle of nowhere.
Here’s a little video I took showing the ladybugs.
And below we have some photos.
See the next post before this to find some info and links on ladybugs.
After a week of rain, we took a little road trip to a secret spot…
The rain has brought mushrooms out… which causes problems when people roam the hills looking for mushrooms. Many chantarelles are ‘wild-harvested’ which may be done in an irresponsible and unsustainable way… don’t go on private property for mushrooms… it gets people upset when they get trespassers.
A canyon…. cowbones… pathway, and an oatmeal cookie with craisens.
Appalachia??? No, a California canyon. Water in a creek, forbes in a field, and a cow skull
Black Oak, fog in the window, not been run for a week in the rain. Sycamores… and cows
We’ve had nearly a week of rainy weather… accompanied by high winds.
Some local areas got twelve or more inches of rain in a week…. this is about one third of a usual year’s rainfall… all in one week. For many places, this would be merely a regular stormy week…but it is the first such weather we’ve had in three or four years.
Here is a flooded area just off the 101 in the Avila area.
Here are two shots I took near our place… one is a downed oak in the canyon.
We had several trees go down in the canyon. The soil is so wet that the winds allow the roots to semi-liquefy the soil by moving the tree back and forth, hour after hour, day after day… for five or more days while the rain comes down, hour after hour, day after day…. this can help the tree topple.
The other photo is a nearby field, used to graze beef cows…. it is years since I have seen this amount of runoff water on this spot. The water has natural drainage swales… these people treat this ground prety good… they never allow livestock in while the ground is marshy… it is bad for the feet of the animals… and it turns the wet spots into mud wallows that don’t provide any food for the animals, and keep them muddy. Their animals are rotated around different fields so they always have fresh clean grasses, and never destroy the structure of the soil.
On the left is a tree that went down on the canyon road … there was no way to get around it. This has happened before.. once I traded vehicles with a neighbor on the other side of a downed tree…. it got me home, and him to work. Some local folks carry chainsaws with them when coming in and out… you never know when a tree will come down…
In a case like this it is local custom that anyone coming along with a chainsaw may take what they can cut… but the first goal is to open the road. In this case, the county came by and cut it. Usually when a tree goes down like this, local canyon dwellers usually cut it up and haul it away before an hour has gone by…. he who waits will not get wood. In this case.. the wind was blowing fiercely, and no one else was about… I went home and waited out the storm rather than risk a tree falling on me. I was going out taking a cat to the vet to be teutored… this is the third time he has escaped his lessons… the first time he got locked in a neighbor’s garage, the second time he clawed his way out of the doggie door while being held indoors overnight… and this was the ‘third-time’s-the-charm’ thing.. and it seemed like God caused the tee to fall to keep this cat’s bloodlines going…. what’dya think?
This is a neighbor’s barn. We had a few hours of decent weather between the thunderstorms…. just after I took this photo the radio sounded off with the ‘Public EmergencyAlert’ (first time I recall hearing an actual messag on it instead of jsut a test), warning of a severe thunderstorm crossing Pismo Beach, and heading inland at thirty MPH. A few minutes down the dirt road hail started falling onto the truck. We seldom get hail… I’ve only seen it here perhaps five times in the last twenty years. The severe thunderstorm was overhead. In a matter of minutes the wind started roaring and blew like crazy again.
Here is a photo of some clouds coming onto the shore at the Dinosaur Cove area near Pismo Beach. On the way back into the canyon I saw a young deer on the road… My first photo used the flash… but the deer was too far away… but I like the deer-eyes glow. You can see what condition our road is in…. four miles each way daily will take a toll on car batteries, and suspension systems.
A storm like this can topple some of our cactus plants also. The large Opuntia ficus-indica to the far left fell over…. it was perhaps seven feet tall, and probably weighs about one hundred pounds.
The middle photo is some of the grasses growing on one of our hillsides.. notice how they are bent over by the rain and wind. I really want the grasses to grow… they absorb water reducing runoff, they also open the soil permitting more water entry, helping the water to infiltrate into the soil. Depending on the situation, we often let the grasses grow, mature and set seeds. We will then mow them to reduce the cover for snakes, and keep the weed stickers down. The cut grasses form a mulch on the soil.
The third photo is one of our outdoor cats, Elizabeth Little-Grey. She sleeps in a little cat-condo… here she sticks her head out. We often lay a blanket over the condo at night, to help keep her warmer. On occasion we’ve brought her indoors during storms, but she doesn’t like being indoors at all… she quickly runs to the door begging to get out. She’s really cute and friendly outdoors though. All-in-all, it’s been a fairly un-fun experience the last week. Plenty of ag and mining operations have lost much production. The tourism industry likely lost some revenue during these storms… but on-the-other-hand… we’re pretty darn lucky… things could have been worse (but we’re not out of the weather yet), most of the country has had much worse weather for the last two months than this one single week has been for us. So we’re really lucky, but still hope we don’t have to go through anything near this again for some years.
I was going to visit a neighbor and was a bit startled when I saw this most excellently cut metal sign that says “Broke Back Boulder”. I wondered for a second about the significance of this statement, and then I recalled that a neighbor had run into a boulder and down into the creek recently and broke his back. It turns out that his friends and family put the sign up to ‘rib’ him afterwards.
The accident and his good recovery are a testament to our medical system and his own good health, prayers and positive thinking. Thanks also goes to the cowboys up at The Bull Riding School run by Gary Leffew. Turns out the man’s horn became stuck on after his body impacted the steering wheel, the fellows at Leffew’s place heard the horn blaring, and came to investigate. They summoned proper medical care and the man is off to a good (miraculous some say) recovery.
From my posting in Jan 2008…. and the man who broke his back is reportedly very well healed….
We recently got some snow in the hills a bit above our elevation.
Going through the Santa Maria Valley I was able to take a photo, but it did not show the snow too well.
You can see the farm machinery harvesting lettuce… this is the day before the rains started here… they wanted to get all they could out of the field before it turned to mud.
This is in the bottom of the canyon… this particular spot doesn’t get any sun for a couple of months in the middle of winter.
So when the grasses freeze, it can stay like this for several weeks.
Micro-climates are when a particular area has a weather climate that is different than the prevailing overall conditions. In this case the particulars of airflow, elevation, air drainage, the nearby flowing stream, and lack of any direct sunshine for a couple of months leads to this particular spot having a radically different climate than where we raise the cactus a mile away which is on a south-facing hillside nearly a thousand feet above the canyon bottom.
Little Man, the Shetland Pony who used to ride children around at a fair in Los Angeles has been living in the canyon for some fifteen years now. He’s pretty old now… heck, he seemed old when the local farrier came back into the canyon with him after rescuing him when he heard the owners of the kiddie fair were going to have him out down due to his age.
Since then he’s become something of a fixture in the canyon. He used to roam free, visiting different houses in the canyon and eating what he could find or was given. Now, since some objected to him eating their gardens and flowers he has to stay locked up. So now, many people in the canyon give him some of their leftover veggies…. but he can’t chew well either, so it has to be soft foods.
Some of the local women and children will open his pen and take him for a walk up and down the canyon road… to give him something interesting for the day. All in all, it’s a bit of a sad life for the little old guy. Still he’s better off than many animals in factory farming conditions… kept in stalls too small to turn around in, and deprived of sunlight. This would never have happened if he were only in France… they’d have eaten him by now.
He’s blind in one eye now too. In the wild animals never really grow old… they get killed by some predator….
The local Guinea hens have become friends of his… perhaps lured by the occasional produce lobbed over the fence.
We had a big storm come through here almost two weeks ago. Every time there is a big storm, we’re likely to have big trees alongside the road fall over and block the road. This is a California Live Oak that fell over onto the road. The local custom holds that any tree that falls onto the road is fair game for any locals who have a saw and wish to take wood. The first thing to do if you have a saw is to cut an opening for vehicles to pass… then you can cut the rest of the tree into smaller pieces to take home. Don’t cross fences…. the ability to take these ‘windfalls’ is extended only to the edge of the road technically. This tree probably blocked part of the road…. but it has been cut quite a bit far from the road. Perhaps the landowner permitted the extra cutting…. more likely, whoever got here first with a saw just kept cutting closer and closer to the stump, and taking all that nice ‘Red Oak’ home. The one big branch on the ground still attached is holding much of the weight of the entire tree… when it was initially knocked over it was probably a few thousand pounds. Cutting into that branch might cause the tree to move and hit you…. the ground here is actually pretty steep, so it can become very dangerous. Doing such work one must be continually aware of everything around oneself… no place for daydreaming…. this work. One time years ago I was coming back from work early in the AM from night-shift at the plant… and there was a huge sycamore that fell across the road…. with steep impassable banks on both sides there was no way around, and I was still five miles from home and the saws…. and I was soooo tired and wanted nothing more than to get home to bed. Walking around the tree in the dark, trying to find a solution I looked up as a neighbor was coming down the road on his way out to his work… we traded trucks and he went to his work in mine, and I went to my home in his.
Another time I was coming into the canyon and there was a fellow standing in the road scratching his head looking over a giant oak tree that had fallen down from the top of the cliff above…. it extended quite a ways out over the creek which is impassable….. he was stuck. The odd thing is he was following his friends who were guiding him into the canyon to their ranch…. they were perhaps a hundred yards ahead of him, and passed before the tree fell…. it fell just in front of the visitor. This was a tree so huge you could not wrap your arms around the trunk…. luckily he was not going a bit closer to them… he held back so his air filter would not get so much dust from their truck.
Once going out early in the morning to work, there was a tree down…. I went back home for a saw and went and cut a hole big enough to get through and rushed on to work…. it was 2AM and not a good time to be cutting wood under headlights while I’m supposed to be getting to work.
