Arrr, mateys! September 19th is International Talk Like A Pirate Day… and the anniversary of our first date spent pedalin’ the high roads in proper pirate garb! So naturally we donned our pirate finery and set out again – this time up the coast from Santa Cruz to Davenport and back.
Alas, twas not until we reached the shores of Davenport that we discovered the newly constructed coastal bike trail was now open and clear. So we abandoned the highway for the return voyage which made for a much more pleasant passage away from the roaring land-lubber traffic. Arrr!
Richard joined me to see Weird Al Yankovic’s “Bigger & Weirder 2026 Tour” concert in Paso Robles with opening act, “Puddles Pity Party”. It was a lot of fun – definitely recommend!
While up in Tahoe this summer, I met up with Richard for a ride up to Stanford Rock on the west side of the lake. This was my first time on this trail and, while it required a good chunk of effort (2200 ft over 7.5 miles one way), it’s a great trail to ride and has great views to boot. Darlene joined me on it for a repeat ride a few days later.
Darlene and I also ventured out on a few hikes: one starting from the Martis Peak fire lookout to Rifle Peak where we stumbled on a rogue mountain bike trail full of big gap jumps; another up from the Olympic Valley floor to the Pacific Crest Trail junction near Granite Chief; and another part way along the Big Chief trail below Northstar’s Mount Pluto.
Darlene and I loaded up the camper van with the cats and our bikes for a three-night stay in Boggs Mountain Demonstration State Forest last week. I’ve been to Boggs numerous times for mountain biking with the Outdoor Adventure Club, but we hadn’t been back since before the catastrophic Valley Fire that hit the area in September of 2015. While some 80% of the trees burned, a few scattered oases of old trees are still standing – most notably the trees surrounding the Calso campground as pictured above – and they’ve planted apparently 700,000 tree seedlings since the fire. These now vary in height across the area from two to five meters or more, depending on when they were planted.
Volunteers from Friends of Boggs Mountain have managed to rebuild the trail network over the intervening years and I was able to ride all of them but Jethro’s and Game Trail during our mid-week stay. With the loss of most of the old tall trees, all the trails are more exposed to the sun but they’re fun and well built even though they of course don’t exactly follow the original routes after the fire salvage and replanting efforts. Amusingly, they’re often quite a bit more windy now, zig-zagging between all the young new trees. One oddball trail is the Creek Trail, as the creek’s ravine was apparently not salvaged after the fire and remains strewn and clogged with fallen trees, rocks and shrubs around and over which the trail now weaves.
90-second video montage showing the state of several trails
So yes, Boggs Mountain is definitely open for fun riding again and the campground luckily still provides much needed shade in the summer. That leaves the question as to when we’ll back again… Richard?!
In early June we loaded up the camper van for a trial run with the new cats, Sabik and Jinx. We spent about nine days in the Eastern Sierra between Sonora Pass and Rock Creek Lake, relocating to a new wild camping spot every couple of days. We did some hiking — a short one to Emma Lake in Hoover Wilderness, a hard climb up Crater Mountain in the Mono Craters area and a day-long hike through Little Lakes Valley above Rock Creek Lake in John Muir Wilderness. Oh and Darlene finally got her “pie in the sky” at Rock Creek Lodge. We also visited the Travertine Hot Springs near Bridgeport and took a dip in the Shepherd hot spring tub (one of the Whitmore Hot Springs near Mammoth). We checked in on the eagles nest we found in Owens Gorge some years ago and found it now abandoned. And I set out on what was supposed to be a reasonable mountain bike ride to the lookout tower on Bald Mountain on the Long Valley Caldera from our campsite near Smokey Bear Flats but turned into a 36-mile journey avoiding unexpected private property lines and slogging along miles of nasty loose and sandy roads.
The real focus of the trip was acclimating the cats to camping in the wild and they took to it pretty well except for Jinx’s scary first time getting freaked out and not understanding how to get back to the safety of the van. (He is such a skittish cat.) We have radio-tracking collars on them so we can locate them if they wander but the real trouble is they get to having too much fun hunting for critters, climbing rocks or dashing through the brush that we can’t get them to come back in the van when we want to close up in the evening. We can’t even get close enough to pick them up when they don’t want to come in. We’ve been trying treats and toys and both attractive noises and scary noises but this is clearly going to take more work and training. We really need to get them to the point of coming when called (like with Pan and Hera), or at least not treating it like a game of “keep away”.
After far too many dry warm weeks, we finally got a big snow storm across the Sierra in mid-February and Darlene and I dashed up to Tahoe with the cats just ahead of it to enjoy the snow for a couple of weeks. Resi and Aiden joined us for the first week and we got a couple of days in at Northstar before and after the big dump. Later in the week, I met up with Troy and Aiden at Homewood for three days as more snow piled up. Unfortunately, Darlene wasn’t feeling well and missed out on the fresh powder.
We then joined Jon, Stan, Bill, Jim and Lewis for our annual ski week, getting a day in at Palisades before the rain came in for a couple of days to wreck all that fresh powder. So we had a couple of board game days together before venturing back out at NorthStar and Palisades Alpine. Over the first weekend in March, Jon and Roland joined us for more gaming and we got in another day at Alpine before eventually packing up and heading home.
A short video montage of our skiing over a couple of weeks.
