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The Northern High Sierra

Mono Lake

 North of Mammouth Lakes one passes Mono Lake. A large circular lake of volcanic origin. When we were tired of skiing, we would drive there and climb into the wild jumble of North Crater, from which this composite photo was taken as the last winter-storm was receeding east over the desert.

The wide country around Mono Lake from the Aeolian Buttes, a string of small volcanos to its south.

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 Depending on the light Mono Lake has many dramatic faces. This picture was taken from North Crater in another year.

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 Just below North Crater a bizar collection of stalacmites grow at the shore of Mono Lake. They are produced, similar to corals, by minute sea animals unique to Mono Lake.

Another storm brewing over the Lake. Behind the mountains in the distance lies Bodie, perhaps the most beautiful of the California ghost towns from the gold-rush days.

Bodie

 At one time Bodie was a flourishing town, Marc Twain lived here for a while as reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle. Now it is a most forlorn place, to which the Park Service has added buildings, furniture, and relics from several other gold towns nearby. The buildings of the refinery of the once rich gold mine can be seen in the distance, the touching cemetery is on the left.

 School Street in Winter. The old school house with its tower is seen in the foreground.

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Old wagons in a back yard.

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 The pharmacy on a bright summer day.

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 Geroge Washington over the dining table in one of the houses.

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Chairs for two. The place is a paradise for the phtographer and most of these pictures were taken in a competition with Susanne in the year before she entered Art Center od Design in Pasadena.

 The deeply weathered browns of the siding of a shack...

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.. and the faded curtains behind a window in one of the houses.

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 The visual poetry of the rusted tin-can facing of another building.

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Lake Tahoe

Barbara and Cornelius in 1973 on a secluded beach of deep Lake Tahoe, which lies at an altitude of 2000 m between the Nevada Desert and the High Sierra a couple of hours north of Bodie. Twice we camped there at D. L. Bliss State Park for a week.

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Yosemite National Park

Half Dome on Yosemite Valley from the road to Tuolumne Meadows.  A most beautiful road leads from Lee Vining on the eastern shore of Mono Lake into Yosemite. The pass near Tuolumne Meadows is high and the road closes after the first snow. Twice we spent a few days at the campground in Tuolumne Meadows in Summer and explored the many hiking trails around it. As one drives west towards the valley its highest montains come into view.

The rapids of the Tuolomne River and the tip of Half Dome. 

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 Tuolomne Meadows is full iof brown bears who at night search the trash cans of the campground. One even climbed once into our car (through an open window) and making a huge mess ate all our sugar — not good for their teeth!  

 Tenaya Lake and the surrounding mountains (1967). Yosemite Valley has been innundated by car exhaust and is presently closed to car traffic. One has to take a shuttle bus. I have not been there for decades.  

 Barbara and the children in 1967 on the shore of Tenaya Lake.

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The Wine Country - Napa Valley

 On the way from Yosemite to San Francisco one should pass by Napa Valley, where the best of the California wine grows. Napa and its surroundings have become too chique and expensive for us, but Lorrain Ruston, a close friend of ours tends a small vineyard in St. Heléna and we visted her on Christmas Day 2003. A view of the valley from near her house.

 Lorrain has a simple pool, which lies idle in Winter, and nobody had seen beauty of the reflections of the trees in its water...

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 ... or at the the late winter-light in her vineyard. With great circumspection, a lot of work, and careful irrigation (the black tubes) she makes a small quantity of excellent and expensive wine.

 But the real delight for me — I drink less and less the older I get — was a Persimmon tree in her vineyard, by now leaf-less and hung over and over with delicious fruits. It reminded me of Georgia in November and of a brief visit to Narita in Japan many decades ago.

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Point Reyes - Drake's Beach and a Bit of San Francisco in Winter

North of San Francisco the Pacific Coast becomes ever more lonely. The woods recide before the ice-cold breath of the Pacific the bare hills following the coast. An hour north of the city Point Reyes juts into the sea. On this southern beach protected by Point Reyes — visible in the far distance — Sir Fancis Drake spent the winter of 1579-80 repairing his Golden Hinde — or so goes the fama, little is known about this part of his circumnavigation of the globe. We love the place and went there with Robert Forrest and Lorrain in the last days of December 2003. The children are not ours who were far away in Italy and Atlanta. 

 Barbara walking out of the picture on Drake's Beach (December 2003).

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To get to San Francisco from the northern bay area one can either drive across the Golden Gate Bridge — a short pleasure on which one sees little — or take the ferry boat from Sausalito.

 San Francisco and the Bay Bridge to Oakland and Berkeley from Sausalito (December 2003).

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Children playing in the lapping waves in Sausalito. 

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 The sky-line of San Francisco from the Sausalito ferry.

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 In the days before and after Christmas 2003 we visited four old and new San Farncisco museums. Architecturally by far the most interesting is the new Museum of Modern Art, of which this is the main entry lobby. Unfortunately their collections are third rate, except for an occasional special exhibition.

A typical but less photographed aspect of San Francisco are the houses climbing over its several hills. This section is above Nihon Bashi, the Japanese town.