End 2016

GF and I wished 2016 good riddance together, which was fun. We had the house to ourselves for Christmas and after making pancakes and vegan (TVP) sausage Christmas morning, I found a discarded tree in perfectly good shape not half a block from my house. So we gave it a new home and decorated it with cut-outs from Science and the New Yorker.





We also went to see the SF Gay Men's Chorus at the Castro Christmas Eve. Camp is definitely, definitely not my style of humor, so mostly I enjoyed it for the fact that they, unlike MoTab, would pretty clearly not perform at the inauguration of the next president even if they'd been invited.


I finally managed to find GF a steel-framed bike that fits her (47.5cm Terry Symmetry), so that was her present. We took it for rides around the marina and Treasure Island.







We also went to Berryessa Snow Mountain National Monument. I didn't really know anything about it before going, I was just looking for nearby BLM land a month or so ago. I assumed there had to be some, and there is (see publiclands.org to find public land near you). BSM is just 90 minutes to the north, and then there's a patch just west of I-5 as you head south called Clear Creek, but apparently that'll give you cancer because there's so much asbestos in the soil, so no thanks. BSM is new (Thanks, Obama!) so it was hard to find information on it on the fly. It's Forest Service land in the north half, and BLM land in the south.  The Tuleyome non-profit's trail guide is the best resource for the southern BLM portion, and the standard FS maps of Mendocino NF and Snow Mountain Wilderness will get you through the northern FS, though the Snow Mountain Wilderness map is outdated and doesn't show the expanded coverage of the wilderness.

Anyway, if you're looking for easy dirtbagging as I like to do (sleeping in your truck on the edge of wilderness) I'd recommend both the north's Snow Mountain (FS) or the south's Cache Creek (BLM) wilderness area for a couple days of winter exploration, where you can get snowed on and potentially stuck on the top of Snow Mountain, or be in short sleeves among oaks and grassy slopes the same day. There's no granite, and I'm sure it's hot as hell in the summer, but off-season it was nice. There are a million places to car camp in Mendocino NF to the north, but we actually ended up coming home a day or two early because we kept striking out when looking for places to dirtbag on the edge of Cache Creek. All the sites along Highway 16 (Cowboy Camp, the Yolo County's Cache Creek Regional Park) were closed, with gates locked, and the bridge on Road 40 across Cache Creek itself is out. If you're on the west side along Berryessa Knoxville Road, I think you'll have better luck.








Comments

  1. L3:37 AM

    Nice stratocumulus shot! I don't really love campy, either, but I do like cute, and I thought SFGMC was adorable.

    ReplyDelete

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