Alabama

We have been visiting my grandfathers ranch for the past week in the exciting local of New Market Alabama. It's on the outskirts of Huntsville, which is rapidly trying to turn New Market into its own little suburb.  New Market itself is less of a town and more of a "Census Designated Place."  Within this "CDP," there is of course a town called New Market.  It's where you will find the New Market Cafe. Right next to one burnt out building and another that's just falling over.  This is next to the empty shop, where you used to be able to watch feral cats running around inside through the dust covered windows.  A true center for culture and the arts.

The ranch itself is about ten minutes to the south, and has just recently passed from my grandfather to my dad.  It's a bit out of shape at the moment, but there is a new management plan type thing taking over at the end of the year which should clean it up.

Cladonia Cristatella or Didyma.  A Cladonia species at least.   The orange/red tops of this lichen are the fruiting structure.  Like almost all lichen, this one is a "mutualistic association" between an algae and a fungus.    

I went through a couple of old cabinets this time.  There was some booze and a large number of slides.  I also found a sweet Kodak Carousel 760H slide projector.  It worked for a couple of slides, then the bulb went.  Fortunately you can still buy bulbs that will fit the projector. I'll have to find one of those for next time.

Found some old and not so old shooters in a cabinet.  Neat little bottles.

A White-Lined Sphinx Moth.  Moths in this family ( Sphinginae ) are usually large.  They generally feed by hovering in front of flowers like hummingbirds.

Passiflora Incarnata, or the purple passion flower.  Supposed to help with nervous anxiety and insomnia,  a tea made from the plant has actually been shown to help improve peoples sleep.  You can also eat the fruit off the vine.

The American Green Tree-Frog ( Hyla Cinerea ) I think.  One study showed that nearly 90% of their prey were "actively pursued."  I always assumed they sort of waited for it to walk by.

Yellow spots help distinguish the Green Tree Frog from the 'Squirrel Tree Frog', which is what I thought this was at first.

Me and Athena took a day to go to a local climbing gym.  Really it is the only local climbing gym, and it's more a small area in an athletic center than a dedicated climbing gym.  The person running the counter just asked us if we climbed and when we answered told us we would not have to take a belay test.  He then walked us to the climbing area and informed the staff member running it that we did not have to take a belay test.  This has never happened to me before.  That's probably because letting random people skip their belay test is so exceedingly dangerous that no half respectable climbing gym in the country would be so cavalier about it.  The gym itself was... sort of better than not climbing.  It's really a top rope gym, although there did seem to be a couple draws up for leading.  The ropes feel old and many of them have a number of hard spots.  The are anchored to the ceiling by 2-3 quick draws set so that the rope drops toward your belayer 4-5 feet away from the wall.  This means that  to climb the opposite wall of the gym in some areas you simply switch sides of the rope.  It's skinny like that.

What a sketchy place.

So the gym was a janky place overall, and probably not worth the $15 per person charge.

In preparation for the Fourth of July, Athena baked a cake.  It was america themed of course.  I mowed the lawn with a sweet tractor and we all bought a large number of fireworks.

AMERICA.

Sweet ride.

Lots of fireworks.

For some reason we build dams in the creek when we are down here.  Partly because we used to do it and partly because it's one of the only things to do.  Usually we are unsuccessful.  This time I started by building two parallel rock walls, then filled the center with sand and gravel.  It took a lot of gravel moving, but the end result was a huge success.  It only took five of us and a large part of the day.

A breakthrough in dam building technology.  Father is trying to catch fish that Ben is scaring towards the opening.

Dam.  Almost a nice swimming hole on the upstream side.

There are still a couple cows on the ranch.  They are owned by a guy in Texas that needed a place to run his cattle.  By the coming year they will be gone, but for now it's nice to have some around.  As I couldn't decide on one good picture here are half a dozen mediocre ones of a baby cow.

Would be a nice picture, but if you look closely they calf is about to poo.

We are flying back to California in the morning to continue our climbing trip.  Due to some troubles with airline we are staying one last unexpected night.

I've started a new fantasy series so the flights will be a nice time to read.  Turns out that "The Malazan Book of the Fallen" is a good set of books.

San Francisco and Family

We headed north to Mammoth Lakes after bishop ( named for an old mining company, not the old elephant cousin ).  It got a bit colder, and a bit nicer for climbing and sitting in hot springs.  Looking for free showers, we drove into Devils Postpile National Monument the first night.  Turns out the showers are closed... so we made dinner and left.  It's a nice park, but you have to take a $7 shuttle from a couple miles outside the park to see the rock formation the monument was established to protect. We went to see the view of the minarets that the ranger suggested instead.  It was a nice generic view.  The best part was the clouds, which I suppose I could have looked at from outside the park.

Some of those tiny spikes in the distance are the Minarets.

The next day we did a bit of climbing east of mammoth.  The rock is a neat volcanic tuff.  This makes it interesting to climb, but a bit fragile in places.  Many of the blocks on the ground seemed like pumice stone to me, which I figured would be related to volcanic tuff.  Turns out that while volcanic tuff is compressed ash that  was ejected from a volcano, pumice is formed when super heated compressed rock is ejected.  The rapid cooling and depressurization forms the light pumice stone.  Neat.

Athena stress eats while learning to drive stick.  She's not even watching the road.

 The last week or so has for the most part been spent in the bay area visiting family.  It has been busy as some are in Berkeley, some in San Mateo,  some in San Jose, and all want to spend time with us.  So a lot of driving through city traffic.  We went to the Monterey Bay Aquarium for a day in between to get a bit of a rest.

A picture of Athena taking a picture of a leopard shark.

 The Monterey Bay Aquarium is one of the best I've been to.  Unlike many aquariums, you can still learn about fish there.  They have scientific names and knowledgeable staff and cards with interesting facts about all the animals.  Many aquariums/zoos seem to be dumbing down the content in favor of a more flashy, entertaining experience.  I like the cards you have to read and staff to chat with.

Throughout the aquarium are sculptures like this.  They just sort of hang out in corners and on ledges making the place look neat.

When we visited they had special exhibits on jelly fish and on things with tentacles ( squid, nautilus, octopus, cuddle fish, etc. )  The jellies exhibit was sort of 70s psychedelic themed.  This included a hall of mirrors, odd music, many uses of the word groovy and subtle cultural references worked into the information plaques.  Sort of weird but enjoyable.

A single floating jelly.

Lots of floating jellies.

The tentacles exhibit was extremely well done.  I'm always happy to see nautiluses ( not nautili, at least according to WikiPedia ) and they had a huge number of different cuttlefish on display.  The cuttlefish is named for it's cuttlebone, although I would argue it makes more sense the other way around. These are the oval shaped white bones that you can give to birds and reptiles as a calcium supplement. I never made the connection before. They also had a few different species of octopus, where most aquariums just have a single giant octopus or none at all.

This baby turtle spends his time swimming with his head against a blue plastic wall. Sort of sad.

A young penguin, saying hello.

Leaping Blennies I think.  They jump between rocks and breath air,  so sort of an odd fish.

Shrimp with his pal Eel.

 After the aquarium, we stopped by Athena's grandmothers house.  We stayed the night, played some Mahjong, and had some wonderful food for both dinner and breakfast.  Athena's grandmother doesn't speak any english and I don't speak Chinese so shopping while Athena was away was a bit... difficult.  She is also quite good at Mahjong.

I picked out a wonderful Japanese yam apparently.

 Yesterday we drove down to Pinnacles National Park.  It's the newest national park and feels like it hasn't quite been gumbified for the masses yet.  It's also fairly small, and has two separate entrances for the east side and the west side. Although it's only a couple miles of trail from one side to the other, it's a two hour drive as no roads connect through the park.  We entered the east side, realized the climbing we wanted was on the west side, and took a hike instead.

Huge boulders have fallen into deep gullies to form caves and pathways.  Fun for humans and bats.  13 different types of bat live in the park. 

Duckweed has more protein than soybeans. ( By weight I'm assuming, although no one ever mentions the specifics. )  I think it's pretty.

One cave had a single spot of light coming down from the ceiling.  Perfect for pretending to be tony stark. 

The base of a small reservoir and the exit from a cave.  Lots of canyon wrens (Catherpes Mexicanus)  here.

The rock formations in pinnacles are part of the extinct Neenach volcano that has shifted and eroded over time. The other half of the volcano is almost 200 miles away, due to movement of the  tectonic plates. (The pacific plate in particular ).

The park posts information about climbing closures at trail heads.  This is immensely helpful, and i wish everyone did it.  Here we, and all the visiting tourists and their families, can see that "Even Coyotes Do It Doggy Style" is 'sensitive'.

Out last day was spent walking around the city.  After wandering a bit we went to Balmy Alley with my Mom and her partner David.  Many of the murals relate to the struggles of ethnic minorities and the poor in the face of white washing and gentrification.  Tension between the older, poorer residents of the mission neighborhood where the murals reside and the new, wealthy residents moving in is fairly high.  Tech companies use public transport bus stops without paying and to the detriment of the public system, rents are sky rocketing and forced evictions are at their highest levels.  Many of these evictions are 'no-fault evictions' meaning that the tenant didn't do anything, but that the land lord can make more money with a different class of tenant.

Victorion, defender of the mission.  Lots of neat detail, including a hipster store with the tagline "unique together"

I like the hands, and all the little animals around the mural. 

Scooby and Shaggy?

 Although some argue that this process of gentrification is a natural and good thing, I'm not sure these are the same people being asked to leave their homes.  The systematic displacement of a poor minority neighborhood for a rich predominately white neighborhood doesn't really seem like the healthy evolution of an area to me.

Some of the murals are... not awesome.  Here we have a couple eyes, some prayer hands, and a sort of face on a heart in the back. Odd, unappealing, and unoriginal.  Lame.

In the upper right, police in riot gear labeled with 'google' and 'facebook' force a couple out of an eden like landscape.  The signs behind the officers read "Foreclosure" and "Luxury Hipster Community".  Cops drink Starbucks with yuppies and a wealthier class of citizen plays in the streets while the old residents are arrested, evicted, or otherwise forced to move.  Gentrification!  

It's only hip to live in the city if there is little crime, good coffee, and small shops selling expensive clothing on all the corners.  So the old community has to go.  Developing these places also happens to make the developers rich which doesn't hurt.

The chain links all read different institutions/ideas  such as IMF, WTO, Intellectual Property Rights,  etc. 

 From the above work.  I like her face.  Credits are here for the most part.

After a nice puerto rican lunch we left the city, headed back to my dads place, and packed our bags. We are off to Alabama at 5:50am tomorrow.  Hopefully it won't be too hot, and we won't get too weak in a state with almost no accessible climbing.  We have our Yosemite guide books so we can plan while in Alabama, and I have the first book in the 'Malazan Book of the Fallen' series to try.  Hopefully it's good, but if not I have a couple Harlan Ellison books to read.  

Too cool for the crag.  Flashing my belay card while I project 5.8.  I was hoping to get a sweet top-rope on-site, but I'm still a bit burnt from my sesh last week.