Ahjumawi Lava Springs State Park

A golden eagle perched high in a poplar tree surveys his domain. He sees something far below. It’s a wary ground squirrel moving along the lava rocks. The squirrel stops under the protective cover of a red and green leafed California redbud. He looks all around; he seems to know he is being watched. The eagle’s attention is diverted by a noisy flock of Canadian geese flying across Big Lake to the fields beyond. When the eagle turns back, the squirrel has disappeared. And so, once again, nature’s drama is played out in Ahjumawi Lava Springs State Park.

Ahjumawi (Ah joo maw we) is a lonely place. It’s located in northeastern California and is one of that state’s most primitive state parks, and it may be the least visited, as well. Lassen Peak to the south and Mt. Shasta to the north are visible from many spots within the park. Think of it, a state park that has no cars, no RVs, no crowded campsites, and for much of the time no humans. In addition, there are no occupied buildings, only an abandoned farmhouse, a barn, and a 19th century trapper’s cabin.

There is a bit of a mystery as to the meaning of the Indian word, ahjumawi. Some say it means, “where the waters come together,” while others maintain it’s the name the Indians, a band of the Pit River group, gave themselves, “the river people.” Water was extremely important to the Ahjumawis. In this area they found a plentiful supply of it from several lakes, ponds and the largest system of fresh water springs in the US. All this water provided the Ahjumawis with an abundance of fish.      

Along the park’s shore one can find ancient prehistoric fish traps. There were comprised of a succession of increasingly smaller ponds, into which the Ahjumawis literally herded fish until all they had to do was reach down, grab and toss the fish ashore. They were especially fond of suckerfish, which they smoked and ate head and all.

As you might imagine, the park is accessible only by boat. Visitors must bring their own; there are no rental boats available. At a spot the locals call “The Rat Farm,” located a half-mile north of the town of McArthur, there is a launch site. The waterway into the park passes over ancient lava flows. In some places there are narrow channels between the barely submerged rocks. The water is clear, so obstacles are visible to the watchful boater. However, anyone not paying attention can easily scrape across a lava flow and do damage to a boat’s hull, or an engine’s prop.

Ahjumawi is a haven for nature lovers, photographers, canoeists, and people looking for contemplative solitude. Some day Ahjumawi may have the kind of facilities that all the other state parks have. But for now, anyone who enjoys the primitive will find this park ideal. So load a boat with your fishing gear, your camera equipment, your artist palette, your bird watching binoculars, or your favorite book and go to Ahjumawi. Just don’t be surprised if you find yourself there alone.

Q

The Great Equalizer

We humans have a tendency to put certain people up on a pedestal. Any celebrity goes up on that pedestal and depending on who it may be, the worshipers are either a small tightly knit group, or a throng of several million. Athletes and entertainers are prime candidate for an overwhelming amount of hero-worshipping. Some deserve it and some definitely do not, but that’s a matter of opinion. What is not a matter of opinion is the fact that they’re not a higher order of human at all. They are basically subject to the same constraints, have the same desires and failings and must conform to the same laws to which all of us mere mortals must adhere. So the next time you feel like hero-worshipping, just so the desire doesn’t get out of hand, think of this photograph. It’s truly the common denominator and goes far in bringing the hero into perspective.

Sheep Ranch

Many years ago I attended a photography workshop in Sheep Ranch located in the Sierra foothills, not far from the historic town of Murphys. I used to come to Murphys in the old days when it was just a tired out reminder of a time when people rushed in for gold. It always appeared to be barely alive, but in recent years it has had a new birth and is now called the “Queen of the Sierra, One of the Ten Coolest Small Towns in America.”

   I drove down the main street passed boutiques, gift shops, cafes and wineries searching for Sheep Ranch Road. The first time through, I passed right by it; I thought it was an alley. The road was narrow and wound its way up, over and around many mountains. The mountains showed the scars of a recent fire. The Mother Lode country has had a long tradition of burning out its inhabitants, but still they come.

   Sheep Ranch got its name because of the sheep corrals that surrounded it. In 1860, the place quickly changed to a mining town when gold was discovered in those corrals. In a quick gold rush minute it went from corrals to fifteen saloons and five flourishing gold mines.

    Today it’s a mixture of old dilapidated shacks and a few newer homes. When I arrived some children had placed a small bicycle ramp in the middle of “Main Street” and were noisily enjoying themselves. The heart of what’s left of downtown with its one building was just a mere twenty feet from where they played. Part of the old building was the post office, which appeared to be alive and well, the other part looked like it might have been at one time a grocery store. Outside an old Texaco pump with a glass top sat rusting. Everywhere paint was peeling, creating rich patterns of age and neglect.  

    The inn where I stayed was also a relic from a time when stagecoaches were the mode of transportation and passengers stopped for the night. The parlor was filled with overstuffed furniture and a large steel barrel stove. The green and red walls were a mosaic of pictures, deer heads, tools, a stuffed badger and a stuffed squirrel, the Mona Lisa and an assortment of treasures that one might find in an antique store. Downstairs also contained a bar complete with a barber chair and spittoon, a small poker room just big enough for one table, a kitchen confused with old and new, two bedrooms with marvelous period furniture, and a large dining room with a buckboard hanging from the ceiling. Upstairs there were more bedrooms, creaking floors and lumpy beds. Bathrooms came late in the life of this old relic. At some point a two story tower was added on the backside of the building. it housed two bathrooms down and two up.

    Next-door, George Hearst made his fortune. From the 3600-foot shaft George and his miners coaxed, sweated, and blasted millions of dollars worth of gold. While nosing around I discovered a small mountain of tailings. While I stood on the pile of rocks, I imagined the following scene. George Hearst and his son, perhaps on that very spot were deep in conversation. George wanted his son to continue the family business.       

    “No, Father I have other plans, besides I rather live in an enormous castle on a mountain top overlooking the Pacific.” 

    “Ok, my son here’s a couple million. Go peddle your papers.” 

    And so William Randolph Hearst did precisely that.

I haven’t returned to Sheep Ranch. I’ve often wondered if it’s still the same sleepy out-of-way place.

Ansel Adams’s Lone Pine Photograph

Ansel Adams made the photograph, Winter Sunrise, Sierra Nevada from Lone Pine in 1944. It should be obvious to anyone who knows Adams’s work that the picture here is not one of his; it’s a photograph I made near where he made Winter Sunrise. I offer it here, because I’ve been involved in discussions about the ethics of removing elements from photographs and Winter Sunrise has always been one that springs to mind during such discussions.  

    Adams awoke early on four successive mornings and tried to make the picture he had envisioned, but conditions weren’t what he wanted. On the fifth morning he struck pay dirt. It was still dark and very cold when Adams drove to the spot he had chosen, located just outside of Lone Pine, a small town 58 miles south of Bishop, California on the eastern side of the Sierra Nevada. He set up his camera on the new platform that had been bolted to the top of his car. When he finished, he climbed down and he and his wife, Virginia, sat in the car waiting and sipping coffee. Just before the first light of dawn, he climbed back onto the platform and at that time he has been quoted as saying, “I finally encountered the bright, glistening sunrise with light clouds streaming from the southeast and casting swift moving shadows on the meadow and dark rolling hills.” Just as Adams exposed the film the horse that had been standing in the meadow turn sideways and the sun sent beams of light that highlighted the horse and the trees in the foreground. That moment was not only the beginning of one of his most recognized photographs, but later it would give rise to one of his famous quotes, "Sometimes I think I do get to places just when God’s ready to have somebody click the shutter.”

    The one thing about the photograph that disturbed Adams was the white washed L-P that high school students had painted on the rocky slopes of the Alabama Hills. “It was a hideous and insulting scar on one of the great vistas of our land,” so stated Adams. He removed all of the L-P that he could from the negative and spotted out any remaining trace on the final print. He was criticized for doing that, because many people think it unethical to remove elements from photographs. In his defense he said, “I am not enough of a purist to perpetuate the scar and thereby destroy for me, at least, the extraordinary beauty and perfection of the scene.” 

    On one of my trips down U.S. Route 395, I stopped off in Lone Pine and made the photograph you see here from nearly the same spot as Winter Sunrise and there sits the L-P. For this to be a true comparison, I would have had to be at that spot at o-dark hundred, which is against my basic principles. That’s why I have no sunrise photographs in my portfolio. Copyright laws prohibit me from using Ansel’s print here, but if you Google it, you’ll see the difference that a master of technique can make in a photograph. And I have no quarrel with anyone who removes elements from photographs as long as they fess up to it and clearly state the fact, which is precisely what Ansel Adams did.

Note: You can find a discussion of Ansel Adams’s Winter Sunrise in his own words in his book, Examples, The Making of 40 Photographs.

Cherry Creek

If you wander the unpaved streets of Cherry Creek, a living ghost town, with a population of around 70 people, you'll find plenty of abandoned houses that are slowly withering away. They were built in the late 1800s by hard rock miners who came to Nevada in search of fortune. Today relics sit side by side with newer homes, occupied by people who still work a few of the mining claims. Some of them brought in mobile homes, while others beefed up old buildings and added new rooms. There are even a few mud houses remaining that were half-buried in the ground. They had wooden floors and doors and wooden beam roofs, on which sod was piled. All of this variety makes for a cacophony of architectural styles.

The house you see here was one of the first brick structures built in Cherry Creek and now it's the sole surviving brick building. That wood you see in front of the door might seem like a porch, but it isn't exactly. It was the porch's roof. A tremor, or maybe age weakened the supports and down it came.

Cherry Creek got its start in 1872 when two old sourdoughs located silver ore and named the strike, the Tea Cup Mine. One year later, there were nine other claims along with a town of around 400 people. Legend holds that the town’s name came from a small creek that got its name from either wild cherries or chokecherry bushes that grew near it. The area went from boom to bust, then fire, then more boom, more fire and more bust. All told there were three cycles of riches to rags over an eleven-year period.

At the top of the boom times, about 1880, Cherry Creek had a transient population of about 6,000 with about 1800 permanent residents. The bustling town at one point had all the services miners needed: a livery stable, blacksmith shop, hotel, boarding houses, restaurants, two stamp mills, a post office and most important to thirsty miners, an amazing twenty-eight saloons. It's reported that altogether a total of some where around $20 million in gold and silver came out of the mining district. Small leaseholders continue to be active, probably because gold is selling at a price that makes it worth the effort to go after the small pockets that are left. Residents own most of the claims.

All the activity that once was and the growth that was the result is certainly not apparent today. You have to use a great deal of imagination to see what it must have been like to be there during the boom years. I think of this brick house as a symbol of the rags to riches to rags history of Cherry Creek. If only that house could talk.


Cherry Creek is located about an hours drive north of Ely.

Zzyzx

Many years ago I was looking for photographic workshops to attend. I'd heard about the ones offered by UCSC Extension. I thought to myself, “ Ansel Adams started the program; they must be great.” Of the ones offered, one in particular stood out because it was in a place with an impossible name...Zzyzx (ZYE zix). My curiosity got the better of me and before I knew it, I was off to the lonesome East Mojave Desert and Baker, California. A right turn off I-5, several miles shy of Baker, took me onto a dirt road headed for Soda Springs, which sits on the edge of an enormous playa. This oasis has been used for hundreds, if not thousands, of years by people traveling through the high desert. Four and a half miles later I arrved at the Desert Studies Center, a field station of California State University. I was amazed at what I saw. Palm trees, a large pond with a rock fountain and cement buildings. 

    The Center use to be a resort, the Zzyzx Mineral Springs and Health Spa, founded by Curtis Howe Springer, a radio evangelist, self-proclaimed medical doctor, Methodist minister and maybe a bit of a con man. In 1944, Springer and his soon-to-be bride filed mining claims for a 12,000 acre parcel of federal land surrounding the Soda Springs. They made up the name, so it would be last in the telephone book, bottled the spring water and offered it to travelers. Always an enterprising soul, Springer planned and built a sixty-room hotel, a radio broadcasting station, a church, a cross-shaped health spa, a private airstrip, which he named “Zyport,” a pond with a fountain he called Lake Tunedae, and several other buildings on the property. Springer traveled numerous times into Los Angeles to gather up workers, usually derelicts. He’d offer them room and board in exchange for their labor. At the height of his enterprise, 221 stations in the U.S. and 102 overseas syndicated his radio program, a mixture of religious music and his own brand of evangelism. He solicited “donations” that would buy listeners his special cures for everything from hair loss to serious diseases. These concoctions were a blend of celery, carrot and parsley juice. At the resort, visitors could avail themselves of goat’s milk and an allegedly life-prolonging “Antedeluvian Tea.” They were also offered a $25 dollar self-administered hemorhoid cure. Each day, Springer gave two sermons over the loud speakers that were spread throughout the resort and ended with more solicitations for donations. All went well until the federal government caught up with Springer. He was charged with squatting on federal land. Springer offered to pay back rent, but the government refused the offer and in 1974, he and a 100 of his followers were evicted. He was also charged and convicted of making false claims about his products. 

    In 1976, the Bureau of Land Management allowed a consortium of California State Universities to take over the management of the property and its facilities. Today the facility is used not only by people who study and learn about desert fauna and flora, but those who attend special classes and workshops.

    All my stays at Zzyzx have been very comfortable. Electricity was provided by both solar and wind power, the water was pure, the food was wholesome and the dorm rooms were as good as can be expected. 

    So how do I feel about Zzyzx? I would go there again in a quick Mojave minute.

Miscellaneous Ramblings Vol. 9 No. 5

Hello Everyone, It’s  May of course. Been that way for the last two weeks. I’m sure you’ve noticed.

I am determined to be cheerful and happy in whatever situation I may find myself. For I have learned that the greater part of our misery or unhappiness is determined not by our circumstance but by our disposition. ~Martha Washington

>>>The Cats… Have you ever driven Hwy 17 to Santa Cruz? Probably. And probably you've noticed the two beautiful white 8' cats that mark the entrance to an old 34 acre estate. Conventional wisdom dictates that the cats were inspired because of the town of Los Gatos, which in Spanish means “the cats.” But hold on there buckaroo, it ain't true. The estate owners, Colonel Charles Erskine Scott Wood and his partner poet, suffragist Sara Bard Field named the cats, Leo and Leona and apparently the couple just happened to like cats. Actually, Los Gatos was named in honor of the mountain lions and bobcats that frequented the Santa Cruz Mountains back in 1840 when the town was looking for a name. 

>>>>In my ever-to-be-humble opinion… Now I understand why the two statues don’t look anymore like mountain lions or bobcats than Calvin Coolidge looks like Meryl Streep. But then again, they are very nice examples of artistic license, aren’t they?

>>>The man left his mark… Irish warring king, King Niall of the Nine Hostages may have more descendants than any other male in Irish history, or any other country's history for that matter. It's estimated that this prehistoric king may have as many as 2 to 3,000,000 descendants. How do we know that? Well, people who study such things discovered the King Niall had the Y-chromosome, haplotype. Don't ask me how they were able to go back thousands of years to find this out. Probably had something to do with analyzing the king's bones, or what's left of them. And don't ask me about digging the old boy up either. So anyone with that chromosome marker is therefore related to King Niall. Oh, and about his title = Remember he was a warring king, and as a result, he held nine royal hostages in his castle’s dungeons. They were captured in each of the lands he conquered. Voilla...King Niall of the Nine Hostages. 

>>>Spending money… Question: does our government spend our tax money wisely? The answer depends on the issue upon which the money is being spent and whether or not the many different factions agree it's a wise expenditure. Anyway here's one example that has been floating around for some time: When NASA started sending astronauts into space, they quickly discovered that ball-point pens would not work in zero gravity. To combat this problem, Congress approved a program and NASA scientists spent a decade and over $165 million developing a pen that writes in zero gravity, upside-down, on almost any surface and at temperatures ranging from below freezing to over 300ºC … the Russians on the other 

hand used pencils.

>>>And now the rest of the story… The story above is an

urban legend, but there is a grain of truth however: NASA began to develop a space pen, but when development costs skyrocketed the project was abandoned and astronauts went back to using pencils, just like the Soviets. However, the claim that NASA spent millions on the Space Pen is incorrect, as the Fisher pen was developed using private capital, not govern-ment funding. NASA – and the Soviets  – eventually began purchasing such pens.” 

>>>A final word on US spending… The Feds spent a total of $3.8 trillion in 2015. That’s $3,8000,000,000,000. Another way to look at it: it’s $12,000 for each man, woman and child in the country. The $3.8 trillion represents only 21% of the nation's economy (Gross Domestic Product, the value of all goods and services produced in a year). So how much did the Feds collect in taxes in 2015? That number is $3,248,723,000. Do you see the problem?

>>>Water jet cutter... A water jet cutter, also known as a water jet or waterjet, is an industrial tool capable of cutting a wide variety of materials using a very high-pressure jet of water, or a mixture of water and an abrasive substance. WOW, water cuts! My son was doing a kitchen remodel and told me that the granite kitchen tops were cut out with one of these water jets. Again WOW! If you're interested and want to find out how it works, then google “How Water Jets Work – YouTube.” First we did it with a chisel and a hammer, then along came diamond bladed saws and now with water, so what next?

>>>Old VW microbus uses… If you trek over to the Capitola Mall on 41st Avenue you might want to spend some money at this unusual vending machine. It’s a lousy thing to do to a wonderful old microbus. But there’s no accounting for human behavior.

Seven Facts… 1) You cannot put soap in your eyes.  2) You cannot count you hair.  3) You cannot breathe through your nose, with your tongue out.  4) You did #3, didn't you?  5) When you did #3, you realized its possible, and you look like a dog.  6) You're smiling right now.

>>>A Thought to Leave On…. I've heard different speakers use slightly different words to define the Hindi (India) word: namasteI (NOM uh stay). Namaste is used as a customary greeting when individuals meet, and a valediction upon their parting. I chose the following wording: My soul honors your soul. I honor the place in you where the entire universe resides. I honor the light, love, truth, beauty and peace within you, because it is also within me. In sharing these things we are united, we are the same, we are one… After reading that, think what the world would be like if everyone understood and adopted the concept behind namaste: we are all one.

Well, that’s it for this time, stay tuned for the next time, which may be some time from now, or not... But in the meantime ... stay well, be safe, keep in touch,    Sam

And little ZeeDee says, “Woof.”