Mountains

The Tetons impress me more than any other mountains I have seen. The wide meadows and reflecting lakes at the foot of the mountain range provide scenic views of power and beauty.


Grand Teton mountain lit by the first rays of the rising sun. It's the tallest of the peaks, so the sunlight reaches it first.


More early morning sunlight on the mountains.


The Tetons and Jackson Lake, seen from Signal Hill. This is high above the plain with panoramic views of the horizon in all directions. The road winds around Signal Hill several times as you ascend. The last part is a bit hair-raising, as it goes across a little spine. I don't know what signals they used when they chose the name, but obviously now, there's a huge cell-phone tower near the top.


View across Jenny Lake. After stopping at this viewpoint, we drove to the visitor center and took a boat across the lake to a hiking trail.


From the hiking trail, we saw the mountains from a number of perspectives, one more beautiful than the next!


View from a turnout along the road.


We also enjoyed our view of the California coastal mountains from our Santa Barbara apartment. This shows our deck.


Santa Barbara view at sunset.

Santa Barbara Scenery

We're getting ready to leave Santa Barbara and drive home, so I've taken pictures of a few of the scenes that I enjoyed during my stay, and picked a few to illustrate how beautiful this place is.

Near my yoga studio is Alice Keck Park Memorial Gardens (which I think of as Park Park). In one city block, inventive landscape designers have created a number of tiny climate regions -- wetlands, collections of dry-climate plants, flowering trees, ground covers, and a duck pond, shown above.



I like the tiny artificial streams that criss cross the park and flow down its slightly sloping grounds. Children often play near the duck pond. They seem to love to feed the ducks, the few white geese, and the turtles that live in the pond. I imagine that they think the park is much larger than it really is.



Arroyo Burro beach is around 10 minutes from our temporary apartment. Above, the beach on the sunniest and warmest day we enjoyed, which was earlier this week. The little girl with the parasol kept twirling it, holding it over her companion, and otherwise playing with it.



The day after sunshine -- heavy fog. The ocean is barely visible behind these beachgoers at Goleta Beach near the UCSB campus. The Goleta Pier almost disappeared into the fog.





Finally, for the first time this morning, I walked on the headland above Arroyo Burro Beach. It's called the Douglas Preserve. A friend showed me how to get there, as I had never figured it out in all our visits to Santa Barbara. We walked around with her little dog Willie. The sunny beach in the prior photo is at the left.

El Capitan and Refugio Beach

We had a delightful picnic at Refugio State Beach, about 30 miles north of Santa Barbara. Above, the view from the picnic table, looking across a little slough towards the beach and the ocean.

Our friend Eshel went with us. Below: Eshel and I walking on the nearby El Capitan Beach;

After our afternoon meal, we walked on the beach and up the headland, all breathtakingly beautiful:

The one flaw is tar on the beach. It's somewhat natural, as there is a lot of petroleum in the ground, and always was tar on the beaches even before oil drilling began (as illustrated by one location near Goleta named in the 19th century: Coal Oil Point). Is it an oil-company propaganda claim that the oil wells relieve the pressure and thus lessen the tar on the beaches? Or is it true?

Here's a photo of one of the offshore oil rigs, seen from Refugio beach, that may or may not make it worse:

Not Amaryllis!

What are these purple and white flowers that grow several to a tall stalk? They are everywhere in Santa Barbara and also around Menlo Park, Palo Alto, Los Altos, and Mountain View. I googled like crazy, and couldn't identify them, because I thought they were amaryllis. Now I know -- they are

AGAPANTHUS

... yes, they are in the family Amaryllidaceae. But they are't amaryllis, and it's incredibly hard to find them if you don't already know their name!

Fireworks at Santa Barbara Harbor

Solstice Festival

The sun is shining, and it's almost the longest day of the year ...



Welcome the sun with rows and rows of dancers in sparkly costumes ...



Bands of drummers with an African god for a leader ...



Dragons and monsters including Nessie, pushed by a man in a kilt ...



Families and kids buying gauzy halos and polka-dot wings from street vendors with carts...





Handmade floats powered only by human labor, like this one with Ganesha onboard and a blue Hindu god pushing it down the parade route...



Santa Barbara has a long tradition of an alternative parade for the summer solstice, which took place yesterday. We bicycled down to the parade route and around the car-challenged city. For lots more photos, click on any of these to see them on Flickr.

Dreaming in Ojai

What if you dreamed that your books were taking over your whole house? Sometimes it seems as if books are doing that. You would find that your kitchen had filled up with cookbooks.



Even your sink turned into a bookshelf. You could hardly see your old tiled countertops. The stove had disappeared behind a bookcase.



And your living room was crowded with more and more books. Scarcely any room was left for chairs or tables. Little alcoves of books, locked display cases, shelves near the ceiling, and old paperback turning racks were everywhere.

 

Even when you looked out the windows, bookshelves had filled your yard with mazelike structures. 

FINALLY: you find the checkout counter. You aren't dreaming after all.



You're really at Bart's Books of Ojai: "The World's Greatest Outdoor Bookstore." The core of the bookstore is really an old house, and twisting alcoves of books (mainly used books) have taken over the whole yard. Quite a dreamlike experience, I found!

For more about our short visit to Ojai see:

The Witch of Endor Ate Here

In my neighborhood

Yesterday evening I took a walk through my very hilly neighborhood here in Santa Barbara. Most of the houses have extremely beautiful gardens, often making use of steep slopes. A few houses have grassy lawns; most use plants that are well-adapted to the dry climate here. To me, many plants seem exotic: jacaranda trees, hibiscus hedges, jasmine, bottle-brush trees, and even overgrown geraniums that have grown woody thanks to years of growth without freezing.

 





 For more photos click on any of these to see my Flickr set.

In the Park

I thought this tree would surely be full of kids using its nearly horizontal branches to climb and hide:



What the little sign says:  

Crows seem to love it, though. Several were perched there sometime after I took the photo. They were having a loud cawing conversation, like all the crows around here. One was eating a dead mouse.

Memento Mori

I was walking along the beach when I noticed a gull pecking at what I took for one of the numerous piles of kelp that the tide was washing in. Actually, it was a dead seal -- dramatically dead! Its head was reduced nearly to a skull. In ancient or medieval times, I've learned, this would seem to be an omen or a reminder of mortality, but in fact, the day was beautiful and the sun was bright (after a misty morning). Children and families were everywhere, enjoying the day. I just don't have that medieval mindset. It's not a reminder of anything, just part of the interesting California beach scenery.

 

Len's Birds

A California Quail in the garden of our temporary apartment (we move tomorrow).




A Stilt. See more at http://www.flickr.com/photos/len2000/sets/72157629840181906/with/7274750806/

Isla Vista, California

 Isla Vista, California, is a very small town almost surrounded by the University of California, Santa Barbara, and almost exclusively made up of student rental apartments and a few businesses that cater to students. (The actual city of Santa Barbara is a few miles down the coast.) Every apartment parking lot is bursting with cars, which park two-deep and onto the sidewalk. Besides cars the streets are filled with pedestrians, bicyclists, pedestrians carrying surf boards, cyclists carrying surf boards, skateboarders with or without surfboards, and whatever. Apartments crowd the bluffs overlooking the beach, with occasional pathways down to the waterside. Buildings are colorful and often decorated with artistic works.

 



The seaside is beautiful, with large open spaces, especially near the University-owned cottages where we are staying this week. It's popular with painters, surfers, people strolling or cycling. The University has a wildlife preserve at Coal Oil Point just beyond the town, where snowy plovers nest and feed. Pelicans fly low over the beach and the open spaces; humming birds, shore birds, hawks, songbirds, raccoons, bunnies, and other wildlife are abundant.



If you are old enough, you may remember the most famous event in Isla Vista history: in 1970, angry student protests created a very ugly scene, and near-riot, in which the Bank of America was burned to the ground. The image of the bank in flames became an icon of this era -- as one person said, makes Occupy Wall Street look tame.



Bank of America is still here -- though only an ATM: