We and 2016: Then somewhere near Salinas...

Thursday, 12/29/16:

We woke up early and headed out for a hike that Kai had planned the night before.  We parked at an unofficial trailhead an retraced several steps that we had taken with Dad/Grandpa.  An initial steep climb up a grassy slope to a quick peek across the Salinas Valley:

Mr timpane:  Carmel is a hoot.  At one time, it was illegal to eat ice cream outside on Carmel sidewalks...or something like that.  Maybe Treeflo remembers the details about that one.  Still, it was always good for an upscale pub crawl; at least in the early '90's.  And I love the beaches.

We left the dirt road for a nice, shaded single track trail through oaks, dangling their Spanish moss tinsel.

Mas Moss:

The trail led to nice views of Salinas Valley, "The Salad Bowl of the Nation."

Thanks, you two.  Happy New Year.

We reached the top of a mesa-like bluff, put down our packs, and wandered through sage and manzanitas, searching for items left behind.  Kind of like a relaxing Easter egg hunt.  Kai was excited to find an army food tray from 1968, in very good condition.  While he kept exploring, I took some time to myself, sitting in the warm sun and enjoying the beautiful surroundings.  The smell of California and black sages, the songs of hummingbirds and thrashers, and the soaring flight of raptors overhead.

After a few hours, we  headed to another bluff, which had some great rock formations.  At one spot, a natural wall appeared at the top of a short cliff.  It had a sizeable window in it, which, as Kai illustrated, would provide a tactical advantage for a military ambush on the road below:

I mainly enjoyed the rocks for what they were

Hey 13point!  Thanks for the compliment.

Here are a couple more rock shots

Kai found this old, half-buried metal drum in the bushes.  Made in New Orleans, U.S.A.  It looked like it would've carried oil or fuel, but it smelled like dirt (no fumes).

One thing my Dad used to do for Kai is that he would scout out different areas of Fort Ord and when he found something interesting, he would note its GPS location, then tag it on his computer satellite images.  It used to drive Kai nuts that his Grandfather didn't pick it up before someone else did, but my Dad set it up so that Kai would essentially follow a treasure map to locate the desired object, adding to the fun of the hunt.

During our hike on the 29th, Kai led me down a gully and pointed to something: "There's the parachute flare."  Kai told me that he saw it noted on my Dad's computer the night before.  That was a touching moment for me.  The man keeps giving.

Here is a shot of Mt. Toro, as the sun was getting closer to the horizon

While Kai was searching through the bushes, I enjoyed a transcendent sunset experience.  No photos. Not many thoughts.  Just being at peace with the beauty in front of me.

Then Kai and I enjoyed a night hike under the stars to get back to the car.

It was a great day to be outside.

Thanks Bart. 

The Best of health to you and BeNice. 

Let's meet up sometime this year. 

Hey, Thanks for your kind posts, people.

Kai and I took a one-week trip tp Hunter Liggett with Dad/Grandpa a couple of years ago.  We stayed on the base, in a pseudo Mission complex, built for William Randolph Hearst.  Beautiful area, with lots of wilderness, animals, and a real Mission.  And, yes, Kai and Gpa managed to find lots of bullet shells, including a number of 50 cal and 20mm shells, which we don't have in our area.  It's a big area and is still quite active.

Treeflo, that's so cool that you met a badger out there.  I've never seen one, but have found a number of extremely large, deep burrows.  Which reminds me:

We started out early for day two, 12/30, by parking at a legitimate trailhead near the Fort Ord Airport and walked a gravel road to our next destination: a spot where a large number of troops obviously slept and trained, relatively deep into the park (there were remains of several lavatories, with many large enameled cast iron urinal troughs overturned in the weeds; strange, but we often joked about how Dad/Gpa had a big interest in locating and marking as many latrine sites as he could, no lie).

Now, how this reminds me of Treeflo's badger, is that we quickly came across a bobcat, sitting in the grass of a medium-sized field.  We stood and watched it for a bit, before it's short-tailed body scurried back into the oaks.  Not long after that, we came to a field called Machine Gun Flats, where a gorgeous young coyote seemed to be having a polite nonverbal conversation with a female harrier hawk, who was sitting in a 4-foot tall coyote bush.  They stayed facing each other from a distance of about 10 feet, while we were watching for good long time from about 60 feet.  So good to know that these animal folk have good space to roam.

Beautiful Photo, Treeflo

Even walking on the paved roads was nice.  And there were no cars.

Thanks, JB.

Nice story, Judit.  You probably drove down the road pictured above. 

Not long after that photo was taken, we discovered a small cave, hiding between the oaks.

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Hey Lava and DickyB.

I've kinda stalled, with all the stuff going on outside of the black screen, but would still like to post a few more photos.  After all, I haven't even gotten to the point where we actually say good-bye to 2016.

Day two was a bit cooler than our first day, which was a bit welcome, as we hiked around.  It was nice to see clouds in the California sky

Kai led us to what he thought would be a promising area that he and Grandpa had not explored.  It was a sloping bowl, thick with oak, manzanita, sage, and what looked like a bushy form of heather.  We ditched our day packs in some bushes and split up to explore.  I enjoyed taking a leisurely, intentional pace through the brush, rotating my body left or right to pull away from clawing ends of thin branches.  A couple of small holes were made in my shirt and some minor scratches and cuts on arms, trunk, and legs.

I started finding shiny aluminum cylinders here and there; generally deep under the bushes.  On hands and knees, then sliding on my stomach, I entered tunnels in the brush to go further.  Dirt, leaves, and poking twigs would make it seem like something to avoid, but there was a comfort in such small spaces (without being in total darkness deep into the ground, such as found in, say, a lava tube).  At one point, I just lied down on my stomach, feeling the stiff manzanita leaves pressing against my body, and inhaling the damp earthy smells of soil.  I rolled over on my back and looked up.  The sky was clear again.

Kai called for me, announcing that he was finding silver objects of his own (well they were actually aluminum and tin).  We brought them all down to our packs and grouped them together.  We had collected 79 parachute flares from this one hillside.  Kai said that he and Grandpa's previous record for flares collected in one day was 14.  He would've liked to have told Grandpa about today's find.  We decided to at lesat take a photo.

It was late in the afternoon, my phone was out of batteries, and we had more than enough "loot."  I figured that we were done for the day, but Kai wanted to explore the bluffs at the top of the slope.  We pushed through more bushes to reach the peak.  With mixed blessings, Kai found a motherload of spent brass shells and made sizeable piles of them.  Then we found approximately 200 unfired blanks, connected/frozen together by rusted links.  I had a surge of anxiety, knowing that Kai would want to take this all back to the car.

We watched the sunset, then descended back down to pack up the flares, which filled 2 1/2 plastic hotel laundry bags.  They were bulky and surprisingly heavy.  We picked up our packs and made our way back up to the top of the bluff.  It was getting dark and even with our flashlights, we became disoriented had had a hard time finding our way to the piles of shells.  I was ready to leave these behind for another day, but Kai was determined to pack them up right now.  Passing through two manzanitas, I was poked on what felt like the side of my eye (turns out I scratched the white of my eye and am now administering antibiotic eyedrops 4 times/day).  We stuffed our packs completely with brass, which proved to be heavy for the volume that our packs could hold, lumbered down to pick up the flairs, and headed back towards the car.

With so much weight on our shoulders and in our hands, we took several breaks, dropping everything and laying our bodies flat on the road.  The pain and exhaustion brought euphoria.  We gazed at the stars and watched two satellites racing by Scorpio and through the Pleiades.  We reached the car just before 10PM, completely and utterly spent (at least I was).

As with our previous hikes, we started the last day of the year by getting up and out of the house early, this time finding parking just off of Reservation Road below East Garrison, a new housing development which has replaced old barracks.  I'm not sure if Kai planned these hikes with this in mind, but we ended up retracing a significant part of our last hike with my Dad, a steadily climbing road on a mild incline, which led us to sweeping views of the Valley and the north part of Monterey Bay (Santa Cruz Mountains and Moss Landing).

The weather was colder than in previous days; windy, with thick, dark clouds above.  I had packed a rain jacket, but Kai dissuaded me from carrying the extra weight, noting that the weather forecast called for only 15% chance of rain.  Well, sure enough, it started to sprinkle as we hit the highlands then rained in earnest, if not terribly heavily.  The idea of hypothermia entered my mind, so I counterintuitively took my flannel shirt off and placed it in my pack to try to keep it dry as long as I could.  It was a bit uncomfortable, but exhilarating to be away from the confines that keep us comfortable for the majority of our days and nights.  We sat under a small oak tree for a few minutes until the rain passed.  There really wasn't too much of it, after all.

We spent the rest of the day taking a relatively easy hike along a few connected bluffs, with smaller, "well placed" bushes.  We came across an area that was full of shells dated 1942-43.  At another spot, I found a shell made in 1918, nearly 100 years old.  Kai outdid me later by finding the brass bass of a shotgun shell, made in 1901.

Once again, I found some rare and much cherished alone time to sit and just "be," with distant sounds of a California quail calling to his covey and the more subtle tapping of a sapsucker nearby.

Kai and I reunited on a ridge to watch the final sunset of 2016.  It was now so clear, that there wasn't much in the sky to catch color.

Looking back to where we were earlier in the day

Kai and I figured that the previous day/night had provided plenty of adventure, so we decided to walk back to the car relatively early.

Venus and the Moon followed us down the road and I turned around frequently to admire them (obviously smart phone photo does not do justice)

Walking on the road meant that we didn't need flashlights.  We enjoyed the big sky and looked down on the lights of Salinas; spotted a few fireworks glistening down there as well.

We heard the screeches of the Barn Owl and the Hoots of the Great Horned Owl, as we descended to the trailhead and our car.

We thoroughly enjoyed the final hours of the year eating pizza, watching TV, and resting our weary bones. That seemed just about right.

Thanks for checking in.  And HAPPY 2017.

Peace and happiness to you as well, Mike.

Best,

John

THANKS