Desk-bound Nature Lover

My Blog: Occasional postings about the joys of birding, hiking, camping, and sightseeing.

My life: I spend most of my days in offices, looking at a computer screen, and waiting for those few weekends when I can get out and enjoy some remnant of our precious natural heritage. But, boy, do I live on those weekends!

Thursday, July 07, 2005

Weekend in the Sierras

In spite of the vigorous efforts of our last few Republican presidents to turn our national forests into national stump fields, there are still some very nice places to visit in the national forests of this country, especially in California, where Democratic congressmen and senators have some influence. This past weekend, July 1st to 4th, I spent most of my time enjoying some of our National Forest lands.

I set out from my San Mateo apartment on Friday afternoon with my car full of my camping gear heading first north and then east through the coastal mountain range and then across the great Central Valley of California. (About the Central Valley, I like to say that California is an interesting state, with the Sierras on one side, the Pacific Coast on the other, and Nebraska in the middle.) Fortunately, California’s “Nebraska” is narrower than the real one, and within a few hours I was in the foothills of the Sierras.

My initial destination, and my base of operations for the rest of the weekend, was an area in Eldorado National Forest known as the Crystal Basin. I had learned about the Crystal Basin from a travel guide called Birding Northern California, by John Kemper. I have often used this book in planning my weekend excursions in Californian. It describes 81 areas in California which are good for finding birds and other wildlife. Of these 81 areas I have now visited 26, including four this weekend.

I had a campsite reserved at Fashoda Campground on the shore of the Union Valley Reservoir, which is owned by SMUD, the Sacramento Municipal Utility District. I was not especially impressed with the campground. It was pretty enough, being set in a grove of Incense Cedar trees which looked to be a century or two old, but the camp sites were too close together, there was no privacy, and I had noisy neighbors on two sides of me who kept up an alarming racket until well past midnight each night. Later in the weekend one of the Forest Service employees told me that she could have steered me to much quieter and more private sites if I had called ahead. From now on I will make a point of calling ahead and asking about the quietest sites before I make my camping reservations.

The next day I got up at sunrise (in spite of being given precious little chance to sleep during the night) and spent the whole day birding the Crystal Basin. There were birds all around the reservoir which I had never seen before or had only seen once or twice. Hermit Warblers (my first!), MacGillivray’s Warblers, Mountain Chickadees, and White-headed Woodpeckers, just to name a few. There was a Townsend’s Solitaire right in the camp site, only the second one I had ever seen.

Near sunset, I went high up in the mountains near the border of the Desolation National Wilderness to take a trail which had been recommended to me by the same Forest Service employee I mentioned two paragraphs before. It was a pretty trail, but without mosquito repellant I think I would have been a dead man! The mosquitoes and black flies were as thick as I have ever seen them. However, my first ever sighting of a Red-breasted Sapsucker made the hike particularly nice.

The next morning (Sunday) I drove about an hour to the east to see Lake Tahoe. About this lake, Mark Twain wrote, “A month of camping along the shores of Lake Tahoe would restore an Egyptian mummy to full health and vigor. Not one of the older and drier mummies, of course, but one of the fresher ones.” I absolutely believe him, but that would have been back when the shores of the lake were still pristine. Today I think it would only work for a freeze-dried Peruvian mummy, and not an embalmed Egyptian one. However, Lake Tahoe was as crowded as you would expect any place to be on a fourth of July weekend, so I escaped the crowds and went on up further into the mountains. Before I left, though, I found the nest of a family of Mountain Chickadees and watched a pair of Ospreys hunting along Taylor creek, which flows into the lake.

I spent the afternoon and early evening at Carson Pass, up among the beautiful craggy, snowy peaks and alpine lakes of the Sierras. There I found my third and fourth life-list birds of the weekend: Cassin’s Finches and Green-tailed Towhees. I also watched a pair of Williamson’s Sapsuckers (gorgeous, magnificent birds!) tending a nest of chicks. The chicks were in a hole in a dead tree which the Sapsuckers had drilled as smooth and round as you could have made with an electric drill. This species is found only in high alpine areas, but they sure do make the climb worthwhile! Also making the climb worthwhile were a small flock of Mountain Bluebirds, the bluest bluebirds you can find.

Monday, Independence Day, was the last day of my trip. I did a little more early morning birding around the reservoir, finding one of my favorite birds, the American Dipper, and then packed up my tent and blankets and headed out. I stopped a few times on the way out of the Crystal Basin for some roadside birding. Further along the way back to San Mateo I stopped for a couple of hours at a place in the foothills called Sly Park, another area recommended by John Kemper. I finally made it back to San Mateo about six PM.

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