Early Summer Doldrums

The days pass strangely, with little definition other than the regular dimming and brightening of our solar pirouette. We're mostly through June now, and my last paying day of work was May 31st. We start up our summer camp season on June 29th, with four days of training and five weeks of camp. Beyond that, the future guards its secrets. Financially speaking, the worst case scenario is that we get laid off. Somewhat better would be furlough. Better yet is that we get the go ahead to engage in one of our modified science camp scenarios for the 2020/2021 school year. If that happens, it will probably be some sort of day camp, because doing our usual residential camp isn't looking very likely at all.

I'm not feeling motivated to do much around the house at the moment, so I find myself dividing the days into music listening, listlessly scrolling around on Facebook, watching Star Trek: The Next Generation (I'm currently in the middle of season 2, and really enjoying it - I didn't watch it when it originally aired, so I'm making up for lost time), and reading (I'm currently nearing the end of the available Steven Erikson/Ian Cameron Esslemont Malazan books). Oh, I've also been continuing to photograph birds, although the backyard action has slowed down. The Black Phoebes fledged and flew, and the Bewick's Wrens did the same (choosing to do it on a day I wasn't looking). I've been managing to go hiking a couple of days a week, with the most recent one being yesterday when Willow, Sophie, and I went walking around Skyline Ridge and Russian Ridge Open Space Preserves. I haven't seen Willow much during the pandemic, and Sophie even less, so it was nice.

Last week, I pushed my envelope a bit and hiked the Skyline to the Sea trail with Jellyfish, Snowgum, Algae, and Algae's son, Ben. It was Algae's idea, and she also arranged drop off and pick up, since there was no way we were going to yo-yo the trail. This hike was one we used to offer when camp boasted a backpacking program. It is a five day hike. We did it one. This meant setting my alarm for 4:30 AM so we could be hitting the trailhead a little after 6:00 AM. Starting on Skyline Blvd., the trail descends into the forest and winds its way mostly downward into Big Basin Redwoods State Park before winding upward and finally downward through lush greenery along Waddell Creek before spitting us out at Waddell Beach. This took 13 hours, but Algae's husband Mark met us with pizza, which was nice. There was around a 3000 foot elevation gain over the course of the hike, but of course a much bigger elevation loss. The elevation gain really isn't that noticeable when it is spread out over nearly 30 miles. At the end (which translated to around 65,000 steps for me, but thousands more for Jellyfish, who has a shorter stride - this might explain why he was more sore than I was). I wasn't as sore as I expected to be, although that definitely doesn't mean I wasn't sore. This was over 10 miles longer than the longest hike I've taken since I started keeping track of that sort of thing. I would do it again, although this week we're going to do a shorter one.

We didn't see much in the way of wildlife, although there was a banded Steller's Jay trying to get at our food during a break in Big Basin, and I'm pretty sure I heard a Swainson's Thrush along Waddell Creek (we saw and heard a lot of other birds too, but the Swainson's Thrush is one of only two diurnal birds I still need a photo of for the field guide project I've been working on, so it's special). A quick peek at iNaturalist.org indicates that they've been seen there, which leads me to believe that I'm right. Berry Creek Falls was also a beautiful spot to visit. We got there at the same time as a couple we'd seen on the trail a couple of times earlier in the day. She proved to be an out of work spa worker, and he proved to be an out of work tattoo artist. There were a lot of people in and around Big Basin too, although mostly near the parking lot. We didn't seen any hikers at all for the first 15 miles.