Over Zealous Miners from Michigan

Just before you drive down into Rancho Murieta, on highway 16, in the California Foothills, you can see the landscape change. The hills look different.

It is because this whole area has a history. It's where GOLD was discovered on the Cosumnes River in 1849.

Two men from Michigan found some gold along the river and within a very short time there was a town and  people swarming over this area. They wanted to get the gold as fast and as efficiently as possible. So the process of hydraulic mining was used.

Now there is no one here. Mainly a highway going up into the foothills, a clay company, some cows and, in the spring, hills covered with many kinds of wildflowers and yellow lupine.

 The Michigan Bar Mining District covered a large area. Placer gold deposits were mined extensively between 1849 and 1900 primarily by hydraulic and ground sluicing techniques. Dredging was another successful technique and extended the district's mining life into the 1950's. The total gold production in this district has been estimated at over 1,500,000 ounces.
But the miners made a terrible mess of the area because they didn't have good mining practices back then. Because they wanted to get more of the gold out of the ground they turned to larger mining practices, using water to break down the material. They called it hydraulicking. It was a form of mining using high-pressure jets of water to dislodge rock material and move sediment. The water-sediment slurry was then run through sluice boxes to remove the gold. The hydraulic mining left scars on the land that, to this day, are still visible.

But Mother Nature has worked some magic and healed most of her wounds. When Spring comes and the wildflowers bloom, this area is just about as beautiful as it gets around here.

 Above is Michigan Bar Rd looking north toward the Cosumnes River.Those are poppies and blue lupine lining the road. There are a couple of ranches down at the river and some old buildings, but mostly it's just rolling hills and a long gravel road.
If you turn around and look south, you can see the strange shape of hills that were created by huge hydraulic water guns..

If you look closer... you can see how the water pressure cut into the hills as if someone took a bite out of them.

The folks that mined this way thought that hydraulic mining was an efficient way to get the gold out of the ground but the erosion and damage to the land was horrific.
Today the land looks beautiful, with some slightly funny looking  hills and a few red dirt remnants left to tell the tail.

There are some beautiful old valley oaks here and there.

And the wildflowers (including the yellow lupine) have, again, laid their clam to the land.

Nature is always healing man's mistakes.
We need to be more careful. We don't want to damage this beautiful world beyond its ability to repair itself or we will find ourselves without a world at all and my grandchildren need a place to live.

Doing nothing, outside, in the middle of the day.

We are having our first heat wave. Summer is finally here and ,with it, limited activity. I water and do projects in the morning and go for walks after the sun goes down. I loose all my energy on hot summer days, so I stay inside with my precious air-conditioning. I have no shame. I would be living in Alaska, or at the ocean, if I didn't have air conditioning. I'm not a hot, summer in the city, type person. Summer is something I suffer through. Its redeeming value is summer vegetables, wild blackberries and the fragrance of the Butterfly Bush blooming in the front yard.
One project I did this week was to paint a folding, metal chair that badly needed help. This was done early in the morning after Farmlady's second cup of coffee... in a cool, shady spot under the oak trees.
This was what it looked like "before".

 A pretty chair that you couldn't sit in. The paint had oxidized and if you sat on it you got up with dusty white stuff all over your rear end.  The cushion helped, but you still got powdered if you leaned back.
For a while, I just put a plant on it.

This worked and no one accidentally sat on it. But, it was a chair, after all, and things should be used for what they were intended.
 So... last week I washed the chair with soap and a wire brush, let the sun dry it, checked for loose paint and the next morning I spray painted it.
Here is the new spiffed up chair with all the intention in the world... waiting for someone to sit on it.

I love the color. It's Krylon indoor/outdoor spray gloss. The color is "ivy leaf". It dries in less than 10 minutes. I only used one spray can. I wanted the darker finish to show through, so I didn't cover it with a second coat. I like the effect. Now, there are no embarrassing moments when friends want to sit on the porch and talk.
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Last night I went for a late walk up to the top of the property. It was still warm and it smelled like summer in the foothills... a mixture of heat, grasses, oak trees, manzanita and toyon. It's a good fragrance.

Annie followed me and then decided I had gone too far, so she waited for me below the well house. Always, at some point on our walks, she stops. It's as if she knows not to go further. Interesting.
Maybe she smells something or senses danger. I'm not sure, but she always stops and waits until I come back. Then she runs ahead of me and we walk back to the house.

She leads me home. It's a very important job for her. If I stop to take a picture she runs up to me, circles my legs and starts walking again. It's a little ritual we both enjoy.
I stopped once more before we reached the house because I saw a burst of blue in the dry grass. It was one of the last spring wildflowers standing.

It was Brodiaea elegans (the Elegant Brodiaca). This wildflower blooms from April to July in our grassy hillsides. It begins to flower when the fields dry out in early summer.
I took some pictures and then, as the evening darkened, walked back down the trail toward home.
When we reached the house I put Annie in the garage, gave her a treat and a quick back scratch, closed the door and walked across the concrete to the back door. I heard Brownie acknowledge me from the goat house.
The dogs were at the door and greeted me like I had been gone for years. Carl looked annoyed. He forgot that he and Cutter go with me every other night. It's a different walk with them on a leash. Not so peaceful. Lots of stopping and going. I guess Annie feels the same way about me.
The Prospector was reading in the living room.
He looked up and said, "Did you put the cat in?"
I said, "Yep.".
He said, "Thanks".
I looked outside and it seemed dark already.

Tonight I went a little earlier... and took the dogs.
We watched for Rattlers and stayed in the middle of the main road coming up to the house. With this heat we have to be very careful.  No walking in the grass.The Rattlesnakes will be coming soon. Another reason to love summer. (That was sarcasm!)

Friday Shoot Out ; with a camera

I think I'm finally getting this BOKEH technique down.
Remember what Bokeh is?
In photography, bokeh is the blur, or the aesthetic quality of the blur, in out-of-focus areas of an image, or (derived from Japanese word "boke", meaning 'blur') - In photography, refers to the creative use of lens blur as a composition.
The photo above is a White Globe Lily.

This is a common Thistle, but I don't know what kind.

The Red Clover is everywhere right now. As I walked up to the top of the hill it's like a carpet beneath my feet.

I had no photos of a "Zoo" (the photo topic for this week), so this is my maverick Friday Shoot Out.
For "Zoo" photos go here.