Rudha-an here. Caturday was delayed. Blame Titanescu. I was attempting to update WordPress, but he insisted on walking on the laptop as usual. Today, he’s leaving me alone, but that will change in a couple of hours. 🙂
For now, here are the pointy eared people and the droopy eared one.
This last week, we escaped and went adventuring. Lastech will tell you about that, but I’m going to do a bit of an intro. As I’ve mentioned before, California is on fire, making the air quality unpleasant, to say the least. Here are two pics I took during out outing that show the problem.
Lucky for us, our outing took us above the smoke so it was nice out. The critters all stayed home in the air conditioning. Pepi didn’t get to go this time as doggies aren’t permitted on the trails. She had a good run at the park before we went though, so she wasn’t deprived.
Rock City is a group of sandstone caves carved by the winds. It’s located on the SSW side of Mt. Diablo.
And now for adventure…in Lastech’s words.
As familiarity breeds contempt, proximity to “civilization” brings its blemishes. In the case of Rock City, this means carvings in the sandstone, some mundane, some obscene. There’s spray painting as well, although, in fairness, this becomes scarce the further along the trails you go. Driving up from the North Gate, you come to a fork in the road, about 3000 feet up, and turn right at the Ranger station. A short drive later, you pull off the road into one of the lots and choose your trail, easy-peasy.
Even though you know it is there, sandstone holds some fascination in sight and touch. In sunlight, much of it looks like granite, gray with some black specks (soot from older fires?), but on the ground, the color is tan, and in places, the stone looks ‘pleated’, like windswept sand dunes. You cannot help but touch it to feel its texture, and it appears slightly porous, though firm. And in the heat of an afternoon, it is hard to imagine it could ever be cold to the touch.
Sound travels differently as you walk around the stone formations: there are no echoes, voices sound slightly muffled. It is a quiet place, where you mostly hear birds, and we did see and hear a few woodpeckers.
As sunlight reflects off the lip of a hole in the stone, it paints the inside of the gaping maw in goldish-tan hues,as you can see on some of our photos.
Walking further up the trail, we came to a couple spots where I could take panoramic shots of the area, all the way to the horizon, and lo! carved into the ground was the symbol, universal: a spiral, or maelstrom.
Could this be where Ceiling Cat comes to bury His turds..?
Here is a slide show of the rest of the pics
Rudha-an here again. I normally avoid politics on the blog unless it pertains to equality (for women and my LGBTQ brothers and sisters). This time, I couldn’t resist. First, I found this…
Then Lastech found this. 🙂
