The Board Chronicles is an ongoing series of articles about the adventures of Mr M’s Woodshop as a vendor at community festivals & craft fairs. Learn about the horrors of The Road. Read the impossible demands of the people that know what I should really be doing. In short, it’s the comedy of errors that has become my life, presented here, like my cutting boards, as simple unvarnished truth. All for your amusement … and for the good of vendor-kind.
I was very excited about journeying to Northern California to be a part of the California Artisan Cheese Festival in Santa Rosa. I’ve always been focused on serving pieces, and this seemed like a very nice, targeted event.
The year was 2020, and then the world went to hell.
The 2020 event was cancelled due to covid, of course, like almost every public event in California that year. And again in 2021. And, for many events especially early in the year, 2022 was not different. For 3 years, this event was lost to me.
Finally, 2023 became a new opportunity. Thank goodness.
This Festival is a series of events over a long weekend with artisan cheese classes, food pairing events, farm tours and more. On Sunday afternoon, a vendor event is produced with a very large group of artisanal cheese producers – many with their own herds for true farm-to-table cheese – as well as related vendors including vintners, brewers, distillers … and woodworkers, among others. About 100 vendors were gathered for this 5 hour event.
New Ideas
I broke many rules to do this event.
This is a one-day, 5 hour event. I don’t do one-day events.
Since this event was 400 miles away from our home, I had to drive and stay in a hotel for … a one-day, 5 hour event. That never would have happened independently of any other good ideas, so…
Mrs M made a rare appearance at this event, playing the part of a Foodie enjoying the best of cheese while I was working like a dog in the booth. So, the event became the *excuse* to do a long weekend in Wine Country. We spent 5 days visiting Healdsburg, Sonoma, St Helena, and more. If you like wine, if you like food, if you like to wander … wine country is a great getaway.
Since I was all in for the event, the first event of 2023 … I created Serving Trays as a base for Charcuterie Kits to debut at this event.
I didn’thave walls (the event is indoors at the county fairgrounds, no canopies/frames allowed), so I could not hang pictures. And I had just done nice photography of the charcuterie kits … so I did a thing. I produced a Power Point presentation to show on my tablet, which was mounted on the table above the serving trays. The mount cost all of $22 and displayed the “boards in action” photos that really help illustrate what my boards can help you do. New presentation idea, powered by a portable battery we have to re-charge cellphones at un-powered events. Worked like a charm!
This was a getaway weekend, with a destination of a single booth at a targeted event … so I left the trailer at home, and packed the truck with what I needed. The limiting factor of the truck meant I left many products at home, but focused exclusively on serving pieces appropriate for artisanal cheese, charcuterie boards … or whatever people serve things on.
Observations
The display was more farmer’s market than fancy art boutique. It was a very casual atmosphere, a table top event (which, again, I never do these days). The promoter provided 2 8′ tables with short table cloths. I brought an additional 4′ table, and that was the total base of the display.
We arrived at 8a, and were set up by 9:30. The event didn’t start until 11, so we were perhaps a bit early. But you never know what the challenges are at a new event in an unfamiliar venue. It’s good to relax and check out the event before the masses arrive.
Mrs M being there means that she messes with my display. She improves the look of the booth, she says. She makes it better, she says. She increases sales, she says.
I have no idea what she’s talking about.
The floor was busy during this event. Estimated attendance of 1,500, all there to sample cheese and wine … and beer and nuts and bread and whatever vendors were giving away. Lines were 20+ people deep, 8-10 minutes for a “hot” vendor like Cowgirl Creamery or Beehive Cheese Company.
I had talked to the promoters about my unique presentation (compared to the food vendors sampling their creations, I was the weird one). They put me in a corner booth so people could walk on 2 sides of the booth. That was good.
They also put me across the building, in front of the bandstand. That was bad. (The band was primarily acoustic with a banjo, clarinet, tuba and percussionist. Very fun Americana music and not too loud.)
They also put me on the path to the bathroom. That was good. I guess.
Booth locations are something that I do my best to ignore, honestly. Vendors don’t control them. Why get upset about where you are when it’s someone else’s decision? I’ve run events. I’ve assigned vendors to booth locations. I’ve also dealt with upset vendors that just lost their minds because their location … wasn’t whatever they thought it should be. I don’t want to be that guy. My location was FINE. People could see me. We were not blocked by a line. If people were looking for a wooden object, they knew where I was.
But I brought cheese boards … I didn’t bring chess boards. That was a request. As were book shelves. I politely said sorry! … just as I happily dispensed free advice on how to deal with a permanently mounted wooden cutting board embedded into a stone counter. I am old, so I must be wise. I guess.
There were actually 4 woodworkers there. Two were really focused on traditional cutting boards and one exclusively made seascape resin boards using that dreaded bulbous grass, AKA bamboo, as their base. Truly I did not compete with any of them.
My first 3 sales were Charcuterie Kits and Serving Trays. Vindicated, I was.
And I said that out loud to the Lady. So, of course, I didn’t sell another one.
For a five hour event that was an excuse to drive 400 miles … this was a winner. I sold enough to pay the entire hotel bill, gas and vendor fee. The Lady got to geek out on cheese … and found the highly-sought cheeses that are used in the world’s best grilled cheese sandwich (found at the Rustic Bakery & Muir Woods National Forest) as well as the fabulous Very Adult Mac & Cheese from the Market in St Helena. Both of these dishes served as destinations for us during the weekend, so buying the necessary cheeses was a great coup.
Sometimes, going a-vendoring is about the journey, not the destination. I’m taking the win on this one.
The Food
When we travel, the Lady busies herself in the passenger seat stalking restaurants in our destination city to choose the ultimate, best dinner she could find. It’s her thing. This trip, however, it just worked out that we did lunches as our culinary adventures, and “settled” for take out most evenings.
Best Meal: Pizza Verde at The Journeyman, an Italian charcuterie in Healdsburg that makes their own sausage salumi. The pizza featured soppressata, an Italian sausage sometimes made by pressing the meat between 2 boards. It was amazing. And we just might have purchased a lot of sausage to bring home. And a guillotine to cut it. And joined their meat club. Hey, we were on vacation.
The Other Best Meal: A pannini-style grilled cheese sandwich, the Marin Melt, with Rustic Bakery‘s Honey Whole Wheat bread, Two cheeses are combined: Cowgirl Creamery Mt Tam and Point Reyes Toma cheese.
Honorable Mention: Very Adult Mac & Cheese, The Market, St Helena. I added chicken, the Lady added crab. Draw your own conclusions. We had this dish a few years ago when we visited Little Girl at her nearby college, Sonoma State in Rohnert Park. Simply fabulous food. Worthy of being a destination.
Worst Meal: We went out one night, Monday night. Most restaurants were closed (oops). Choice # 1 was an Italian restaurant that wanted reservations (double oops). Desperation drove us to another relatively well reviewed Italian restaurant, Alfredo’s in Petaluma. It was horrid. Made the Lady sick, even. My belief is the Mexican American cooks had no clue how to follow the Italian recipes they were given. Every dish was just … off. Mrs M later found a couple of bad reviews that talked about “cooks in training.” Sorry, not for a dinner costing over $100 for 2 with no alcohol.
The Facts
Total miles driven: 852
Booth cost: $250
# of people we met during the event from the producer: 4
Visits in the booth by a promoter’s representative: several
Returning next year? Yes. This is a great event for cheese enthusiasts … and Mr M’s Woodshop belongs there.
Little Girl was marrying E, and I asked if they wanted me to build anything for their wedding.
The answer was yes, and I got a to do list that was 3 items long:
A board for guests to sign. A keepsake.
Sets of candle holders to decorate the reception.
A heptagonal arch for the wedding ceremony.
I decided to make all 3 items out of white oak. I start with lumber.
No, this was not all of the lumber. I ended up getting a whole lot more lumber before it was all built.
The sign-in board was a simple 24″ circle, cut on the CNC. I then went to my buddy the flag maker, who used his laser engraver to cut words out of 1/8″ ply. Those were spray painted burnt umber with an acrylic spray, and then mounted on the piece. The whole assembly got a top coat of rattle can lacquer.
The time consuming project was making candle holders. I made 12 sets of 3 … so 36x pieces with 4 sides, 1 shelf and 16 accent pieces. Each. That’s a lot of pieces. The lumber had to be planed down to 1/2″ thick, so I generated a lot of sawdust on this project.
A lot of sawdust.
These candle holders are one of my favorite projects, actually; I first made them about 10 years ago for Christmas presents.
I have learned a bit and upgraded the garage shop since then, thankfully, so the lumber went from track saw to table saw to planer to table saw to CNC to router table to assembly.
A unique part of this project is how you assemble the sides that have chamfered edges to fit perfectly into a square without showing the wooden edges. No nails are used, just glue. And how do you join slippery sides of a square together without nails?
You rubber band them together until the glue dries.
Then you do the same process for the Walnut accent pieces, rubber banding them into place until that glue dries. The raw wood was then finished, again, with rattle can lacquer.
The biggest project in many ways was making the 7-sided arch, AKA a heptagon or a septagon. Internal height had to be big enough for E to be nicely framed … so 78″ it was.
Luckily, there are some handy polygon calculators on the interweb thingy that told me what I needed. Each side was 3′ – 7″, and every angle had to be 128-5/7 degrees. Simple, right? Of course, the miter gauge only has degrees, not sevenths of a degree. Time for some fancy footwork. Apparently.
The sides of the arch were configured with 3 lengths of lumber connecting to 2 lengths of lumber using finger joints and bolts to hold it together. I nailed pieces in place to reinforce each joint so that the angles would not vary one-seventh of a degree from the design. The joinery was important, as the arch had to come apart for transport.
And the heptagon would be assembled and installed by the venue’s staff, as I was to be elsewhere. I was told that I would be elsewhere a few times, so I knew it was true. And since I was to be elsewhere, I labeled each joint with a letter so if they put joint “A” together with the other part of joint “A,” all would be well.
The base was the final piece I made, and required a lot of head time to visualize what was needed. Because 7 is an odd number – stay with me here – the finger joints had to be 3 fingers on one side and 2 fingers on the other in order to mate up with the other 6 pieces of the heptagon. After a lot of staring at the wall time, I finally got simple and made the bottom with 5 pieces of lumber all the same size – but sticking out 3 fingers on one side and 2 fingers on the other. It was simple, but it was not simple to me on July 20. And the wedding was August 5.
The base was destined to be buried in the sand, but it had to have the structural integrity to both support the heptagon sticking 7′ into the air … and not blow over if an ocean breeze decided to attend the wedding. So, as I am sure you can see, I felt no pressure as I made up this plan staring at the wall.
Finish was brush on urethane, suitable for outdoor applications. The heptagon is destined to take up residence in the back yard of the Kenderas when they build out that landscaping … but first, the heptagonal arch had an important date with a beach.
Alas, I cannot bring back the California Grizzly Bear, which was last sighted in 1924 and declared extinct shortly thereafter. It was hunted to extinction after the gold rush caused ’49ers to encroach on the bears’ habitat.
I do have a couple of stories about the bear that first graced the flag of the very short-lived independent California Republic. That happened in 1846 … and apparently California has been dependent ever since.
Bear baiting, where bears were put into fights against bulls, were a big spectacle in the California of the 1800s. Horace Greeley, a newspaperman of great accomplishment, saw one of these fights and observed that a bear fought with a downward swipe while a bull countered with a horn’s upward thrust. This caused Greeley, it was said, to coin the terms of bear & bull markets for Wall Street.
This wasn’t fake news (joke! It’s a joke!), but it wasn’t true. The popular term (OK, not so popular with most) for a bear market has a very different beginning, which you can read about in Merriam Webster’s article, here.
California has plenty of wild spaces where grizzlies could thrive, but efforts over the last few decades to move up to 500 grizzlies back into California have not been successful. You can draw your own conclusions about whether California is wild enough to support the mighty grizzly bear.
The bears that I make are all from Black Walnut, and measure 19″ from nose to tail. They stand about 9-1/2″ high.
These bears and everything else that I make in the Woodshop are now available on my new site, MrMsWoodshop.com. Special offers for this one-time-only launch month are free shipping for any order over $50, and 20% off everything, site-wide, when you use the promo code “MrMsLaunch.”
Here’s the link to go straight to the page for these California Bears.
The Board Chronicles is an ongoing series of articles about the adventures of Mrs M’s Handmade as a vendor at community festivals & craft fairs. Mrs M’s subsidiary, Mr M’s Woodshop, has been approved to create this chronicle for the good of vendorkind.
When I left you, dear readers, I had a rental car and was in a hotel in Gilroy, trying to imagine what should be next. That was Monday. If you need to catch up, you need to read about our experiences at this year’s Gilroy Garlic Festival. Read about it, here. Go ahead, I’ll wait.
Since that fateful Sunday evening just 5 days ago, I’ve driven several hundred miles, finally gotten all of my stuff back … and am now sitting at home. Here is what happened:
Velda & I spent Monday watching the news and trying to figure out what to do. We networked with other vendors and read email updates that we began to get. The Garlic Festival website had a dedicated link to news as well.
CNN was carrying all of the Gilroy press conferences live at this point,
and we were eager viewers. We learned that the entire Christmas Hill
Park was now considered a crime scene, and that the entire area was now
under FBI protection. It appeared that it would be days before anything
could be recovered from inside the park – where the jeep and trailer
were parked, and the booth was set up with all of my wooden pieces on
display, open to the elements 24/7.
Remembering the Enterprise Rent-a-car slogan (“We’ll pick you up!”), we took them up on that offer and got a rental. We stayed near Gilroy on Monday night, which was an extra night in the motel, plus food (an accurate accounting will follow in the formal event review, but for now, you’ll just get approximations). $200.
We communicated with our final customer of the day, who had bought a beautiful, large Black Walnut cutting board and left it with us for pickup later … until we were all interrupted by the idiot with the gun. The buyers, luckily, lived in Gilroy, and we agreed that we would see each other when we returned, so they could get their cutting board … which was currently in the FBI’s protective custody.
We decided to drive home with the rental on Tuesday, and drop it off in Santa Clarita. $200.
Gas, $40.
On our way home, we learned at 2:45p – when we were 4 hours away from Gilroy – that we could pick up the Jeep if we were there by 6:30p. No way we could make that, and having the Jeep wasn’t that helpful anyway in the near term. The trailer had to stay with the booth – and the product was not accessible. Yet. We decided to keep on the road to home and do nothing, for now.
Wednesday was more of the same. I called the offered information number … and got the main receptionist for the city of Gilroy. No help there. Velda got a call from an FBI agent, who verified that she did not see the perpetrator.
We saw nothing.
Our near-complete lack of information, and general confusion continued throughout the week. Official announcements were typically made shortly before the time period that you were allowed to do something, so you really had no advance notice when anything would change. No. Idea.
Late Wednesday, an update landed on the website saying that “sometime” on Thursday the vendors on our side of the park would be able to recover their property. No other information was given. No time. No schedule. Nothing. We were cautioned that we would need an ID or driver’s license, proof of insurance and registration for the vehicles before they could be recovered. Well, OK, then.
Velda & I agreed that we would pack up Wednesday night and drive north Thursday morning. We would take the opportunity as it presented itself.
Velda, who had her fair share of anxiety – and then some – woke up at 2:15a. She puttered in the kitchen. At about 4a, she starting making the bed with me still in it and that’s when I got up.
We were on the road shortly after 5a. We drove her car, with the plan being that she would drive it home while I drove the Jeep & trailer home. Gas to & fro, $80. Wear & tear … well, we’re way beyond accounting for that on this one.
We were in line behind a flatbed produce truck. I have no idea why.
When we were almost to Gilroy, we learned that we could get access to the park after 1p. Since it was shortly after 9a, we had some time to kill. We ended up at the Gilroy outlet mall, and Velda did a bit of shopping. I read a book. We ate lunch (she made our lunches at 3a, I think it was). We headed out at about noon, and we were at the gate at 12:15p. A CHP officer was manning the barricade, and he told us where to wait. We got in line; about 10 cars were ahead of us.
Soon after we got in line, an FBI agent came out to talk to everyone in line and tell them what to expect:
You would be individually escorted at all times
You were not allowed to do anything but recover your property that was located on what’s called the “park side” of the park … where our booth was.
Everything in your booth had already been examined by the FBI.
All cash in the booth had already been photographed, logged and removed by the FBI (we had left none).
All valuables were similarly removed from the booth, we were told (so my cutting boards were not considered valuable. This is SO WRONG.).
They had already arrested some people that tried to sneak through the protective line of police. The crime scene was still being managed by the FBI (how stupid do you have to be to try and sneak onto a crime scene while the police are still there?).
We finally got to go in a little after 2p.
Each car had to be checked in by the FBI. A form had to be filed with my ID info for each of my 2 vehicles. Velda was also identified with legal ID and logged into their system. While in the park, we had a nice FBI agent named Matt (badged & armed) by our side at all times. Our trailer was an additional wrinkle; but we got a ride in an FBI cart to the Jeep, where I could then hook up the trailer, drive to the booth and begin to do what we were there to do. Velda took the pictures … this is exactly how we found the booth. The empty containers in front of the booth, the products and the canopy were set up exactly how we had left them Sunday evening.
This is the area of our booth after it was removed. The mostly brown grass was the walkway between my tables. The green grass was under the tablecloths. The rectangles of dead grass are where my empty containers were sitting under the tables. As you can see, most of the other vendors were already out of the park, but work continues.
There was some minor damage to most of the boards due to exposure to the elements; they’ll need to be refinished. Unfortunately.
Thursday evening, we went to our motel for the evening & I took a shower, thankfully. We went out to dinner, and then found our customer to present her with the board, now liberated from protective custody.
Motel, $140. Food, $52.
We got up Friday morning, had our horrible but “free” breakfast at the motel, put gas in both cars and got on the road. We’re now home with the Jeep, trailer & my boards. The trailer is in the driveway … and now I have to fix all of the damage.
But not today.
I need to repair 200+ boards before my next event in 14 days. Costs … let’s call it a day or more, and at least $100 for supplies (sandpaper, oil, beeswax, lacquer).
Home again.
We now know that the FBI investigation will continue for perhaps another week; all booths and property left on the other side of the park (the “ranch side”) are still in place. Those vendors must simply wait.
We now know that our last customers of the day – the couple that bought the nice Black Walnut end grain cutting board – were RIGHT THERE when the shooting happened. They saw it all. They ran for their lives, and, fortunately, were not injured. They are also 100% certain that the shooter acted alone. There was no accomplice. There was no 2nd shooter.
There was just one stupid, crazed gunman who wreaked havoc on a community.
The Board Chronicles is an ongoing series of articles about the adventures of Mrs M’s Handmade as a vendor at community festivals & craft fairs. Mrs M’s subsidiary, Mr M’s Woodshop, has been approved to create this chronicle for the good of vendorkind.
2 July events … and both get a Special Edition of The Board Chronicles.
Not. Good.
I was a vendor at the 41st Annual Gilroy Garlic Festival. It’s been on our bucket list for many years – long before we were vendors, Mrs M was a great cook. She is a foodie. And if you’ve ever eaten at her table, you know she loves garlic.
Loves. Garlic.
So, of course, we wanted to go to the world’s pre-eminent festival in celebration of the Stinking Rose. Since the event is always in the heat of summer … and Mrs M’s products don’t play well when it’s in the 90s … we decided that I would be the vendor, and Velda would be the tourist. We had a plan. I applied to the Festival, got accepted as a vendor, and we were on our way.
All was good through most of the event, which will be reviewed separately. It’s a 3 day event, and Friday and Saturday passed without incident. We had fun. Sunday was a slower, relaxing day as is typical for a festival. I had just finished with my last customer at 5:35p and sat down to rest for a few minutes before our packing & load out would get started at 6p.
5:41p. We heard some pops. And then some more.
It sounded like gunfire, but some pops didn’t, I thought. No clue what it was. We then saw people running by my booth, screaming. “Shooter! Run!” But … run where? We had no clue what was happening where, so we didn’t move. We did go behind our booth to not be as visible.
5 sheriffs ran by, towards the source of the sound, guns drawn.
A 30-something woman was also behind our booth, with a crying, lost child. The woman called the child’s mother trying to reunite them.
No one knew anything. Hysteria. What? Where?
Terror.
A little after 6p, event organizers (all volunteers!) told everyone to evacuate to the south (away from the gunfire). I had already emptied the cash drawer; I gathered up our electronics and was ready to go. Velda … she picked up her valuables, which were 3 braids of garlic and her purse. Yes, I got to carry 10 pounds of garlic the rest of the evening. But, it was safe.
Velda saved the garlic.
We walked away from our $4,000 Trimline canopy, and my 200+ boards in the wide open booth. We moved with the crowd to the southern-most area of the park, and then eventually were moved to a nearby large concert amphitheater.
We simply abandoned the booth. We walked away from everything, open to the breeze. It’s just stuff.
We. Got. Out.
Organizers were there to help keep people calm and announce what was known (nothing). Velda shot a little video (why?) that shows you what the chaos sounded like.
We were in the amphitheater with several hundred people. Most were normal guests of the Garlic Festival. There were several volunteers, and many vendors as well. Eventually, it was decided that the guests that were in remote parking could walk to a nearby elementary school, and meet shuttle buses there to get them back to their cars. Those with cars on site (us!) would sit tight. That was just getting going … when 6 police moved quickly through the theater, guns drawn. They were going further south. Quickly.
Soon, there was a panic and people started running away … to where? Back to where we were evacuated from? Chaos returned. We had been sitting on a straw bale in the front of the audience area; Velda and several nearby people were now face down on the grass, hiding from … what?
We had no real information.
After that calmed down, we were quickly told that everyone would go to the elementary school. We started walking: six tenths of a mile to the school. We got to the school, and many people got picked up by family members there. Buses were there, taking people to parking lots. We … sat on a curb. We had no easy way to get anywhere we wanted to go. Our hotel was 8 miles away. No family or friends to come pick us up. We heard there were 3 Uber drivers in all of Gilroy, and they would clearly be overwhelmed.
Then we heard from a bus driver (!) that we were all to get on a bus which would go to the remote parking lots the Festival patrons needed, and then could go to Gavilan College, where people like us would get assistance to leave the area.
We got on a bus, and the driver immediately got lost. We turned around, circled the neighborhood, and then finally got to the Green lot … and waited behind some unmoving buses for a while. The driver eventually determined she needed to go around the buses that weren’t moving, and we got to the loading zone. Some people got off. We turned around … and then another party on our bus determined they should have gotten off at the last lot. We had to turn around. Again. The chaos continued.
We got back to the Green lot … but now we had to wait to be interviewed by an officer there that were taking down ID info, phone numbers, and statements. We saw nothing … but they have my cell number if they want to ask me any questions. After the interview, the CHP did arrange for us to get on the bus and get transport to Gavilan College.
Once there, another officer stepped on board to ask if we had seen anything. With that negative answer, we were free to go … where? We had no way to go anywhere and thought that waiting for a cab would probably be hours at best. That’s when a nearby young man raised his hand and called out, “Anyone need a ride?”
Fidel was simply a good samaritan that was helping out. He lived in Gilroy. He and his buddy Neil had their families in a safe place, and they were now offering rides to strangers.
You bet we got in their car. We do rely on the kindness of strangers all of our lives; but it’s always surprising when it’s such a large kindness. Fidel, AKA “Pops,” gathered up 5 strangers, and we proceeded to go to 3 different hotels & a restaurant that the strangers needed to get to. We were the last stop, and discovered that Neil was actually our vendor neighbor. His girlfriend is a 2D artist; the Gilroy Garlic Festival was her first-ever event. We met them Friday; hadn’t realized that he was the boyfriend until we got out of the car.
Kindness.
One passenger in our SUV was 80 feet from the shooting and talked about throwing kids in his booth behind boxes to try and get them undercover. We met another vendor that talked about how the shooting happened right beside the booth they had last year … but they were in a different position this year. But for the grace of God….
We got back to the motel at about 9:15p, 3-1/2 hours after the incident. Velda bought screw top wine from the motel gift shop. We ordered pizza.
We now know that the shooter cut through the perimeter fence to bypass the entrance security for the event. We now know that the incident was contained VERY quickly by the police force on duty at the event. The event site was divided into 5 zones, with officers patrolling each zone. We saw cops on foot, on horseback and on dirt bikes throughout the event, and 3 of those cops responded immediately to the shooter, and killed him with their pistols within a minute of the shooter opening fire with his AK-style rife. The cops were out-gunned, but they ran to the danger. And, perhaps, they ended it right then. Perhaps all of the uncertainty that thousands felt after the shooting was unnecessary, if that idiot shooter was truly a lone, crazed gunman.
Our perspective is that the event organizers did EVERYTHING right. They had a fenced border. They had security. They had a significant police presence. One idiot lone gunman defeated their planning. Unless they build a border wall around the park … what can you do?
As I write this on Monday, we still don’t know if there was a 2nd person involved in the attack (witness accounts varied). We still don’t have access to the park, so our booth and my products are still open to the elements. The Jeep is still on lockdown, and we now have a rental car.
We’re fine. We’re safe. The stuff we left in the park will be taken care of eventually, and I’m very OK with that.
Propelled by relentless ocean waves and strong onshore winds, small grains of sand accumulated to form the impressive dunes of Guadalupe-Nipomo Dunes National Wildlife Refuge in California. Stretching inland from the Pacific Ocean, the migrating dunes are home to a unique ecosystem of plants and animals, like the northern elephant seal, the western snowy plover and the California red-legged frog. Two remote hiking areas offer visitors a chance to explore this dynamic landscape in peace and solitude. Photo by Ian Shive, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Posted on Tumblr by the US Department of the Interior, 7/5/17.
California’s Case Mountain is home to some of the largest trees on earth! Located about 7.5 miles southeast of the town of Three Rivers, California, Case Mountain was established to protect the giant sequoias. Comparable in size to a 26-story building, sequoias not only loom over their mixed conifer forest neighbors, but they also outlive them – reaching over 3,000 years. Photo by Bob Wick, Bureau of Land Management. Posted on Tumblr by the US Department of the Interior, 4/28/17.
Abundant winter rain this year ushered in a series of super-blooms in southern California, including the thread-leaved brodiaea in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains in eastern Los Angeles County. “It’s the only brodiaea left in Los Angeles County, so it’s extremely rare, and what we have on our land is pretty special,” said Ann Croissant, a retired professor with a background in plant physiology, who has led a local effort to protect this endangered plant. Credit: Joanna Gilkeson/USFWS. From the US Fish & Wildlife Service Pacific Southwest blog.
Sacramento River Bend Outstanding Natural Area in California includes expansive rolling hills of blue oak and lush forests surrounding the Sacramento River and its tributaries. The beautiful and diverse habitat – home to bald eagles, osprey, deer and salmon – offers natural beauty and solitude paired with numerous recreation opportunities, sunrise to sunset. Photo by Bob Wick, Bureau of Land Management. Posted on Tumblr by the US Department of the Interior, 4/13/17.
