Category Archives: California

National Parks

Happy 97th Anniversary National Park Service!

Posted on by Shawn E. Bell

The National Parks Service will mark its 97th anniversary on Sunday, Aug. 25. Most of the parks will be celebrating by offering FREE ADMISSION!  Get out there and visit your national parks!

From the NPS website:

Since 1916, the American people have entrusted the National Park Service with the care of their national parks. With the help of volunteers and park partners, we are proud to safeguard these more than 400 places and to share their stories with more than 275 million visitors every year. But our work doesn’t stop there.

We are proud that tribes, local governments, nonprofit organizations, businesses, and individual citizens ask for our help in revitalizing their communities, preserving local history, celebrating local heritage, and creating close to home opportunities for kids and families to get outside, be active, and have fun.

You can find out more about the National Park Service – and find a National Park near you – on their website HERE.

Activities, Hiking - General, National Parks

Amusing Planet on Half Dome, The Granite Peak at Yosemite National Park

Posted on by Shawn E. Bell

Amusing Planet posted a blog with GREAT pictures about Half Dome and the joys of hiking to the top.

From the article:

The trail starts with a 13.7 km hike, followed by a rigorous 3.2 km approach including several hundred feet of granite stairs. The final 400-foot ascent up the peak’s steep but somewhat rounded east face is ascended with the aid of a pair of post-mounted braided steel cables raised on posts that lead to the breath-taking summit. This cable route was constructed close to the Anderson route in 1919 by the Sierra Club for visitors who have no rock climbing ability or equipment. Following the Half Dome Cables Trail is a unique experience, and it has become one of the most popular hikes in Yosemite National Park. As many as 1,000 hikers per day have sometimes climbed the dome on a summer weekend, and about 50,000 hikers climb it every year.

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National Forests, National Parks, News, State Parks

Immigration Reform Bill includes new penalties for growing pot on federal land

Posted on by Shawn E. Bell

As a big fan of our open spaces including national forest, state parks, and so on I firmly believe that using them to grow marijuana is a bad idea.  It’s not that I’m against the plant in any way – I’m very 420 friendly – I just don’t believe public lands should be used to grow it.  I’m a firm supporter of the Mendocino County, California’s yellow zip-tie program from a couple of years back.  It was a great idea, and it’s a shame the state of California didn’t stand behind it and allowed the federal government to swoop in and wipe out the legal and law-abiding growers crops.

Being a conservationist and being cannabis friendly and living in a state where medical marijuana is legal, I was surprised to see that the unnecessary immigration reform bill includes ANYTHING having to do with pot or federal lands.  It seems to me that a bill about immigration should be about … immigration.

From the Richmond Times-Dispatch:

The Senate recently approved a measure that would add — on top of the sentence for illegally growing marijuana — up to 10 years in prison for those cultivating the drug on federal land. The measure, a little-noticed addition to the immigration overhaul bill, also calls for new penalties for environmental damage such as that caused by the use of toxic chemicals.

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News

New and Remarkable Details of the Sun Now Available from Big Bear Observatory

Posted on by Shawn E. Bell

According to Science Daily,  researchers at the Solar Observatory in Big Bear, CA have been taking some pretty detailed photos of the sun with their new solar telescope.

From the article:

The photographs reveal never-before-seen details of solar magnetism revealed in photospheric and chromospheric features.

“With our new generation visible imaging spectrometer (VIS),” said Wenda Cao, NJIT Associate Professor of Physics and BBSO Associate Director, “the solar atmosphere from the photosphere to the chromosphere, can be monitored in a near real time. One image was taken with VIS on May 22, 2013 in H-alpha line center. The lawn-shaped pattern illustrates ultrafine magnetic loops rooted in the photosphere below.”

The other photospheric photograph is the most precise sunspot image ever taken: A textbook sunspot that looks like a daisy with many petals. The dark core of the spot is the umbra and the petals are the penumbra. “With the unprecedented resolution of BBSO’s NST, many previously unknown small-scale sunspot features can now be perceived,” said Cao. In particular, there are the twisting flows along the penumbra’s less dark filaments, the complicated dynamic motion in the light bridge vertically spanning the umbra’s darkest part and the dark cores of the small bright points or umbra dots.

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Activities, Hiking - General, National Forests, National Parks, State Parks

Hiking the Sierras

Posted on by Shawn E. Bell

Dick Hagerty, an Oakdale real estate developer active in community nonprofits, has written an excellent community column in the Modesto Bee about getting outdoors and hiking the Sierras.

I truly love getting outdoors, and I encourage everyone to visit the cathedrals of nature and see what something beyond your TV screen and computer monitor.  The world is a wide and wonderous place!

From the column:

It is not too late in the summer season to take a short drive up to the mountains and enjoy a day hiking through the woods and the wilderness. We just did the Panorama Trail in Yosemite this week, and despite the very strenuous ups and downs it was one of the all time greatest view treks I have ever experienced.

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