Winter in San Diego...

Just a random collection of photos from today's travels, mainly on the western face and North Peak of Cuyamaca Mountain.  I'll bet that these don't comport with most people's notion of winter in San Diego :)

A Lovely Evening Drive in the Cuyamacas...

Yesterday evening, just before sunset, Debbie and I took off to do a little wildlife viewing.  We headed for one of our favorite spots: the Stonewall Mine area of Cuyamaca Rancho State Park.  Several times over the past few months we've seen herds of deer up there numbering in the dozens.  This is the first year since the 2007 fires that we've seen the deer in numbers up there, so it's a cheerful sign of recovery for us to see them.

At first we were disappointed.  We got to the little valley adjacent to the mine at just about the perfect time: just as the sun was setting.  We saw one deer, just one.  We did see lots of other things, though – turkeys (a dozen or so), and many other birds of the area.  As we were leaving the Stonewall Mine area, we were just a bit disappointed.

That ended just before we reached the main road (state 79), when Debbie spotted a bobcat.  This was the very first bobcat we've seen in Cuyamaca since the 2007 fires – prior to that, we saw them frequently.  This is another very positive sign of recovery in the area; the bobcats wouldn't return until their prey (rodents, mainly) had returned in numbers.  I had two good 15 second or so sightings with binoculars on it; it looked fit and healthy.  In my first sighting it appeared be stalking something uphill of it; in the second it was just walking along.  We were a bit surprised by its color; more reddish-brown than the bobcats we see around our home, which are overall more grey than brown.  It had the trademark spots and stripes, huge feet, ear tufts, and of course the bobbed tail.  A handsome animal, indeed.

Well, that made our evening!  But there was still more on tap for us.  As we drove home, we decided to make a side trip down Japatul Lane.  This gravel road follows the bottom of a small valley, mostly farmed for forage, where we've seen deer before many times.  It was dusk when we got there, just a half hour or so before dark.  Down in the lowest part of the valley, we ran across a herd of 16 deer, including 5 very young fawns (still in spots).  A mile or so away, we spotted a magnificent 7-point stag.  We were able to park and watch the fawns and their mothers for 20 minutes or so, quite near to us.  We loved seeing those fawns...

What a beautiful evening it turned out to be!

Cuyamaca in Bloom...

Debbie and I took a delightful trip today, up to Cuyamaca Mountain and environs.  Our first destination was the Descanso Junction Restaurant, where we had an excellent (and gigantic!) breakfast: country-fried steak and eggs with rye toast for me, and eggs Benedict with chipotle-flavored Hollandaise sauce for Debbie.  Then we went wildflower-hunting!

We first took Boulder Creek Road north up the west face of Cuyamaca, then cut over Tule Springs Road almost all the way to El Capitan Reservoir, then up Eagle Peak Road back to Boulder Creek Road, then up and over the pass on Engineer Road, and finally back toward home through Cuyamaca Rancho State Park.  Along the way we visited altitudes from 1,700' to 4,800' and a dozen or so micro-ecosystems.  This means we saw a huge variety of wildflowers, this being that time of year.  Photos of some of these are below. 

We also ran across something we've seen a few times before: butterflies eating the minerals left by evaporating water.  In this case, we were at the ford over Boulder Creek, along Boulder Creek road.

We had a wonderful time, and so did Race and Miki (they came with us)...

Quite a Sunday...

Yesterday our burn permit and the weather finally came together – and we made a great start at taking care of our (giant) brush pile (the result of our pine trimming project of last summer).  We burned more than half of it yesterday, using our little Kubota tractor to move piles of brush to near the burn site, and then the chainsaw and muscles to get the brush onto the pile.  The wood is very dry, so it burned hot and nearly smokeless, giving off huge amounts of heat.  By early afternoon, we could do no more – time to put the fire out, and clean ourselves up.

Then we went out to dinner at Descanso Junction, and had ourselves a fine meal.  They've recently added a new entree to their menu: pork “steaks”, wrapped in bacon, and topped with gorganzola crumbles.  Last night they served that up with homemade chicken noodle soup and sauteed baby spinach.  Oh, my.  That was so good...

After dinner we decided to head up to the Stonewall Mine Road in Cuyamaca State Park.  It's a short drive from Descanso, and we'd seen large numbers of deer there recently.  The deer population has been greatly depressed ever since the 2007 fires, but they're finally coming back in numbers.  Last night's viewing was the best we've ever had in the park.  We spent a delighted hour watching a herd of more than 30 animals grazing in the large meadow just south of Stonewall Mine.  There is more genetic variation in that herd than we're used to seeing; we suspect that the deer have been brought in from various other places to re-establish the herd.  There were very few deer around last year, so it's hard to imagine how the herd could have grown so fast over the winter without outside help.  Toward the end of our time there, the entire herd was within a couple hundred feet of the road.  We drove very slowly right through the herd, deer on both sides of us, some within 50 feet of the car.  They don't seem to be scared of the cars, but they're very skittish when people are walking.

A very satisfying Sunday for us: a hard day's work, followed by a spectacular dinner, followed by a beautiful evening of wildlife watching.  Woo hoo!

The Deer Are Back!

Debbie and I took an evening drive up to Cuyamaca Mountain yesterday, arriving at the Stonewall Mine just before sunset.  The meadows in that area used to be full of deer, but after the fires of October/November 2007 we saw none until the last couple years, and even then just a very few.

But last night...  Last night, the deer were back, in force.  We saw about 10 groups of deer all together, with five or six of the groups number more then 20 individuals.  The grass is plentiful this year, and the deer were chowing down with some enthusiasm.

The return of the deer means that the mountain lions will be back (if they're not already).  We know the rodent population must be healthy because we see lots of hawks.  Hopefully that also means the bobcats are back (we've seen a few, but nothing like the numbers we used to see up there).  It's very nice to see the animal ecosystem returning to some semblance of normality...

A Walk on Cuyamaca...

Yesterday afternoon, Debbie and I had a very pleasant hike up Cuyamaca Mountain, with two of our dogs (Miki and Race).  We walked up the Fire Lookout Road (the paved road), as that's the only trail that our dogs are allowed on.  This area all burned over in the 2007 wildfires, and we haven't been here very much since then – it makes us sad to see all the old-growth forest gone.  The view was very nice, though.  You can see Cuyamaca Lake near the center of the photo, and to the right of the peak in the distance you can even see a piece of the Salton Sea.  Very little haze yesterday.

Well, most of the old trees are gone, but not quite all of them.  You can see in the photo above that there are some survivors, though in the distance you can see thousands upon thousands of tree skeletons, like the one at left.  We passed hundreds like this on the way up the mountain.  As we got closer to the top, we saw more and more survivors of the 2007 wildfires (like the Ponderosa at right), many of which are charred up to 15 or 20 feet from the ground.  We also saw something that was most encouraging: hundreds of young pine trees, and unbelievable numbers of baby cedar trees.  In some places, the baby cedars (all less than 2 feet high) looked like some kind of ground cover, a veritable mat of greenery.  These babies are too young – maybe just a year – to be fire pioneers.  I'm not sure what caused this cedar explosion, but it sure is nice to see.  The peak of Cuyamaca looks like some kind of development – there are several buildings in various stages of construction, some heavy equipment, and building materials in piles all over the place.  I'm not sure what they're doing up there, but the result is that the peak area is almost unrecognizable to someone like us who has been visiting there for thirty years...

The big excitement on the hike was spotting a king snake (Lampropeltis zonata) on the way down. This little fellow was right in the middle of the road! We don't see king snakes very often – it's probably been 10 or 15 years ago that we last saw one in this area. I used to hike a lot in the San Jacinto area, where I saw them quite often. If you're not familiar with king snakes, they're not poisonous (though the look a lot like the deadly poisonous coral snake). In fact, they eat poisonous snakes!

Last but certainly not least, here are my companions on our delightful little walk.  After we finished our hike, we repaired to the Descanso Junction Restaurant, where I had a burger (great, as always) and Debbie made a small dent in the prime rib special.  She brought home a box with enough beef leftover to make a meal for the both of us!

Despite being surrounded by the evidence of the 2007 wildfires, we both enjoyed getting back out in the mountains again – it's been a while since we went hiking in our local mountains...

A Trip to the Mountains...

When we left this morning it was overcast and raining, so I didn't bother taking my camera.  That was a bad mistake on my part, as Cuyamaca and Laguna mountains were in bloom – flowers everywhere we went!  Bright red penstemmon were perhaps the most common flower we saw, and far more of them than we can recall ever seeing before in our mountains.

We started out by stopping for breakfast at the Descanso Junction Restaurant, where we both had a meal large enough to fuel us for the entire day.  After that, we headed north on Boulder Creek Road.  The creek was running higher than we've seen it before, and clear.  The ford's lower edge is shown at left – if you're familiar with the road, then you know that's much higher than normal.

We stopped there for perhaps 20 minutes, and I took a walk along the north side of the stream, upstream.  It was still drizzling, and the plants along the stream were wet, so I was soaked from my hips down.  I saw quite a few nice things along the way (below), and I came back smelling strongly of plant I walked through – not sage, but with a similar smell.

Then we drove on up to where the short cut to Eagle Peak Road branches from Boulder Creek Road, and took the shortcut.  This turned out to be a beautiful drive, full of wildflowers (especially monkeyflowers and a variety of cheerful, bright yellow wildflowers).  The streams all along the road were flowing higher than we've ever seen them.

Once we hit Eagle Peak Road, we headed north and saw something we never expected: a waterfall with water!  This is a fairly tall waterfall, 50 feet or more high.  There's a rough turnout where you can park and walk south along the bluffs for a great view.  The water was pouring over this falls, and in one spot the swiftly falling water was turned 90° to shoot out straight horizontally.  It's a most pleasant spot for a little sightseeing.

Then we kept on back up to Boulder Creek Road (where we bought some honey at a roadside honeybox), over the hump on Engineer Road to Cuyamaca Lake, then down the Sunrise Highway to the turn on to Pine Creek Road, down Noble canyon.  Along the way we had spectacular displays of many different wildflowers, most especially penstemmon, lupine, snow-on-the-mountain, and fireweed.  We also saw redbuds about to bloom – lots of them, right where we thought they'd all be permanently killed by the 2007 fires.  The wind had kicked up, gusting to 50 or 60 mph, and clouds were scudding by at this speed just over our heads.  This made for really interesting and fast-changing lighting effects that we greatly enjoyed. 

Here's our remaining crummy cell-camera photos...