Forest Lawn Memorial Park, Glendale, California

Posted on July 13, 2023 by admin

Not long ago, I refreshed my memory about what a hilly cemetery can look like.

Those are images of the Woodland Cemetery & Arboretum in Dayton, Ohio. Been a while since I was there (2016), but it’s still a favorite of mine.

I thought about Woodland and some of the other park-like cemeteries of the nation while on the slopes of Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California last month. The Forest Lawn slopes are arrayed with stones flush to the ground, to facilitate lawn care.

Such beauty in its hills and landscape – and such a missed opportunity for a beautiful cemetery. There are spots of beauty, but still. Flush stones, with their numbing sameness, don’t enhance a hill the way a wide variety of standing stones do. Not at all. Not only that, traces of individuality are regularly removed, as a crew is doing in the second picture above.

Even so, Forest Lawn is an interesting place. For one thing, it’s the cemetery that inspired Evelyn Waugh to produce The Loved One, his sharp satire of the American way of death, or maybe just the California way of death. I read the book about 35 years ago, I think, and don’t remember much. I saw the awful movie based on it at some point, and am glad I don’t remember much about it except, vaguely, Jonathan Winters hamming it up, as he usually did.

Looking at the trailer, I realize now how solid the cast is. I’m surprised how much talent went to waste in that movie.

“When Evelyn Waugh came to Hollywood in 1947 to discuss the film rights for Brideshead Revisited, he visited a graveyard: Forest Lawn Memorial Park,” notes Crisis Magazine. “He had heard it praised as a place unsurpassed in beauty, taste, and sensitivity; a place where ‘faith and consolation, religion and art had been brought to their highest possible association.’ But Mr. Waugh found the cemetery dripping with saccharine sentimentality, edged with macabre memorials, and repellent with cuteness.”

I don’t know about all that; I might have a higher tolerance for sentimentality or the macabre or even cuteness than the author, though I have to say that Forest Lawn doesn’t really trade in the macabre, unless you consider cemeteries by definition macabre, which I do not. If anything, it could use just a touch of macabre to tone its memorial-park lightness down a notch.

The park is expansive, its map full of named places: Inspiration Slope, Garden of Ascension, Haven of Peace, Memory Slope, Triumphant Faith Gardens, Gardens of Remembrance, Columbarium of the Christus, Court of David, Court of Freedom, Garden of Honor, Garden of Everlasting Peace, Garden of the Mystery of Life, Gardens of Contemplation, Dawn of Tomorrow Wall Crypts, Vale of Faith, Resurrection Slope, Rest Haven, Graceland, Vesperland, Slumberland, Lullabyland and Babyland, among others.

One thing not on the map is any mention of any of the movie stars buried in the cemetery, or any hint about where they might be. There are many. That’s an odd lacuna, I think, considering this is southern California and that Hollywood Forever makes a point of highlighting the famous, and does it so well with a detailed map.

A handful of famed names appeared on Google Maps at specific points in the cemetery, including Humphrey Bogart. I wasn’t far away, so I went looking for him. I wanted to pay my respects to Bogart. (I’ve seen his hand- and footprints, too.)

Soon I determined that Bogie’s ashes are behind this door to the Columbarium of Eternal Light.

A locked door. No casual admission to see one of the great actors of his time. Or Bacall, who joined him not so long ago. “Golden Key of Memory”?

I had to content myself with stones and niches of random folk.

There’s also an art museum on the grounds, which was closed when I visited, so I had to content myself with some of the freestanding public art on the grounds. There’s quite a bit of that.

A version of the Christus.

The Court of Freedom, which has a patriotic theme, is ringed with artwork. Such as the Declaration of Independence mural.

George Washington.

The chain in front of him tells a story I’d never heard.

A version of “The Republic” by Daniel Chester French.

I don’t count the statue of Washington as a presidential site for this trip, but there was one at the cemetery I did see: the Wee Kirk o’ the Heather, a lovely spot.

Couples are frequently married at the Wee Kirk, as you’d image. In early 1940, Ronald Reagan and Jane Wyman were married there.

The Getty Center

Posted on July 11, 2023 by admin

This is the city. Los Angeles, California.

I don’t work there. I’m not a cop. I do visit from time to time, including early June, when found my way to the Getty Center, a complex perched on a high hill in the Santa Monica Mountains that provides some expansive SoCal vistas.

The 1.8 million or so visitors to the Getty Center every year thus experience something oilman John Paul Getty never did: these views, unless he hiked in the area, which from the little I know about him seems out of character. The Getty Center didn’t exist until well after his death (1976), developed by the Getty Trust and not opened until 1997.

The Getty is one of two branches of the J. Paul Getty Museum; the other is the Getty Villa, which impressed me mightily in early 2020. As a design by Richard Meier, the Getty is a triumph of pale blocks.

Water features.

And flora.

One likable feature of the museum is that you can loaf on its lawns.

“The Getty Center… houses European paintings, drawings, sculpture, illuminated manuscripts, decorative arts, and photography from its beginnings to the present, gathered internationally,” the museum web site says, in one of four buildings named for compass points: North, South, East, West.

Here’s a museum policy other places would do well to emulate: “The Open Content Program makes high-resolution images of public domain artwork from the Getty collections freely available, without restrictions, to advance the research, teaching, and practice of art and art history.”

I wasn’t particularly systematic as I wandered through the galleries. Go here, look at that; marvel at that other work. Rest on a bench (the Getty has some). Repeat. See things both familiar and strange by artists centuries past their lifespans. Sometimes I’m inspired to take my own pics at an art museum, including not just the art, but museumgoers.

Then I was inspired to take some artwork images.

Just a few. Soon I found my theme.

What better than images of Christ in the City of Angels?

Venice Beach

Posted on July 10, 2023 by admin

Caught a bit of an advertisement for a large funeral home chain on YouTube the other day. Guess the algorithm is aware that, statistically speaking, I’m closer to the end of my life than the beginning, no matter what. That’s not so strange, but it took me a moment to realize that the ad was referring to funerals – you know, the thing the company is selling – because it didn’t use that word, but said it would behoove me to prepare for my “celebration of life.”

How did that conversation go?

“No, no, take the word funeral out of the script.”

“But aren’t you selling pre-need funerals?”

“Sure, but you can’t use that word. It’ll remind people of death.”

Are we so squeamish about death? Sometimes I think so, and probably we are compared to – say – people living in the 19th century or pretty much any century before that. Still, I’m not sure potential funeral home customers would be that upset to hear about funerals.

Be that as it may, I’m still alive and looking for paths to travel. And I mean literal paths, such as the one that leads from the canals of Venice (in California) to the beach at Venice. It wasn’t a long path.

The path leads to a much longer one, two paths actually, that parallel the beach: one for pedestrians, the other for bicyclists.

Walk far enough to the north, toward Santa Monica, and you come across tennis courts, basketball courts, a skatepark and of course, Muscle Beach, whose equipment was fenced in. Not too many weightlifters were around, but then again, the entire area was only modestly crowded. I think overcast skies and 60-degree F. temps are just right for walking or otherwise moving along the ocean, but many people don’t seem to share that feeling.

Some do.

A raft of businesses, most catering to tourists and other visitors, face the beach.

Santa Monica Pier, visible in the distance (I didn’t make it again), is elaborate with shops and cafes and an amusement park and an aquarium.

Venice Pier is simple.

People were fishing from the pier. It offers a nice view of the wide beach, too.

Plus a look at some surfers. They weren’t deterred by the cool air or, for that matter, the chilly water.

Everything I know about surfing is second hand, mostly from unreliable sources. At one time, for instance, I heard that surfing was mighty wild and getting bigger every day, from Hawaii to the shores of Peru.

So I decided to spend a little while watching the surfers, to see what I could learn. Mostly I saw them ride the wave.

And then fall down.

Guess that makes surfing a metaphor for life. You’re riding along for a moment and then – down you go. Get up and it happens again.

Dublin, Barcelona, Then Venice

Posted on July 9, 2023 by admin

After a mostly dry June here in northern Illinois, early July saw some rain, but not quite enough to end the dry spell. Out beyond the grass and gardens of the suburbs, it’s a “stressful time for corn and soybeans.”

June 25, mid-day, at a cornfield in southern Wisconsin, which is suffering a drought as well. Moderate drought for the county that includes this field, at least as of the end of June.

The field looked healthy to my untrained eye, but for all I know that’s what a stressed crop looks like a few weeks into a drought. I might be up that way again next weekend or the next, and I’ll stop by for a look at the same field if so.

I had the opportunity to spend most of a weekend in Los Angeles in early June, so naturally I did. To visit some of the places that I considered but didn’t have time for in pre-pandemic 2020, because that’s how I think, though I didn’t make it to La Brea Tar Pits this time or earlier. Like the Cloisters on the other coast, it’s a place that still eludes me.

On the other hand, I made a point of going to the Los Angeles neighborhood of Venice this time.

Though named for the place in Italy, Venice has a distinctly American history, invented as it was ex nihilo by a real estate developer looking to reference the Old World in the newest part of the New World, namely California. Not just any developer, but one Abbot Kinney, whose career was circuitous and strange, the way business men could be in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Not only that, the arc of history in Venice is very much American: an initial flowering, subsequent decline, much demolition and disfigurement in the name of modernization, years of scraping along the bottom, an effort to save its meager remnants, gentrification and insane property values – all within the span of about a century, specifically within the 20th, though spilling into the 21st. Which is an affluent time for Venice of America.

“When it opened on July 4, 1905, Venice of America boasted seven distinct canals arranged in an irregular grid pattern, as seen… in Kinney’s master plan for the community,” KCET says. “Totaling nearly two miles and dredged out of former saltwater marshlands, the canals encircled four islands, including the tiny triangular United States Island. The widest of them, appropriately named Grand Canal, terminated at a large saltwater lagoon. Three of the smaller canals referred to celestial bodies: Aldebaran, Venus, and Altair.

“Soon, a second set of canals appeared just south of Kinney’s. Linking up with the existing network through the Grand Canal, these Short Line canals (named after the interurban Venice Short Line) were apparently built to capitalize on the success of Kinney’s development. Their origins are uncertain, but work started soon after Venice of America’s 1905 grand opening, and by 1910 real estate promoters Strong & Dickinson and Robert Marsh were selling lots in what they named the Venice Canal Subdivision. Built almost as an afterthought, these six watercourses are the only Venice canals that survive today.”

The rest, the originals in their irregular grid and with their celestial names, were long ago filled in and paved over – that would be the demolition and disfigurement.

I arrived in the neighborhood fairly early in the morning, early enough – I realized later – to park on Venice Blvd. within walking distance of both the canals and the beach, which is more difficult later in the day. Venice Blvd., near the ocean at least, also happens to be the locus of a handful of residents living in parked RVs and, for those who can’t swing that, tents in the boulevard median.

The canals form a neighborhood unlike any I’ve seen and, I have to say, flat-out gorgeous in our time.

Public sidewalks run between front yards and the canals, with occasional footbridges crossing the canals. This arrangement, I’ve read, is the result of renovation that occurred in the early 1990s. The only vehicular street running through the neighborhood is Dell Ave., which connects with alleys behind the houses with the wide expanse of LA streets. The way residents drive in and out of the area, that is.

The yards are lush, at least they were in June. Temps weren’t that warm the day I visited, and the skies fully overcast and sometimes drizzly, since southern California seems to be in some kind of weird weather bubble these days. Made for a good walking environment, though.

Hard to believe the area spent much of the 20th century as a slum; a quick look at Zillow’s estimates puts no property along the canals at much less than $2 million, and many a good deal more, with a scattering of new houses under way as well. Such is real estate across the decades.

Golden West Nuggets

Posted on November 3, 2022 by admin

This is the kind of detail that keeps the built environment interesting. A visible part of an alarm system of some earlier vintage, operable or not.

To be found in Placerville, California. You can also take a look at a small tower of some vintage in that town.

Placerville’s old bell tower. For use in the pre-electronic communication days, with a ring meaning something’s going on, come quick.

Wish I’d been hungry in Placerville, but no.

Some miles away, a Coloma plaque. I’m a fairly regular reader of plaques.

Another. I could post nothing but plaques, but that would be more granular than I want to be.

It’s a good-looking part of California anyway.

With recreational opportunities.

Mark Twain on Lake Tahoe (from Roughing It): “At last Lake Tahoe burst upon us, a noble sheet of blue water lifted some 6,000 feet above the level of the sea, and walled in by a rim of snow-clad mountain peaks that towered aloft a full 3,000 feet higher still.

“As it lay there with the shadows of the mountains, brilliantly photographed upon its surface, I thought it must surely be the fairest picture the whole earth affords.”

Enjoyable vistas for sure. It was good to see other people there.

I had breakfast my first morning in Reno at a restaurant for old people — except that’s me now, isn’t it? But on a weekday mid-morning, I was one of the younger patrons. Decent food, though a touch expensive (a contagion from California, no doubt, plus the inflation du jour).

After I finished, I went out to leave, but noticed a sign I had to see, not far away. I took a closer look.

Not in the market, but someone must be. If that isn’t local color, I don’t know what is.

When serendipity is with you on the road, that kind of sighting leads to others. That’s what happened that morning in Reno. This was nearby the wedding chapel.

“Bee Dance” by Andrea Greenlees (2019), according to its sign, which also said it was created at Burning Man that year.

On the next block — all this was on West Fourth Street in Reno — was a closed off place called Glow Plaza, an outdoor event space that only opened this year. Well, open for concerts on the weekends. It wasn’t open for me to look around, though there was some construction going on at an adjacent site (probably new apartments), so maybe that restriction was just temporary.

Anyway, I got a look from the sidewalk. New-looking sculptures.

Including vintage Reno neon, or maybe close-replica homages.

Speaking of apartments, this property in downtown Reno has the look of a 2010s adaptive reuse. I checked, and it is. It used to be a motel. The loss of an SRO property? Maybe, but I didn’t know there was much of that left.

Now it’s an “upscale micro-unit living facility,” to borrow a phrase from Northern Nevada Business Weekly. I checked again, and its rents range from $1,100 to $1,700 (the low end of the range is for about 250 square feet).

Could have done an entire posting of name plates on vintage cars at the National Automobile Museum. The familiar and the less familiar.

That last one’s an attention-getter. You can find it on a Krit Motor Car Co. auto, made years before jackbooted lowlifes shanghaied the symbol.

The Battle Born Memorial in Carson City, dedicated to fallen soldiers from Nevada.

At first I thought, iron? True, iron is at the heart of modern war. But as soon as I was inside, and looked up, I realized how fitting the material is. A remarkable memorial.

Especially when you gaze up at it.

The names of the fallen are inscribed there.

Eight hundred and ninety-five names, I understand. Punch Architecture did the design, which was completed in 2018.

Later I looked up Battle Born. I didn’t know that was a nickname for Nevada. Everyone’s heard Silver State, but not Battle Born State. I puzzled on that a while, but eventually realized that when Nevada entered the union (1864; Lincoln needed another two Senators), it joined the fight, as a state, to keep that union together.

A much smaller metal-work, underfoot in Carson City. Good to know I’ve been on the Kit Carson Trail.

Underfoot in Reno.

On the road to Virginia City.

The drive out from Virginia City to I-580 is along Nevada 341, and it’s a winding drop of a drive through arid landforms. This snip from Google maps illustrates the winding-est part of the road, called Geiger Grade Road at that point. The entire drop is from more than 6,100 feet above sea level at Virginia City to Reno’s 4,500 feet.

Light traffic on a sunny weekday afternoon. A fine drive if you’re paying attention. Almost car commercial driving.

This instead of a real map.

No, California. Don’t do this. It’s false economy. I don’t know how, I just know that it is.

I figured out my way around without a gizmo map. I even found a spot a few hundred yards from a parking lot, and a little off a nearby trail, where I could sit in the sun for a few minutes, and listen to only faint sounds. Almost as quiet as Joshua Tree or Big Bend NPs.

The Hotel Charlotte in Groveland, California. Now a hundred years old, it’s the kind of place that gives you a brass key, and lets you know there’s a fee for replacing it. Basic and comfortable, though the most expensive place I stayed on this trip; you’re really paying for near access to Yosemite NP.

Main Street in Groveland (California 120), just after dawn.

A few more images. Such as in Sacramento.

I had to look up lumpia: spring rolls found in the Philippines and Indonesia. And northern California, it seems. Too bad I wasn’t hungry. Also, it was closed. Not long after, I saw a Balinese restaurant in Old Sacramento. Still wasn’t hungry. Damn.

I was driving to the last place I was going to stay in Sacramento on the late afternoon of October 7, and I got a little turned around, wandering some neighborhood streets before the inevitable moment when I pulled over to consult Google Maps.

I chanced on this place.

What a garden it is.

An extravaganza of roses.

Go in the garden and ask the rose its meaning.

Cathedral of the Blessed Sacrament, Sacramento

Posted on November 2, 2022 by admin

Urban churches are often locked when no service is imminent, but on the other hand, sometimes a side or rear door is open, while the main doors won’t budge. That was the case at the Cathedral of the Blessed Sacrament in Sacramento.

A fuller view. The nicely written Wiki entry is worth quoting a bit:

“Among the first of thousands to seek his fortune in the Sacramento region during the California Gold Rush, Patrick Manogue had aspirations that differed from many of his fellow fortune seekers. His goal was to earn enough money to finance a trip to Paris, where he planned to enroll in seminary college and become a Roman Catholic priest.”

So he did, eventually becoming Sacramento’s first Catholic bishop in 1886.

“Inspired by churches he’d seen in European plazas, Manogue worked to secure property just one block away from the State Capitol, with a dream of building a cathedral in Sacramento. Manogue modeled the cathedral after L’Eglise de la Sainte-Trinite (The Church of the Holy Trinity) in Paris.”

The building, design attributed to Bryan J. Klinch, a San Francisco architect of Irish birth, was dedicated in 1889.

“Traditionally, cathedrals are built with the main altar on the east end, to reflect ‘Jesus coming like the rising sun in the east,’ ” the cathedral web site says. “While the exterior of the cathedral is Italian Renaissance, the interior was fashioned after the Victorian style of the day. Much of the decor was painted in a style called trompe l’oeil….”

Above the altar hangs a 13-foot crucifix with a crown overhead that is 14 feet in diameter, with a combined weight of almost a ton. They are held up by aircraft cables.

Side chapel art.

A little detail.

Gets right to the point, doesn’t it?

Capitol Mall & Old Sacramento Stroll

Posted on November 1, 2022 by admin

One place to go from the California state capitol is down Capitol Mall, a boulevard that generally heads west-northwest from that building to the Sacramento River three-quarters of a mile or so away.

The view down the Mall from the capitol.

The yellow-gold structure in the distance is Tower Bridge, which I decided was my destination that afternoon, on my last full day in California. The day was very warm, but I had a hat (acquired at Joshua Tree NP) and a bottle of water.

U.S. Bank Tower (621 Capitol Mall), an HOK glasswork, rises 25 stories over the street, making it the second-tallest building in the city.

I liked the blue tones of Bank of the West Tower, 500 Capitol Mall, designed by E.M. Kado and started construction in 2007, just ahead of the panic.

There are bears in front.

Another excellent styling, I thought: Emerald Tower, 300 Capitol Mall, an ’80s building designed by DMJM (pronounced Dim-Jim). It was a go-go decade for office development, after all, and this was one of the fruits of that era.

Soon the Tower Bridge was well within view, near One Capitol Mall.

An excellent bridge.

Built in the 1930s, the distinctive golden color is actually much newer than that: 2002.

I wanted to walk across it — walk across bridges when you can — and so I did, even though as a vertical lift bridge, there was a chance I’d be stuck on the other side for a while. But I made it across and back without the lifting-bridge alarm bells sounding, and I even got a view of Old Sacramento on the riverfront.

In full, Old Sacramento State Historic Park. It’s a renovated tourist district these days, with restaurants, shops and a few museums, but of course it was a working riverfront in the 19th century. Actually, I suppose it’s merely doing a different kind of work in our time.

Not to forget the good ship Delta King, built in 1927 and docked at Old Sacramento.

Except it isn’t really a ship anymore, but a floating hotel with restaurants and a theater. Popular as a wedding venue, too.

Delta King used to ply the Sacramento River to San Francisco and back as a passenger ferry. After its days as a ferry were over, it suffered the usual period of neglect and shifting ownership, but was renovated closer to our time. It’s a remarkable story.

The California State Capitol

Posted on October 31, 2022 by admin

Halloween looked the part this afternoon: cool and misty, almost clammy. By dark, 22 kids had come by. Twenty-two in ’22. We gave away full-sized candy bars.

This isn’t the California State Capitol.

Such is the zeitgeist that someone, somewhere could claim that it is, and that nefarious persons — lizard people, even — are up to no good inside, and it would have some chance of being believed, at least by a fraction of the population.

I won’t be that person. That’s the Golden 1 Center. It happens to be in Sacramento too, and I happened to see it. I will say that it has some interesting detail.

Design by AECOM and Mark Dziewulski Architect, the arena was completed only in 2016 and is home of the Sacramento Kings, a team originally formed 99 years ago as the Rochester Seagrams. The development of Golden 1 Center was a “long-running and convoluted… drama,” according to the Sacramento Bee.

Anyway, this is the state capitol of California. It has interesting detail of its own.

San Francisco architect Reuben S. Clark, clearly inspired by the U.S. Capitol, designed the building, which was constructed between 1861 and ’74. Sacramento had been state capital since 1854, apparently picked as a midway point between where the action was in early U.S. California, namely the Sierra Nevada gold fields to the east and the port of San Francisco to the west.

The building is currently undergoing renovation. The park behind the capitol, which takes up many whole city blocks, was entirely closed off by a temporary wall (ah, that’s where the lizard people are scheming).

Too bad. I hear it’s quite a park. But Lilly and I could get into the capitol itself, via a temporary covered walkway through a construction site, and through metal detectors.

If there’s a rotunda, the thing to do is look up at it.

State capitols tend to feature portraits of governors, and California is no different. Some are more recognizable than others, though I imagine even Arnold’s fame will fade over the coming decades.

On the other hand, Minerva isn’t likely to fade from her fame among classicists, eccentrics and a few schoolchildren.

Minerva and not Athena because the signs with this depiction of state seal (mounted in the capitol) called her Minerva, and besides, Athena has been associated with another place for thousands of years.

A few other details about the seal. The bear is a California grizzly which, despite being important to California symbolism, was hunted to extinction. There are 31 stars, the state being the 31st to join the union. A miner toils for gold, and ships connect California to the rest of the world in the early days.

Why Minerva? She was born fully an adult from Jupiter’s brow. As for California, it was born fully a state, skipping territorial status.

Yosemite National Park

Posted on October 27, 2022 by admin

This kind of national park review ends up on humorous lists: “Trees block views and too many grey rocks.” So we can chuckle at the philistines. Ha, ha.

Today I spent some time with Yelp one-star reviews of Yosemite National Park, and while I’m sure somebody actually posted the above as a genuine review (philistines are out there), that’s not what most of the one-star reviews were about. Rather, people were bitching about the management of the park, and specifically admissions and backcountry permitting.

Nothing untoward happened to us during our early October visit to Yosemite because of entrance snafus. But many — most? — of the one-star complaints have a ring of truth to them. Yosemite began requiring timed entry last year and did so this year (but not after September 30), and to be charitable, it sounds like there are still a few bugs in the system, plus genuine issues with rude or indifferent customer service. The permit system to climb insanely high rocks seemed poorly run too.

We call all mock government incompetence, can’t we? Or is it hard to run a major national park when it’s starved for funding?

When you arrive at the park — and get in effortlessly — all such questions melt away. Lilly and I arrived on the morning of October 6, 2022, at the Arch Rock Entrance and from there drove the winding two-lane road to the valley.

In the Yosemite Valley, it doesn’t take long to get to grandeur.

On the line separating the grass and the trees in this image, far to the right, are cars barely distinguishable as such. That’s where we parked. Grandeur wasn’t very far from there, either.

The path across the field, away from the parking lot, offered some more stunners.

After crossing one of the valley’s twin roads (one goes each way), we headed for the Lower Yosemite Fall.

Big rocks make smaller ones.

The fall.

The image doesn’t capture it too well, but there was a ribbon of water or two coming down the side of the cliff. Autumn isn’t the season if you want majestic water volume. Spring has been the season for that for millennia, but maybe not as much in recent decades.

Rocks and more rocks. Erosion in action.

Mirror Lake sounded like another good destination, walkable from the valley floor. First, Tenaya Creek.

Along a road used as a walking path.

Just off the path further on — it was by now was a regular footpath — there’s a patch of cairns, if that term applies in America (and why not?). Temporary, human-arranged rock formations. But only a little more temporary than the rock and bolder piles calving from the surrounding cliffs.

Half Dome. Famed in accounts of the people who have climbed, countless photos and a 2005 U.S. quarter dollar. Ansel Adams’ ashes were scattered up there.

If Google Images is to be believed, that’s a slightly unusual angle, but only slightly. I saw the feature from a few other places, and its granite heft never disappointed.

Mirror Lake, dead ahead.

Dry.

The park shuttle bus had taken us from Yosemite Village to the trailhead for Mirror Lake. We returned to the trailhead and took the bus back to Yosemite Village, which really is a village with a small population (about 330), a school, clinic and post office, but also a complex of hotel rooms and museums and NPS service buildings, including park HQ.

Those buildings were the only places in the Valley that day that sported genuine crowds. Other trails and sights were well populated, but not to the point of distraction.

A handful of people, about 60, repose in Yosemite Cemetery, which is on the edge of the complex but has been a cemetery longer (since the 1870s) than any of the buildings in the village have been around.

“Some of those laid to rest here are well-known figures in the history of the park,” says the NPS. “Some spent their entire lives in Yosemite and are now almost forgotten. Others were visitors about whom very little was known, even at their time of their deaths. There are people who died here while on vacation, early settlers and homesteaders, old timers and infants, hotel proprietors and common laborers…”

One resident is James Hutchings (d. 1902), businessman, Yosemite settler and publisher of Hutchings’ Illustrated California Magazine, which put the Yosemite Valley on the map, at least in the minds of 19th-century Americans. And that’s not all.

“James Mason Hutchings, the first to organize a tourist party to visit Yosemite in 1855. Hutchings unknowingly made an enormous contribution by hiring John Muir to work at his sawmill in 1869,” the NPS notes.

Sadie Schaeffer, drowned in the rapids in July 1900, it looks like.

A.B. Glasscock, died 1897, aged 53.

Albert May, died 1881, aged 51.

Walk on. By this time, the valley is catching afternoon light.

Yes indeed, we got a different view of Half Dome.

Dry now, but it does get really wet around here. At least it did in 1997.

Late in the afternoon, we left by way of a roadside view of El Capitan. The road to the closest grove of the park’s giant trees had been closed, so big trees will have to wait in case I ever return. But I wasn’t going to miss the mass of El Capitan. The boss rock.

Not far from the road.

Further back. I walked about a quarter-mile and El Capitan still dominated the view.

Closer.

It’s virtually impossible to see them in the image, but there were climbers on the face of El Capitan. I watched for a few minutes, and they seemed to be on their way down. Bet that’s a good idea in the afternoon. Except, no. There are nighttime climbers.

Donner Memorial State Park

Posted on October 26, 2022 by admin

Crossing the Sierra Nevada near the Donner Pass is fairly easy in our time, if you have a motorized vehicle, as I did earlier this month when I drove from Reno back to Sacramento. I-80 takes you right across.

Unless, of course, traffic is heavy enough to come to a standstill. Then you might have time to take pictures.

Still, you’ll face nothing like the impediments that the Donner Party encountered in the winter of 1846-1847. Their story is well known; accounts of desperate days and cannibalism have a way of piquing people’s interest.

The Donner Party’s agony is, in fact, much better known than (say) the journey of the Stephens-Townsend-Murphy Party, led by mountain man Caleb Greenwood, who in 1844 were the first successful wagon train to cross the pass. They didn’t have an easy time of it, but they made it.

I didn’t know about Donner Memorial State Park till I visited this part of the country, since I’d forgotten exactly where the Donner Party had encountered their ordeal. But when I saw the state park on the map, as well as everything else named for the Donners, I realized that it was here.

The park is just off I-80 not far west of the California-Nevada line. I resolved to go take a look.

As a memorial park, I expected a memorial. This one isn’t far from the entrance.

One of its plaques notes that the height of the memorial’s plinth is 22 feet — which was the depth of the snow that trapped the wagon train.

That isn’t the only plaque in the park honoring the Donner Party. Along one of the park trails is another plaque listing all of the members. Those on the left two columns died that winter. Those on the right two columns survived.

Both memorials are the work of the Native Sons of the Golden West, installed even before the state park was established in 1928.

At nearly 3,300 acres, the park is much more than the memorials. I took advantage of some of the trails, passing through nice scenery.

Though not nearly as sizable as Lake Tahoe, Donner Lake is a fine alpine lake in its own right. Only a few people were around.

It was really pleasant at Donner Lake that day, October 4, clear and in the mid-70s Fahrenheit. Hard to image a late October day when the area was buried by snow, but they say the luckless Donner Party encountered an early snow that year. Then again, I just checked, and the evening temps in nearby Truckee are already dropping below freezing every day.

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling

Category Archives: US: California