Tuesday, July 20, 2010

Crocuta crocuta

For the last four summers now, I've made a pilgrimage up to Plumas National Forest in the northern Sierra Nevada, near Janesville. The place is called "Crocuta" after the funny sounding name of the spotted hyena, named over 40 years ago, even before the cabin below was built by my friend J.

Late last summer J built a second outhouse to accommodate some 30 people camped in and around his meadow.

I thought the ladies' room was a little plain, so during this year's visit I decided to begin decorating it a little. I found this mosaic-y hanging at the Blackhawk Solar Cookoff, which was an awesome hippie festival in Taylorsville nearby.

I also ripped this out of a magazine because it made me laugh.

Crocuta is rife with your standard cute forest critters. This golden mantle was being a little odd on the deck I thought... but cute, and so I had to take a picture.

Behind the cabin is the "feeding rock", which is where leftovers that just didn't make it go, and where they are almost immediately gobbled up by squirrels, chipmunks, beldings, golden mantles, scrub jays... you name it. I love the body position on this little guy too!

A new discovery this summer was a tree fungus growing high up on Lodgepole - I know very little about fungi, but thanks to my experience at the LA Mushroom Fair, I thought that maybe, just maybe, this might be an Agarikon?

Deep in the wilds of backcountry driving Plumas National Forest we came to the "rose quartz mine" (it's not a mine) - this photo shows the colour best, it was quite remarkable. If only we had some dynamite!

Finally, J needed a haircut, and digging around the bathhouse, found a little something from 1938:

Coupled with these:

They were quite stiff, and I figured they needed a good cleaning, so I took them apart, and I'm pretty sure that a large part of the issue was the LIVE spider and FULL nest that existed on the interior. The spider was less than pleased to be extracted with my careful toothpick operation, but I didn't kill it (or its future offspring), so it should be happy enough...

5 comments:

Missy said...

How come you always find so many random things on your travels?
Whereas I found a creepy bug and three mosquito bites (the day I got home).
I must not be doing it right. :)

gnat said...

And here I left out the whole drunken bug saga, which literally kept me occupied at the time for over an hour. Seriously drunk bug. It was awesome.

Missy said...

Sounds like another blog post is in order. You have to explain the drunk bug story now.

michaelcandido said...

Yes you have an agarikon on that tree. I wonder if its pores are white or yellow. All the ones ive collected (16) are yellow. Ive seen some with white pores when alive. Im aways looking for another specimin to sequence dna later.

michaelcandido said...

Yes you have an agarikon on that tree. I wonder if its pores are white or yellow. All the ones ive collected (16) are yellow. Ive seen some with white pores when alive. Im aways looking for another specimin to sequence dna later.