Leon Turnbull Photography

After checking into our hotel in San Francisco, my wife and I had an early dinner sitting out on the streets of the city and watching all the strange people walk by. There are definitely quite a few of them in that city. One guy walked into the restaurant where we were with two little dogs labeled “therapy dogs”. Apparently, they are some type of service dog for emotionally distressed people. I had not heard of them before. We speculated amongst ourselves why this guy needed therapy dogs. On the other side of the street was a crippled man preaching to passersby about Jesus. We could not really hear what he was saying cuz of all the traffic noise. It is always an adventure on the streets of SF.

Afterwards, we drove up to the Marin Headlands and Rodeo Beach for sunset. There were only a couple clouds in the sky. There wasn’t going to be any spectacular sunset this night. But I tried to make good use of those 2 clouds. I waited until after the sun had set, and for the clouds to light up with a bit of color. Then I captured a long exposure to get that really neat looking smooth look on the ocean water. This exposure was about 4 seconds long. I’m definitely pleased how it turned out.

This past weekend was a pretty cool one for us. My wife and I went whale watching in San Francisco. More on that later. First though, we went to Boulder Creek Falls up at Whiskeytown Natl. Rec. Area, in Redding. The original plan was that my wife would drive the kids up to the grandparents (in Red Bluff) on Thursday, then drive back down to pick me up at home, and then head off to SF from there. Then I had a wild and crazy thought. What if I went up to Red Bluff as well, and my wife and I go hiking to a waterfall on Friday morning before going down to SF. She always says she never gets to go hiking with me, and this was the perfect opportunity to do so sans kids. She liked that new plan. But then I broke this dandy little bit of tidings to her: we would have to get up at 4:45AM, in order to get up to the park and start hiking early enough to make it to the waterfall by around sunrise. A necessary thing if one is going to get photos of the waterfall in good light, which is what I wanted to do. Now my wife is NOT a morning person. She is about as far from a morning person as one can get. And she objected. And she protested. And she balked. But she did not revolt. In the end, she consented to get up that early to go with me. And to her great credit, she did not complain once on Friday upon waking up or during the hike. Indeed, we had a fabulous morning hiking to the waterfall and back, and didn’t see anyone else all morning. After the hike I asked her if she thought it was worth it to get up so early and get out and enjoy the glorious nature without anyone else around. She answered “absolutely”. But it didn’t really sound too convincing. We’ll see about next time.

Now Boulder Creek Falls is really a nice waterfall, dropping in three separate cascades totaling 96 ft. in height. This lower section is the largest, 46 ft. high. It is not a particularly photogenic waterfall, however. There are loads of branches and tree limbs and logs all over the place, preventing a clear view of the falls. I was hoping that somehow, I would be able to find a great, unobstructed, composition of the falls. But that is just impossible here. Nonetheless, it is still a very lovely waterfall to visit.

Since I did not get any new pics from last weekend, here is another from my outing to South Fork Silver Creek Falls. This is another of the many cascades along this creek. This one is about 15 ft. high. The kayaking community calls it “Plastic Surgery” (hmmm, I wonder how they came up with that one?). I had to scramble a bit down a steep snow-covered bank to get into position to take the photo.

Well, I did not get out hiking this past weekend. I did have plans to go somewhere, but it was one of those nights where I could not fall asleep, and really didn’t want to get up at the crack of dawn. So … I slept in.

I did, however, finish updating my waterfallswest website (essentially), converting it all over to PHP and mySQL. I’m sure that really doesn’t excite you too much, but it does excite me. Indeed, if you browse through my site now, you probably won’t notice “too much” that is different. However, I did change some colors, and added some new features (such as, a link to Google Maps, and some neat sorting capabilities on my map and Alphabetical index pages). The reason it excites me is that it is now going to be a heckuva lot easier for me to maintain. If I want to change the layout of my site (or any colors), for example, I only have to change one or two pages, instead of over 400 pages. Plus, it will be much easier to change or add new waterfall pages to my site now. I still have some more things to change over on the site, but I did get all 400+ waterfall pages converted. So I’m definitely happy about that.

In other stuff … next weekend will be an exciting weekend for myself and my wife. We are going to San Francisco for the weekend, and going whale watching to the Farallon Islands. We had this trip set up to do back in January, but it got postponed due to bad weather. That re-scheduled date is now upon us. It should be an exciting time, and hopefully, I’ll have some great photos to share from it. The long-range forecast this time looks all right too, thankfully.

Ok, well this is a funny story I’m sure you will all find rather amusing, and will be laughing at me hysterically.

I found this 175 ft. high waterfall a couple weeks ago at Jay Bird Canyon powerhouse, off Ice House Rd. But when I was there, the light was too harsh for taking a photo, so my plan was to return in better light and explore the falls more closely. That is what I did last weekend.

Jay Bird Canyon Creek essentially drops right into the powerhouse. But the waterfall is hidden from sight at the powerhouse, up around a bend in the cliff walls. This entire canyon is incredibly steep, and in particular, it is very steep right at the bottom of the creek here. I was not sure how I could get up to see the waterfall, but I was determined to try. Looking at the far side of the creek, I figured that was most definitely too steep to try, so I concentrated on the closer side (take note of that). I tried climbing up the closer side but ran into more poison oak, and even though I tried to get through it, I found the cliffs were just too steep here anyway. So I gave up on that … and instead, climbed a very steep set of stairs going up to a tower above the powerhouse. I’m not really sure I was supposed to go up there, but there was no one around, and no signs indicating I shouldn’t go up there, so I tried climbing the stairs to get a vantage point of the waterfall. And I found one. To take a photo of it on these steep stairs, I had to carefully get out my camera, change lenses, sit down on the stairs, and set up my tripod. It worked. And I figured that would be the best shot of the falls I would get.

My next goal was to find a way to get down to Silver Creek and scramble up stream to find a way to get close to Sugar Pine Creek Falls, a spectacular waterfall that you can see by the road side, but again, the cliffs are so steep in here that it is impossible to get down to see these falls. At the powerhouse, I was able to find a way down to the creek (though it was still steep), then I scrambled up stream, about a half-mile, through more poison oak, and got almost to the waterfall, when I hit a dead-end, with towering cliffs on either side of the creek, and no way to continue. I was totally bummed about that.

So … back to the powerhouse I went. My next plan was to walk down to the dam at the end of the Camino Reservoir. It is a good thing I did. Because as I was passing by Jay Bird Canyon creek again, I noticed a rope (on the far side of the creek, that I thought was too steep), leading up a path. What ??? There is a trail leading right to the waterfall. And once up that first steep section with the rope, it was very easy to make it to the base of the waterfall. Unbelievable. After battling through all that oak and trying to photograph the falls from the stairs, I made my way easily right to the waterfall. Well, I guess that is my job. To do all the hard work for all you people, right? You can start laughing at me now.

Speaking of poison oak … yes, I got another bad case of it. (continue laughing at me). A number of people have told me to use technu, and I would not break out in rash. Well, this time I did bathe myself thoroughly with the stuff when I got home, following the directions on the bottle, and I still got oak. Indeed, the technu didn’t seem to do much of anything for me. That was a big disappointment because I didn’t think I would get it this time using technu. I also (for the first time) got some of it in my eye, and had to go to the doctor. I looked worse than Rocky Balboa. The doctor gave me a shot and some drugs, and it cleared up very soon afterwards. I think I will now be staying well away from the oak for at least the rest of this year. I read an interesting article recently that poison ivy/oak is apparently becoming more prevalent and STRONGER, due to GLOBAL WARMING. Really? You gotta be kidding. That is bad news for me for sure.