| Golden Falls Cascade, Big Basin State Park, CA |
Welcome to my web pages. I've done lots of traveling around, taking photos in some of the nicest spots in the West, and putting them online to share with my friends (that's you). If you live in the San Francisco Bay Area, you know of the Bay Area Backroads show on local KRON 4. Some of my friends think I should have my own show like that, and it's true. I have been through so many of the windy mountain roads that line this area, from Big Sur to Point Reyes, and have hiked or biked just about every trail or fire road in the range.
I've driven most of the routes that go inland from the Pacific coast of California and Oregon's coast highways, from Montana De Oro State Park in Los Osos, to the Columbia River, over 1000 miles. I often play travel and adventure guide for friends looking for a walkabout or great driving adventure. I'm slowly discovering the pleasures of inland mountain ranges and deserts. I recently visited Joshua Tree Nat'l Park near Palm Springs.
I live in Mountain View, CA, a nice spot between San Jose (15 miles away) and San Francisco (40 miles away). I live about two miles from Shoreline Amphitheatre (the nation's busiest and most profitable music venue for a few years running), which is near San Francisco Bay. Besides catching the occasional show there or at one of the amazing clubs around here, I play music, for myself, and occasionally for or with friends. I enjoy jamming and composing, and do lots of easy cover songs by Dylan, Neil Young, Cat Stevens, Credence, and a few rougher ones (Psycho Killer). I love to listen to Latin and other subgenres of Jazz, Reggae, Blues, Rock, R&B/Soul, and Bluegrass. I still haven't created a Music web page to link to in my navbar, but I promise I will someday. I am inspired by the last show I saw, which had an all-star lineup: Neil Young, Dave Matthews, REM, Tracy Chapman, Ben Harper, Pearl Jam, etc. Ben was one of my favorites, reminding me a bit of Cat Stevens. It was the 2001 version of the Bridge Show, a benefit for the Bridge School, a private school on the San Francisco peninsula, which is on the vanguard of education for folks with special physical needs, in ways including special technological communication devices for people with severe cerebral palsy. One of their graduates went on to UC Berkeley, a very excellent school, and she was wooed by Eddie Vedder during the show, which was my personal highlight. We got to watch her glowing face on the Video screens. Mountain View has changed lots, but it is still right in the middle of everything. Within one hour of town, you can drive to either Half Moon Bay and Santa Cruz, two beach areas that are 50 miles apart. The drive between them on the the Pacific Coast Highway is the stuff of dreams. I've had jobs in software for about 8 years and I now work as a technical support manager, sometime trainer and writer for a local firewall manufacturer. Being near San Jose, I've seen Silicon Valley expand for the last twenty years, and seen how everything has changed around here. Fortunately it is still livable, since there is a lot of open space, but I'm concerned for the future here. Within the last few years, many choice parts of the San Mateo and Santa Cruz county coastline have been preserved. At Pigeon Point Lighthouse, where a development had started construction within a quarter mile, a legal reversal went through, the project was halted, and it was torn down! Another wilderness preservation victory is the increasing size of Big Basin State Park and its coastside area, which includes Ano Nuevo Island, home of the thousands-strong elephant seal colony. Winter Sunset, Klamath Lake, Oregon 
My photo galleries include many shots of the Santa Cruz Mountains, where I enjoy hiking year-round in the bay area's amazing climate. We are lucky to have plenty of open space just a few miles away from the flatlands here in Silicon Valley. This mountain range stretches from the outskirts of Pacifica down past Santa Cruz to Watsonville, and contains many streams, canyons and virgin coniferous forests and oak woodlands. Besides a half dozen oak species, Buckeye, Madrona and Bay Laurel trees fill the canyons and line the streams. Deer, wild turkey, mountain lion, bobcat, hawk, racoon, fox, owl, quail and many other wild animals live here, but no bear. A black bear was recently caught in Salinas, only about 15 miles from the southern end of the range. It had wandered into town from the mountains south of Monterey, in the Ventana Wilderness. Ventana is the official name of the Big Sur area, which is a coastal mountain range similar to the Santa Cruz range, but considerably taller and drier than its northern cousin. At least once a year, I drive up to see my family in the Seattle and Portland areas. I do lots of sightseeing on the way. I'll be taking more pictures on the north coast of California and in the Northwest. One of the places I want to explore is the Trinity Alps, due west of the Yreka / Redding area in northcentral California. There was a large fire there a few years ago. One of my new favorite spots is the Smith River, CA (just south or the Oregon border) which has the most turquoise water I've ever seen. Just north, across the border in Oregon, is the Chetco River, which empties out at Brookings. This river is similar, with the same turquoise water and stands of 250-foot redwoods lining the banks and bordered by huge gravel and sandbars. It's a secret place where you can escape inland from the perennial Redwood Coast summer fogbank, and actually catch some sun. My most recent photos are in this new gallery: http://photos.yahoo.com/mountainwalker My galleries use photos saved in digital form with the convenient PictureCD service by Kodak. For $10 per roll of 24 shots, I get images in jpeg format, which is good since I don't have a scanner, and the image quality is superior anyway. Lately the MacOS version of the Kodak software has been buggy, and I'm going to try it on my Win2K PC at work. The best part is it comes with free, simple software that can be used to modify images,make different-sized versions of the images, including thumbnails, which come in handy when you are creating a friendly front-end for a bunch of images. |
| Dome, Yosemite National Park, CA |
I have many interests and hobbies, including: hiking, nature, playing guitar, listening to world music, reggae and jazz, macintosh computing, and the internet. My academic interests are in the sciences, especially physical sciences like chemistry. I've become an avid reader in astronomy, climatology and earth sciences. I have become convinced that we will see the global effects of atmospheric warming in our lifetimes. Soon, within a decade or two, I believe it will be a generally accepted scientific fact that human activities have accelerated what may be a natural heating phase, possibly disrupting the heating/cooling cycle on this planet. 
Preferences: non-fiction, documentaries, tap water, comfy chairs, The Chronicle, outdoors vs indoors, chunky peanut butter, Ginger, Great Taste, TP rolling top down, good coffee instead of Starbucks, live music instead of recorded, real panchos instead of the cheaper ones at Sears, and pain-free dentistry. I am an avid NBA fan, and though I am not living in a van down by the river, I'm a regular watcher of Saturday Night Live. Young Elephant Seals, San Simeon, CA |