Birds and Basalt

Monday, I took the long way to Chico to see if the reported swans and sandhill cranes were there. I got there just past dawn and found the swans still sleeping.  But there were field after field of them. I moved past them and took their pictures.  Think maybe I had over 100 pictures and saw over 1000 cranes before I was finished.

Wake Up, You Sleepy Heads

Get Up, Get Out of Bed

Then I went looking for the sandhill cranes that were supposed to be further down the same road. They were there but were way back.  I finally found some a little closer and got to enjoy a little crane dancing.

Flying Sandhill Crane

Doin' a Little Dance

For  an interesting discussion of sandhill crane behavior and interpretation of their dances, click  here.

My next stop, after some wandering around and getting lost, was the Chico Wastewater Treatment Plant Oxidation Ponds.  Only this bird was close enough to photograph.This is our most common sparrow.

Juvenile white-crowned sparrow

Then I wandered toward Chico, taking pictures as I saw them.  I finally got there and planned to go for a hike.  But I didn't remember what the entrance to Bidwell Park looked like and came all the way back to town after I was right there.  By this time I was hungry so stopped for lunch before going back.  I've heard that there are beautiful swimming holes along Big Chico Creek so I took Yahi Trail, which runs beside it, to look for them.

Hang in there, tree

Nature's Carving

Stream View

Swiss Tree

Path View

View Up Hill to Bluff

Toyon

Basalt Fall in Creek

Water over Basalt Rock

Basalt Closeup

Reflections

End of the Trail

Sunset View Looking Uphill From the Road

I walked three miles out and only two miles back because I went down to the creek side so many times and did a lot of climbing over and around the basalt boulders.

I highly recommend this trail.

Honey Run Covered Bridge

Honey Run is the name of the highway that was built to let gold minors access Butte Creek. For a while, the creek was just forded, but a few years later Butte County Board of Supervisors decided to build a bridge.  The bridge was built in  for a cost of $4,295.  It was built in three spans of 30 ft, 130 ft., and 80 ft. to a total of 240 ft and was completed by January 3, 1887.

On January 3, 1887 George Miller reported that the bridge had been completed. It originally wasn't covered but, in 1901, George Miller sent a letter to the Board of Supervisors stating that the flooring and timber of the bridge was very badly decayed.  The entire floor need to be replaced.  He also recommended that the bridge be covered. The cost was estimated to be $560.00.

The bridge was in use until April 12, 1965 when a truck crashed into one corner of the bridge, collapsing the eastern span. Butte County Department of Public Works decided to build a new two-lane highway bridge only short distance upstream.

View showing the three spans

Beautiful geometric patterns made by the setting sun coming through the bridge sides.

The new bridge as seen from a window in the covered bridge.

It's really fun to have to time to visit lots of little corners of the world I'm in now. I hear there is good snowshoeing nearby, a wonderful little Victorian town looks really great in her Christmas finery, and there are lots of wonderful bike rides, and of course there are lots more birds to find.

A Day's Worth of Adventures

I had the day off yesterday so decided to go find the covered bridge that is northeast of Chico.  I went by Llano Seco and caught the sun boiling the fog away. .

 Then I got to see lots of swans.  Four were even close enough to capture with the camera.

 And it was so early, I caught a couple of sandhill cranes in the fields.  There were another thirty in view and still more in earshot at Llano Seco when I stopped to check the wildlife out there.

I went  on to Chico thinking I could find a road that said "Centerville", which would take me right to the covered bridge. But no such luck. I had to stop and ask directions to the covered bridge. I found I needed to be on the Skyway Drive.  Then a long time later, I realized I should have done a few more turns.  No problem, Just change the  plan. Since I was already  heading into the Sierra Nevada mountains and I could see there are lots of places on the map to recreate, I planned to take a hike there before coming back.  

This is a view of Butte Creek Valley from Skyway Drive. 

Soon I realized that I was in a forest of spruce, pine trees and other conifers and climbing steadily.  Then, when I hopped out of the car to take pictures, I froze.  I didn't have enough layers with me to hike up here. More changes happened. First, I started seeing snow.  Shortly after that, the paved road turned into a dirt road than a  muddy road from the melting snow. Signs said: Proceed at your own risk.  Road not maintained in the winter.

I stopped at a pull-off and took the next few pictures. 

 

 

 

Then I saw a very muddy and rutted area ahead and decided I'd better turn around while I still could. So I never reached the Butte Meadows which was my new destination.  I headed back down  Skyway Drive towards Chico and stopped  for lunch at a little town.

 Finally, about 1:30 P.M., I found  the road to the covered bridge.  But it was along Butte Creek and I found a place where I could take a hike.  So I once again changed plans and took another hour to enjoy this wild place.

The preserve is apparently a bunch of small units that are operated to give the salmon an improved stream in which to spawn.

View looking up hill from the creek. 

This log seems to have an entire ecosystem on it.

The path drew me through golden leaves.

Some leaves are bigger and brighter than others.

The path ended at the creek. This area is being protected and rehabilitated to help the salmon have a good place to spawn.

I found lots of small mullein plants.  These are introduced species and are in Texas also.Probably they occur in every state.

I finished my walk, got back in the car and started looking for the covered bridge.  But that will be another story. I did get back to Chico and, after more adventures, got groceries, and even found my way home in the dark. 

Big Doings Going On

Today was an exciting day.  After spending the last few days scrubbing up the office, putting Liquid Gold on all the woodwork and cabinets, washing and detailing a van, cleaning the kiosk, and hauling home the food for the party, I got to go to the grand opening of the new viewing platform at Sacramento NWR. I even got to help set up.

Only a few months ago, an audit found the old platform unsafe.  This is the main destination of 60,000 visitors so the refuge was very upset.  They tore it down and started working on getting a new one. The region found the money and they had the new platform designed and built it in less than three months. Pretty awesome for a government job.

I  enjoyed the beautiful day, met new people, and admired another Marilyn- the lady who won the national award for running the best junior duck stamp program in the country.Wish I could have gotten to work with her.  She is passionate about what she does and has a lovely personality.

It has been a hectic two and a half days, getting everything ready but it was a beautiful event surrounded by ducks and geese under a bright sun.

The New Deck - Part of this event was its grand opening

Denise was the event planner. I enjoyed working with her the last few days . Dan is the Project Manager.

The food and part of the displays.  It was all delicious.

Plenty of birds were in view

Even the Blue Goose, the national refuge mascot, made an appearance. Marilyn, the guest of honor is on the left.

 

Enjoying the birds

Dan Frisk, the Project Manager, telling how the deck got built.

Ribbon Cutting

Marilyn and the bowl honoring her. 

And it was really yummy. Chocolate and white and raspberry inside.

The event ended only a few minutes before sunset. So most of the people stayed to watch the flyout. I was going to skip it but keep stopping to watch a little of it.  Finally I got behind a car who was shooting pictures and I didn't want to move between him and the birds so enjoyed several minutes of watching the sky full of geese and ducks against a red sky.

Meet the Sutter Buttes

One of the first landscape formations to intrigue me  was what appeared to be a group of tiny mountains. Although they didn't look too far away, they seemed very small.  On a map, they look like a place where a giant, whose hands were covered in a sticky dough, touched the earth with his finger, and left a raised fingerprint. The Sutter Buttes are a series of hills roughly forming a circle only about 10 miles in diameter. From a distance, they just appear as a little strip of mountains. Mostly I've just seen their outlines against the sky when looking west or southwest. 

This Google image shows most of the Sutter Buttes- the gray with the green in the middle

The Sutter Buttes were formed by a volcano about 1.6 million years ago in the early Pleistocene era. But this volcano seems to be on it's own fault line, which is no longer active, because it doesn't exactly match the characteristics of either the volcanoes in the Cascades or the California Coast Ranges.

To view an excellent photographic discussion of the geology of the Buttes, click here.  The US Geological Service also has an interesting brochure on the geology of the Buttes.

The Buttes seem to me to be a special place of mystery and spirituality.  At least two tribes of native peoples,  the  Maidu and Wintun,  thought of them that way also and considered them sacred.The Maidu called them Middle Mountain. There were no permanent villages in the Buttes, but the Indians gathered acorns and hunted there.

Today there is a foundation called Middle Mountain Foundation Land Trust that has the goal of preserving the ecology of the area within and around the Sutter Buttes. It also leads public hikes.  I'm hoping to finesses a hike with them, even though I'm supposed to work on the weekends and that is when the hikes happen.

As the Buttes were formed, the land around them sank.  So, on both the east and west sides, there are sinks that have formed wetlands. Some of the area is used to grow rice and there are several preserves in the sinks. One of them is the Butte Creek Farm which the Sacramento NWR Complex staff manages. It was sold to the Fish and Wildlife Service with the stipulation that there would be no public access to the land. A hunting club hunts in the area around it.  Staff and volunteers got to go on a field trip there several days ago.

While there, I got the closest and prettiest view of Sutter Buttes so far. So, after I found the fields of swans, I took a series of roads that would lead me around Sutter Buttes. Indeed, I got to go through part of them on the south side. However, by the time I got there, the sun was almost finished and I only took pictures looking north.

View of Sutter Buttes looking east from Butte Creek Farm

 While driving towards the swan fields,  I got diverted into looking for a boat launch on the Sacramento River at Meridian. The day was foggy but I got these pictures of the west side of Sutter Buttes in the fog.

Nut orchards near east side of Sutter Buttes

West side of Sutter Buttes in Fog

Clearly there was a lot more to Sutter Buttes than I had discovered. So I decided to go all the way around Sutter Buttes - still a very short distance - and see what they looked like.  While I was on the south and east sides of them, the day was still cloudy and foggy so I continued on to look for the swans and had other little adventures. By the time I had found the fields of swans, the day had turned beautiful.

Tree and grass on north side of Sutter Buttes

View of North side of Sutter Buttes in late fall afternoon sun

Sunlight and shadows on north side of Sutter Buttes

Another view

The fields nearest the outcrops of rock are used to graze cattle.

View through nut farm orchards towards South Butte, the highest at 2130 feet elevation

Another north view

Northwest View - these are andesite boulders and some were used  by the Indians to grind acorns into flour

West View - this region is owned by cattle ranchers who graze cattle on the grassy parts.

Rock Outcropping

South View

South View

Looks like a skin over fat

Rocky Outcrop -this is part of the ramp formed by the volcano

Barn against the south side of the Buttes

Another south view

 In 2003, State Parks acquired 1,785 acres of the Buttes, including a section called Peace Valley. The park is not open to the public and has yet to be named.
Hopefully it will be open, the next time I'm in the area.