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Yesterday morning Teri Robinson invited us to photograph a new road he’s been exploring.  David had too much work to do but I said I’d be delighted.  We left on our adventure at 11am.

The road we took was north of us, up highway 49 towards Mariposa.  It’s a typical foothill road that drops in elevation as it heads south and west towards the valley.  I’m guessing we started at about the 2000ft elevation.  Teri was very funny pointing out LOTS of potential places to stop on another day.  He had a couple of specific stops for this day.  The road began tight and curvy with dense vegetation of various oaks, pines, cedars, black berry, poison ivy and scrub brush.  We followed a stream most of the time.  The weather forecast was sunny however the sky quickly clouded over.

Our first stop was along the stream which was a small river due to the weekend rains.  We couldn’t go very far along the bank due to the dense vegetation and swollen stream.  When Teri was last there the water was clear, now it was brown with recent run off.  The moss is beautifully green and plump.

I’m thinking a lot of this was poison oak.

Down the road a little ways we spotted a nice open area along the river.  We walked down a steep embankment under a low canopy of branches to reach the river.  I was ecstatic with the variation of rocks.  There were black ones and pink ones and multicolored ones, granite and rocks made of two different types of materials.  I immediately fantasized about having access to 3 trucks and 20 strong men.  I would walk along the river and point to rocks saying, ‘that one….and that one…’ while the men hauled my choices up to the trucks……  The rocks were still wet from morning dew which made them and the oak litter vivid with color.

This old oak tree root was exposed and moss covered.  In the lower photo I liked the glowing reddish oak leaves stuck in the bush.

These trees came into view as we meandered down the road.  The trees were on the bend across the river.  I immediately dubbed these David Hoffman trees since they looked just like what he’d stop to photograph.  I was drawn to the reddish brush behind the lacy trees with gold leaves and the variations of greens.  In the opposite direction, just down the road was a sweet view of the river framed by two large oaks.

I forgot to mention that the pavement ended long before the first stop.  As we traveled down the dirt road the landscape opened up and became cattle country.  Most of the area was fenced until about the 1200ft elevation.  It felt as if we drove through ranches with fenced perimeters and cattle guards at the road.  The land was rolling with oaks and not much scrub brush.  The stream became bigger as tributaries merged.  Looking back to Indian Peak.

When we momentarily stopped for Teri to photograph, I ‘saw’ this bird looking over it’s shoulder with it’s outstretched wing.  For those who don’t ‘see’ it, it’s a large oak stump.

The next place we spent some time at we were trespassers, and met the nice owner.  I was leery about pulling down someone’s driveway but Teri assured me it’d be okay.  Sure enough the owner came to see what we were doing.  I used to have no problems trespassing in the countryside until I received a severe chastising by a rancher.  Mind you, there wasn’t a town for 10 miles or more and it was the middle of nowhere but since then I haven’t wanted to be yelled at again, especially by another WOMAN!!

This is the lovely river we trespassed to photograph.  The owner was so nice he suggested we go through his backyard and on down to the family swimming hole to take more pictures.  I’ve got to get a thank you note off to the family.

It was after 3pm by the time we left the trespassing spot and we still had a ways to go on this dirt road before we intersected with the (paved) road to take us back to Mariposa.  We wanted to photograph the sunset with oak trees.  We decided to go back to a spot with a view of the rolling foothills we’d visited in December.

We arrived at the desolate rolling hills on the edge of the transitional area where oak trees begin growing.  A very steep narrow track of a road led to the flattened top of a hill that looked like it had once been mined.  The view was magnificent but lacked oak trees.  This is a semi panoramic of our hill top view beginning with looking north, then northeast, east….

You can just make out Eastman Lake to the left of Teri where the pale water color shows above the hills.

At 5pm, with the sun setting at 5:14, we left hoping to find a good spot to photograph the sunset on our way home.  We found it on a bend in the road with the view of Eastman Lake.  There was very little color to the east where the mountains had clouded over but west was gorgeous with one of those sunsets that keeps evolving and getting better and better.  The first photograph is looking south over Eastman lake, the road shot is looking north, the rest were towards the west.  The silhouettes of the oak trees were so much fun to play with.  The sunset was the frosting on the cake at the end of another fun day exploring the California back roads with Teri.