A Drive Down the Coast and Through the Redwoods

Yesterday was sunny and hot, a perfect day to go to the beach and drive down the coast! We packed some lunch, and the Olympus camera that we found, and went over the bay towards Half Moon Bay, which is just south of San Francisco and on the ocean. But before we could get close, there was a major traffic jam, so we ended up getting onto I-280 and driving south until Route 7 to Woodside. There we took Route 84, aka La Honda Rd to the small city of La Honda, which is situated in the redwoods. This was the start of our ride through the redwoods.




There are many small winding roads (which aren't shown on the Google Map above) through the mountains between the San Jose area and Santa Cruz through the Santa Cruz Mountains. The mountains aren't so high, at most ~2,000 ft, but they are covered with old and second growth redwoods. Its fun to drive past the many state parks and open space reserves that are in the area.


The beach we had lunch at near the city of Davenport.

We headed to the beach as our first destination, where we had a picnic. We stopped at a beach just past the Ano Nuevo State Reserve, where the elephant seals live, and had lunch. It was so warm, we didn't need a wind-coat. Next we drove back into the redwoods to go hiking in Butano State Park. We hiked through oaks and berry patches, and finally into a pine forest and further through a redwood forest deep in a canyon with a small stream running through it. There was a campground we passed through with lots of camper making fires. Then we drove out of the park and down more winding roads, Bonny Doon Rd and Route 236, which were neat! Route 236 went right through Big Basin Redwoods State Park, where we stopped at the visitor center. They had huge blown-up maps of the area made for hiking, and we discovered that there was a trail which went in and between many of the state parks, such as Portola, Butano, Big Basin, and Castle Rock. There are also back-country campsites for through hikers. One day we will do the multi-day hike!


Castle Rock State Park at Sunset

As it was getting dark, we drove back towards home, driving past Castle Rock State Park of Route 9 and then continued down Skyline Blvd (Hwy 35) back to Hwy 92 and over the bay. The picture above is looking over the park. All of the darker mountains in the background are forested with redwoods.

Since we bought our digital SLR Canon camera, we haven't been able to take short videos because the camera doesn't have that feature. The Olympus camera which we found kinda sucks (photo quality and zoom) but it was free and it takes videos, so we tried making one at the beach. This is the first time I am posting a video clip on the blog, so here it goes:

Corpse Flower Blooms!

The colorful and odor-ful corpse flower at the UC Botanical Garden.

At the UC Botanical Garden, we heard news that Trudy, the garden's "Corpse Flower," Amorphophallus titanum, aka Titan Arum, was about to bloom. The corpse flower is the largest flowering structure in the plant world, and was discovered in 1878 by an Italian botanist in Sumatra, Indonesia. When we went to the garden to see Trudy flower, she was 66 inches high, or 5 ft 6 inches tall. That's taller than me! It lives in tropical conditions, and only flowers at certain times. It typically takes at least seven years before the plant first flowers after it sprouts from its seed. The garden employees said that the tuber, which is the large bulb-like part of the plant which lives underground, has to grow to be at least 30 lbs before the plant is ready to flower. Trudy's tuber weighed about 60 lbs.


Trudy, the UC Botanical Garden's corpse flower.

The flower will only stay open for a day or two before it begins to close. We went to go see it the morning after it opened. The plant heats up and produces an odor of rotting flesh while it blooms to attract flies to pollinate it. It really smelled bad! And there were a ton of flies hovering in and around the bloom.


Trudy's sister, which looks a lot smaller, is actually not that much younger than Trudy.

During years that the plant doesn't bloom (the last time Trudy bloomed was in 2005) it grows a gigantic single leaf which doesn't look like a leaf at all. It looks like a tall stalk that gets leafy at the top, growing 10-15 ft tall. But it actually only is one leaf which splits up at the top. After about 16 months the leaf goes dormant, and the next time something sprouts up from the tuber, it might be another leaf or a corpse flower!


The stalk/tree in this picture is actually a single enormous leaf of the Titan Arum plant when it it not in the stage of flowering.


The corpse flower in the foreground with another single enormous leaf of a Titan Arum in the background.

The UC Botanical Garden kept a blog up of Trudy's bloom here. It is also where I got all of the information about the corpse flower.

Volunteering to Build the Bay Area Ridge Trail

This past weekend I decided to volunteer to help build a new section of the Bay Area Ridge (BAR) Trail which, when finished, will be a continuous trail encircling the entire Bay Area. The section I worked on, along with over 100 other volunteers, was in Hercules, CA, in the north east bay area.

The current map of the Bay Area Ridge Trail. There are still many sections which need to be completed, as shown by the dotted line.
Not all of the land that the BAR Trail crosses was public. There are many private ranches around the bay area which are still privately owned. This isn't really a bad thing, since the ranches are usually hundreds of acres large and are not developed. It adds a open and wild feel to much of the hills around the bay. But since the ranches are privately owned, trails aren't allowed to be built across their land. Luckily, certain public land trusts raise money to try to buy these ranches, which the owning family usually ends up selling for millions of dollars to the land trusts. The land trusts then donate or pass on the property to the government, such as the East Bay Regional Park District, or keep the land open for public use. The Muir Heritage Land Trust bought the Fernandez Ranch in Hercules and is now beginning to open the land for public use. Thats how I ended up helping out to build a new connecting section of the BAR Trail there.

I volunteered with V-O-Cal, Volunteers for Outdoor California. They specialize in organizing large groups of volunteers for mobilization for projects around Northern California, such as building new trails, making new campgrounds, habitat restoration, and trail maintenance. They provide free camping spots at the project site, free meals and beer, and free showers. I could only stay for one day since I planned to go last minute, but it was still a lot of fun (and a lot of hard work)! Here are some pictures I took with my cell phone:

This is a typical view of the rolling hills of Fernandez Ranch where the trail was cut. Most of it was routed through the forested parts.

The breakfast/lunch/beer tent for volunteers.

My group's section of the trail to be cut was on a slope.

The first step in cutting out our section of the trail was to clear the grass and plants off the surface.

Next, we started digging into the earth to cut a wedge out of the side of the hill. We aimed at making the trail 4 feet wide.

The trail finished after the first day of work. The day after I left, the rest of my group finished it off by smoothing out bumps and removing loose dirt that was thrown down the slope.

Bug-o-Rama #63

This weekend was Bug-o-Rama #63 held at the Sacramento Raceway. We drove down there mainly to see the VW car show and browse the swap meet. It was pretty nice outside, in the 80s and sunny. The swap meet was huge and people had all kinds of parts for all types of VWs but mainly bugs. We found a few things that we needed here and there.


People selling stuff at the swap meet.





A cool baja bug at the car show.

There was also a race, and many bugs were racing on the 1/4 mile strip. Many were heavily modified, but some were stock/original, and of course, they were really slow! They even had dragsters that just barely qualified to be a "VW" only because they were somehow aircooled or had some VW engine parts in them.

NSF Honorable Mention

Today, after much waiting and torture we were notified by the NSF that we both (!) received the Honorable Mention for the 2009 NSF GRFP. That means we didn't win any money, but at least we got recognized! Our names are listed on the NSF's list of awardees for 2009. Here is the e-mail I got:

Dear Jennifer Frederick:

Your application for the 2009 National Science Foundation (NSF)
Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) has been evaluated.
Although the Foundation is unable to offer you a fellowship, it
is my pleasure to inform you that you have been accorded an
Honorable Mention. Unless you have previously requested
otherwise, your name will be included in the Honorable Mention
list that will be posted at https://www.fastlane.nsf.gov/grfp/.

Applicants receiving Honorable Mention are provided enhanced
access to cyberinfrastructure resources, including supercomputing
time, through the TeraGrid. Please refer to
http://www.teragrid.org for more information on
cyberinfrastructure resources.

If you have questions concerning this notification, please send
an e-mail to info@nsfgrfp.org. Thank you for your interest in the
Graduate Research Fellowship Program. We wish you well in your
future studies.

Sincerely,


Carol Van Hartesveldt, Ph.D.
Acting Division Director
Division of Graduate Education

The Dalai Lama Came to Berkeley

So on Saturday, we had tickets to go see the Dalai Lama. He came to UC Berkeley to give a talk titled "Peace Through Compassion." In March, we waited in line a total of about 14 hours to just have the opportunity to buy tickets when they went on sale at the UCB box office. It was worth it. Since we couldn't take pictures, I am posting an online news article from UC Berkeley's website:



The Dalai Lama at the Greek Theatre
(Peg Skorpinski photo)

Dalai Lama: Creating a peaceful 21st century will take all 6 billion of us

By Cathy Cockrell, NewsCenter | 27 April 2009

BERKELEY — Whether history remembers the 21st century as happy or unhappy "is in your hands," the 14th Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, told the students at his much-anticipated campus appearance Saturday afternoon. "My generation belongs to the 20th century. You are the source of hope."

More than 7,000 people filled UC Berkeley's Hearst Greek Theatre to see and to hear the widely revered Dalai Lama, who spoke for close to an hour on the theme of "Peace Through Compassion." The exiled leader of Buddhist Tibet was awarded the 1989 Nobel Peace Prize for his long-standing advocacy of peaceful solutions to conflict. It was his reputation as a force for peace that was on many people's minds as they waited under a clear spring sky for the Dalai Lama to appear on stage.

"I'm definitely a peacenik; he represents peaceful solutions to me," said Susie Sheridan, payroll supervisor for Information Services & Technology. Tsering Khangtetsang, whose parents fled Tibet at mid-century in the wake of the Chinese crackdown, was there with her sister Tenzin. The two had seen His Holiness numerous times before, and they planned to catch his address to Himalayans, in downtown Berkeley, immediately following his appearance at the Greek. "Our leader is the only one who says do not fight violently; do not go to war," said Tsering.

(Peg Skorpinski photos)

Berkeley undergraduates were there in force — many having braved an overnight line to secure a ticket, back in early March; a large contingent hailed from the campus's Richard C. Blum Center for Developing Economies. Among them was fourth-year student Rachel Bramwell and fellow urban-studies major Matt Pruter. Both have done fieldwork in the developing world (she in Nairobi, he in Mumbai) as part of their studies on global poverty. "I'm here for him to tell us to become global citizens in the world," Pruter said of the Dalai Lama.

His Holiness did not disappoint. Sitting cross-legged in an armchair on the proscenium, beneath strings of fluttering Tibetan prayer flags, the 73-year-old monk called for conscious development of our human capacity for compassion. "Peace does not equal absence of problems," he said. Peace is when, despite "disagreement and the possibility for open conflict," people exercise restraint and will power to "seek ways to solve it" without coming to blows.

While the Dalai Lama touched on Buddhist understandings of reality, on animal behavior, and the mind-body connection, his signature humility and comic timing were in play, in spontaneous asides on his childhood aversion to caterpillars and his difficulty finding the right words in English. ("As I become older, my English becomes older," he declared.) One visitor, Associate Professor of Public Policy Jane Mauldon, described His Holiness as "extraordinarily available, disarmingly human, and very intimate."

It was the Dalai Lama's second appearance at the Greek Theatre, his third at UC Berkeley (he visited in 1997 and 1994). He was introduced by Chancellor Robert Birgeneau and by actress Sharon Stone, a board member of the American Himalayan Foundation, which co-sponsored the event with the Blum Center.

Prior to the talk and in the presence of the Dalai Lama, Birgeneau presented Blum, a Cal alum and chair of the UC Board of Regents, with the campus's highest award, the Berkeley Medal, in honor of his contributions to the campus and the university. The chancellor noted that he had bestowed a Berkeley Medal just two days before, on former vice president Al Gore, during a groundbreaking ceremony for the Blum Center's new headquarters. Blum, an investment banker and husband to Senator Dianne Feinstein, established the Center for Developing Economies in 2006 with a $15 million gift.

In accepting the Berkeley Medal, Blum called the day "a merger of the two things I care most about: UC and the Tibetan people and their plight."

Only a month ago, on the 50th anniversary of China's crackdown on Tibet, the Dalai Lama sharply criticized the People's Republic of China, saying its leaders had turned Tibet into a "hell on Earth" for the Tibetan people. It was Blum — who became interested in the Tibetan cause in the 1960s and founded the American Himalayan Foundation — who uttered the only strongly worded criticism of the Chinese government at the Greek. "If they want to become a great nation," he said, they "also need to become a moral nation. What goes on in Tibet is just immoral."

The Dalai Lama ended his 2009 appearance at Berkeley on a high note — pulling from his cloth bag a blue and gold Cal visor, and donning it as the crowd sent him out with a final standing ovation.

The full house at the Greek Theatre. (Peg Skorpinski photo)