Photograph Jets Up Close in Death Valley

Water vapor condenses on the wing of an F-15C from the 144th Fighter Wing of the +Air National Guard in Fresno

I've encountered jets in this canyon in Death Valley by coincidence a few times over the years, so I mentioned them on page 130 of my "Photographing California" guidebook, but I've only recently sat around and waited for them to arrive. The first time I showed up at 4:30 pm and waited for a couple of hours, and was skunked. I later talked to someone who had arrived at 3:30 pm, and saw three passes in 45 minutes before leaving at 4:15 pm.

The second time I waited from dawn, nothing happened until a single plane went through at 9:50 am. Nothing happened for another hour, then a pair of F-15C jets from the California +Air National Guard went through it in each direction, twice! They seemed to spot the camera on the first run, then on the next three runs the lead plane pulled up sharply right at my location partway down the canyon, to be pulling a lot of Gs and turning up out of the canyon sharply directly next to me. The pilot appears to be looking at the camera each time, and I can't think of many reasons to end a run up the canyon early, in both directions, so it sure seemed like he was setting up selfies. When he was pulling the most Gs, water vapor trails formed as trailing lines in the wingtip vortices, and more vapor formed on top of the wings. Having heard that photographers fly over from Europe to spend a week sitting all day waiting for the jets, and they report 7 to 9 per day, I had my 9 and figured that I had done well. For some reason, Mondays were considered to be less promising, so I might not see any more planes that day. I picked up my tripods and started moving towards the car, and more planes came! It was like that until I had to leave by noon. I'd throw the tripod over my shoulder and another jet would come. A couple of guys from the adjacent campsite in the Stovepipe Wells campground the night before showed up and saw a jet go through. A few random people watched one go by from time to time. A busload of children on a field trip showed up, their wait was no more than 10 minutes, then a jet went by and they left. It seemed as if perhaps they came from a town nearby and had been able to coordinate with the pilot, perhaps a parent of one of the children. Having been skunked on a prior visit then rewarded with a flurry of activity after a few hours of boredom, I can't make generalizations yet about your odds of catching jets flying up canyons in Death Valley, but apparently if you are persistent enough, they may eventually come. That's when you'll find success, when preparation meets opportunity.

Water vapor condenses at the wingtips and over the wings of an F-18 in a high-G turn

Shell Creek Road Wildflowers, Paso Robles

Shell Creek Road is a rural road running north – south between CA – 58 and CA – 46, passing pastures and rolling hills that can feature wildflowers in late March through April. There are also agricultural fields which can have symmetric lines for photographs, as well as a large vineyard with both old and young vines. The old vines are probably the ones which yield the excellent the Shell Creek Vineyard reserve petite sirah produced by David Bruce Winery in the Santa Cruz Mountains.

Shell Creek Road can be a convenient detour to take when approaching Carrizo Plain National Monument from the north, or departing Carrizo Plain in the direction of Paso Robles. The wildflowers are more concentrated towards the southern 6 miles or so.

Directions

From Paso Robles at US-101, take CA-46 east 15.6 miles and turn right onto CA-41 West Centre street.  Go 2.8 miles and turn right onto Toby Way.  After 0.3 miles on Toby Way turn right onto San Juan Road.  After 4.5 miles turn right onto Shell Creek Road.  You’ll be on Shell Creek Road 10.7 miles, ending at CA-58.

To continue to Carrizo Plain National Monument, travel east on CA-58 24.2 miles, turn right on Soda Lake Road and travel 13.7 miles.

There's a creek at the north end of the road which can flow over the road after a heavy rain, and this can close the road. When I last visited, there was a car in the creek, just downstream of where it had washed off of the road. Don't underestimate how deep the water is, or how little force it might take to push your vehicle off the road!

For more information on the area, I cover Shell Creek Road on page 177 of my "Photographing California Vol. 2 South" landscape photography guidebook.

Wines to Taste at Hospice du Rhone April 14 - 16, Part 1

Wineries producing Rhone varietal wines in the United States

When exploring wines produced with various different grapes, it can take years of experimentation to sample enough wines with dinners to get a good feel for which wineries produce the style that you like, and what foods they go with best. Fortunately there's an efficient, cost-effective way to find new favorite wines: wine tastings. I like to visit temperate regions and visit wineries while I travel, but there are many tastings in California where producers from all over the state, or all over the world, will come to you. The Hospice du Rhone (HdR) wine tasting event coming up this month in Paso Robles features top wineries from the United States, France and Australia.

Many wine lovers are familiar with syrah, one of over 20 wine varietals traditionally grown in the Rhone region of France. Syrah, Grenache, Mourvedre, Viognier and the other Rhone varietals have done well in the New World as well, particularly in California, Washington and Australia. In Australia they call syrah "shiraz", after a region in the Persian Empire that produced notable wines at the time, although those were apparently white wines, and not syrah. But I digress.

The first year that I attended the  HdR was 2001. Earlier that year I had toured the Australian island of Tasmania enjoying their pinot noir, then I flew to the shiraz-laden Barossa Valley and McLaren Vale wine regions near Adelaide. The Australians were enjoying the release of wines from their fantastic 1998 vintage, which was in a string of strong vintages. I was enjoying them too. Upon my return, I checked two cases of wine as luggage and packed more in my carry-on baggage, for a total of 39 bottles in all! Ah the days before airline restrictions on liquids. Then a couple of months after returning from Australia, I attended the Rhone Rangers tasting event in California, offering American-produced Rhone varietals, and I enjoyed many fine Rhone lineage wines there.

So I started 2001 with a great survey of Australian and American Rhone style wines, and Hospice du Rhone would be a great opportunity to add French wines to the mix, and try them all in one place. Let's start with the American wines and wineries that I particularly enjoyed at the Rhone Rangers event. Although wines change from year to year, the best grapes are consistently grown in the best sites, and wineries and winemakers that have tuned their winemaking practices for those sites will consistently produce great wines year after year. So finding your favorite vineyards, winemakers and producers is a great first step. So among this year's 239 wineries pouring at HdR, many of these producers will again be pouring great wines:

1998 Lewis Cellars Napa Valley Syrah 03/31/01 - Ripe nose, syrupy dark fruit, intense with ample tannins, a touch musty, long dusty finish with more dark fruit. 92
1999 Cedarville El Dorado County Estate Syrah $24.00 03/31/01 - Deceptively supple, fills the mouth with ripe soft berries and some vanilla. 91
1999 McCrea Cellars Yakima Valley Syrah 03/31/01 - Ripe and musty with minty plum and black fruit, intense acid and tannins, ripe on the finish. 91
1999 Truchard Vineyards Napa Valley Carneros Syrah 03/31/01 - Musty, concentrated, a little syrupy, intense on the finish. 91
1999 T-Vine Cellars Contra Costa County Syrah 03/31/01 - Ripe and very sweet,syrupy (American oak?), concentrated. A "no dump" wine. 91
1998 Joseph Phelps Vineyards Vin du Mistral Syrah 03/31/01 - Dry, deceptively well balanced, with a congue-tingling finish. Closed, masking ample intensity. Should be better in a few years. 91
1998 Justin MacGillivran Syrah 03/31/01 - (Barrel sample) Ripe, minty, fleshy, dark fruit, which carries into the finish. A "no dump" wine. 91
1998 McCrea Cellars Yakima Valley Cuvee Orleans Syrah 03/31/01 - Nice nose, plus ripe dark fruit, peppery, toasty, with ample tannins. 91
1997 Jade Mountain Napa Valley Paras Vineyard Syrah 03/31/01 - Supple with vanilla oak and coffee flavors. 91
1997 Swanson Vineyards Napa Valley Syrah 03/31/01 - Dry with dark fruit, oak, spices, herbs, nice acid balance. 91
1996 QupE' Wine Cellars Santa Barbara County Hillside Select Syrah 03/31/01 - Supple with vanilla oak, skins, dark fruit, nice persistence. 91
1999 Beckman Vineyards Santa Barbara County Syrah 03/31/01 - Tannic, dusty, peppery. 90
1999 Cedarville El Dorado County Estate Grenache $20.00 03/31/01 - Medium to full body, plush texture, sweet black fruit, balanced with an acid-supported finish. 90
1999 Cedarville El Dorado County Zinfandel $22.00 03/31/01 - Fruity, slightly syrupy, vanilla. 90
1999 Lava Cap Syrah 03/31/01 - (Barrel sample) Syrupy berry, spices… blueberry pie. 90
1998 McCrea Cellars Yakima Valley Ciel du Cheval Syrah 03/31/01 - Supple, vanilla oak, toasty on the finish. 90
1997 Clos Mimi Paso Robles Shell Creek Vineyard Syrah 03/31/01 - Minty, fruity, with spices and vanilla oak on the finish. 90
1997 Seven Peaks Paso Robles Shiraz 03/31/01 - Ample body, dark fruit (blackberry), mint, plum, shuts down on the finish. 90
1995 Swanson Vineyards Napa Valley Syrah 03/31/01 - Dry, medium bodied, peppery with red and black fruits, some leather, nice intensity and acid. 90

My Background in Wine

 But what qualifications did I have for attempting such a feat? I started enjoying Ridge Vineyards wine since the early 1980s: my mountain biking route took me past their tasting room. A friend of mine worked there. Ultimately they would be named one of the top 5 wineries in the world, so I was spoiled by quality from the start. As I worked in Silicon Valley's high tech industry for a couple of decades, I had access to great wines and my budget enabled me to collect them. I started taking tasting notes in 1994. Given that my day job was selling servers to Netscape, Yahoo! and other startups, I set up a Web site and posted my notes there. That got me into the big wine tastings, often early as a wine trade journalist, before the crush of public made it a little more difficult to access the more popular tables and wines. Even just trying a wine each night with dinner would tune my palate with over 3500 wines in 10 years. But my friends and I got together for a "boys night out" every Wednesday night, and we quickly settled on blind tastings as the agenda, with the host selecting the theme each week. Add in a few trade tastings each year, and you start to develop an experienced palate, along with a pretty sizable database. Eventually I decided to be a wine broker for a few years, representing small wineries to wine shops and restaurants.

My taste in wine may not be identical to yours (the whole subject of reviews, ratings and rankings has been covered ad nauseum for decades elsewhere). But you can try wines and a producer or two that I've liked, and if we like similar styles, my experience may come in handy for you.

I both take notes on the flavors and characteristics of a wine, as well as assign a score on a 100-point scale, like the ones American consumers have become familiar with from Wine Spectator Magazine and Robert Parker's newsletter, Wine Advocate. There's a love-hate relationship with such systems in the industry as a score over 90 points can help sell a wine, and higher on the scale may mean bigger, bolder and more in-your-face, but that's not what you want with every meal. There are many excellent balanced wines that score in the high 80 to 90 point range that might pair better with food. I think that many or most wine consumers have become educated enough to make educated choices, so there's no particular need to shy away from putting a stake in the ground regarding where on such a scale a wine might fall.

Fortunately the Hospice du Rhone event provides one of those opportunities for you find what you like, and cut months or years off your search time, while you save many hundreds of dollars on the cost.

Maybe I'll see you there!

California Spring Wildflower Sites, April: Antelope Valley

Goldfields and California poppies mix with Joshua trees in Antelope Valley near Lancaster

One of my favorite photography road trips ever was a tour of California wildflower sites in the spring, including Antelope Valley and the California State Poppy Reserve, Carrizo Plain National Monument, Figueroa Mountain Recreation Area in the +Los Padres National Forest, and the area covered by the annual Ridgecrest Wildflower Festival in the Eastern Sierra. I posted on my blog at the time some of my favorite photos from the Antelope Valley, but I have a little more time now to take a second pass and show you more of what I saw.

I'm considering taking that route again this year, so reviewing past trips and refreshing my memory on what to stop in on and check can be productive. I've also looked up the wildflower report at the California State Poppy Reserve, which posted this update on Saturday, April 2:

"The season appears to have ended early, as last month's rains came too late to sustain the bloom that had barely started. The fields are mostly grasses now; only a handful of poppies are blooming alongside the trails. The beavertail cactus in front of the visitor center is blooming, which usually happens after the season has ended- a sign that an early summer is on the way."

An early start to summer should not be entirely unexpected, given the record El Nino heat in the Pacific Ocean driving our weather pattern in recent months. It's a shame though that it didn't bring enough rain at the right time to deliver a bumper crop of wildflowers in the Antelope Valley. The Antelope Valley is large though, and there may be dispersed pockets where enough rain fell, perhaps with a northern exposure to minimize drying during the gap in winter storms in February. Much of the area is in the Mojave Desert ecosystem, where Joshua trees serve as gerat subjects, with or without wildflowers.

In any case, many other areas of Southern California desert are blooming with normal to above normal intensity, so if I decide to take the trip, the conditions in the Antelope Valley won't make or break the outcome.

So while I have my photos handy, here are a few more photos from the Antelope Valley area on that prior trip, and I'll sprinkle a few across my various social media accounts as well.


The Antelope Valley California Poppy Reserve often starts its wildflower reports in mid-March to keep visitors updated on the conditions as they peak at some point through April. The area celebrates the annual bloom at the California Poppy Festival.  This year the 25th California Poppy Festival will be held April 16-17, 2016.

For more information, I cover the Antelope Valley California State Poppy Reserve, and other sites to visit on an April California wildflower tour, on page 184 of my new 320-page guidebook, "Photographing California Vol. 2 - South (shown to the right).

California Wildflowers in April: Figueroa Mountain Road

Sunset from Figueroa Mountain Road

Are you looking for a place to find wildflowers along California's Central Coast? Figueroa Mountain can be a great place to see wildflowers when the timing is right. Helen Tarbet of the Los Padres National Forest sent out her first wildflower update of 2016 to email subscribers on March 18. She reports that "California poppies are blooming throughout the mountain" and "Other wildflowers to look for as you continue your uphill climb include, buttercups, goldfields, coreopsis, shooting stars, ceanothus, California poppies, Mexican elderberry, blue dicks, fillaree, royal lupine, lomatium, fiddlenecks, beautiful pink prickly phlox on the serpentine rock formation on the right and lovely orange wall flowers just beyond that. Also, you will see strikingly beautiful Catalina mariposa lilies in the open grassy fields and wild canyon peas in some shaded areas. At Vista Point (large gravel turnout about 11.4 miles from the bottom), exquisite chocolate lilies are in bloom..."

The variety along this road can be stunning. I hope to get back down there next week, but in the meantime, here's my description of Figueroa Mountain Road Recreation Area on page 218 of my Photographing California - South guidebook, illustrated with a few extra photos:
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Figueroa Mountain Recreation Area, Los Padres National Forest 

Home to an annual wildflower bloom each spring, Figueroa Mountain provides a variety of species at various elevations, diversifying your opportunities and extending the wildflower season. The U.S. Forest Service often provides updates on the timing and progress of the wildflowers as they emerge in the February through April time frame, so if you have the opportunity, check their Web site for current conditions.

Photo advice: A selection of lenses will help you capture a variety of perspectives on the flowers. California poppies are one of the most common species of wildflower here, and they don’t open until they have warmed up in the sun, so it’s not necessary to rush up here for sunrise.

Getting there: From US-101 take CA-154 East, San Marcos Pass Road, 3.0 miles, turn left on Figueroa Mountain Road.

This is a narrow mountain road and your drive on it may take you 15 miles or more and increase in elevation 3000 feet. It is not recommended for large vehicles or trailers.

Time required: You’ll probably need 2 - 3 hours or more to navigate the road and have some time for photography.

Nearby location: Also in the spring, the oak-laden hills and pastures in the first mile or two of Figueroa Mountain Road may offer wildflowers such as wild mustard.
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Lower Figueroa Mountain Road

After enjoying the wildflowers, consider exploring the town of Los Olivos and the wineries of the Santa Ynez Valley.