Hmm. I've never even been in Colma, even though I worked a year and a half just on the other side of the Freeway from it. That side of the Bay is so close, yet so far away in traffic terms. I have wandered through the little Naval and Coast Guard cemeteries around the Bay, but really like the little old Gold Rush cemeteries in the hill country of the Sierra, especially when they're overgrown with colorful weeds and wildflowers. No manicured lawns there.
Gold Rush town cemeteries could be a book by themselves!
I did hike out to the Millerton Cemetery which was moved when the dam was built so it's above the waterline of Millerton Lake.
Some Scouts hacked down the weeds a few years ago but there's no trail.
Just park at Winchell Cove marina head for the ridge across from the docks.
No step on snek!
"I would feel more optimistic about a bright future for man if he spent less time proving that he can outwit Nature and more time tasting her sweetness and respecting her seniority"---EB White
Gosh I've run over some enormous diamondbacks around there - once a 7-footer.
That would make a snazzy pair of suspenders!
"I would feel more optimistic about a bright future for man if he spent less time proving that he can outwit Nature and more time tasting her sweetness and respecting her seniority"---EB White
I didn't use all of the skin, just the widest part for a band around my own hat. I still have the rattle - 13 segments. It's laying beside a carved soapstone snake rattle - no doubt part of some Yokut shaman's cure for snakebite.
At one time I did have a 10 foot long snakeskin on the wall, itself with the ends trimmed off. It was actually from a Gaboon python, given to me from a relative who traveled there. But it has a sorta crosshatched pattern to it too. One evening some of the guys from work came over after dark to help me move both a piano and my big 500T Drymount press. One of them had moved from Indiana, and was always telling about needing to wear snake boots out in the pastures there. I told him to stay off my lawn because we have rattlers here too. He said that was no big deal to him, so I showed him that python skin, and told him that the rattle from that one was over a foot long. His eyes went wide open, and he carefully tiptoed outdoors, aiming a flashlight every which way.
I spent a lot of time around the River terraces down that way back when I was doing research papers on Pleistocene climate shifts.
I sadly learned my Geomorphology mentor passed away last year, but we were all engaged in interesting questions like whether the "mena mounds" there near Friant dam were periglacial or not. There's another whole field of those where the Chowchilla River bottoms out at the Valley floor too, to the north. But I mapped all kinds of periglacial features. The Clovis Rodeo would have been even more interesting back when cowboys would be sliding around on permafrost trying to rope a mastodon.
Part of the big pumice field around the lake washed loose during massive ice dam breaks upriver and buried material so tightly that it almost hermetically sealed it. We'd find tiny alder twigs and buds still intact, big chunks of mastodon ivory, thousands of bones all piled up from ice age horses, camels, and elephants. A similar deposit was found near Chowchilla, where the museum now is. But this occurred many places on floodplains at the foot of the Sierra. When my dad supervised the Friant-Kern Canal, they stumbled on quite a few mammoths. If rattlers were around there back then, they would have faced quite a stomping risk (there were warm episodes too).
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