Crispy Adventures

[aggienaut]

   Friday we had moved all the bees out of Bee Yards D & E

   Tuesday morning I happily left the office --where the boss in a relatively random rage was making vague threats to fire people and had unplugged the internet due to paranoia people were "fucking off"-- and proceeded to the bee yards to collect the last of the equipment
   The area seemed relatively deserted (using my sleuthing skills I took note that the horses were idling about in the middle of the meadow, whereas if the owner wasabout they often migrated towards him, and there was no trace of the dogs that usually accompany the owner and can be seen/heard bounding around anywhere within several hundred yards of him), and on any account it may be the last time I'm ever out there, so I decided to do a thorough investigation of my surroundings!!
   Checked out the bell again, took some pictures of the castle from other angles because a few people have asked about it. Ventured over to the graves, took pictures of the cannons, noted that the open gave was still sitting there, open, inviting, waiting.

   Pictured above, the truck loaded up on the road right beside Bee Yard D. If one were to turn around head down the road in the direction we come and go it would look like this.

   But before scurrying off I had one more thing I needed to do. There's one corner of the whole meadow I'd never ventured into. From the satellite view it looked lush and promising of holding secrets. However there was always evidence of activity in that corner. At first there's been tents there all the time, later a shack turned up (it's possible I hadn't noticed it before? I'm not sure), but things were always moved around there a bit so I felt like maybe people actually lived in that corner or something. We assumed they were tweakers.

   However, as noted, on this occasion the entire area seemed completely quiet. Additionally I reasoned that if there wasn't a car there, there presumably wouldn't be people there, because even tweakers need to get around! And anyway I was feeling "now or never!" so I ventured into that corner.
   Strange things strewn about. Metal drums, paint cans, wheelbarrows. The structure there turned out to be a small cottage, perhaps the size of a large shed. Its back was facing myself and the road.
   Coming around the front I'm surprised to find the door wide open and inside it is not a empty shed but actually a clean an well kept habitation. A bed is folded up against a wall, various personal effects are set carefully about. A beer bottle lies on its side on the floor and a crisp clean cowboy haw sits on the chair.
   This latter kind of creeps me out because though I've seen no evidence of anyone it seems representative of someone returning any minute.

   I quickly egress and look about. There's a little lawn in front of the cottage (that being this side that's further from the rest of civilization). There's a picnic table in the middle and around it it is surrounded by thick impassable tree-high foliage. That is, except for a tunnel-like path into the foliage at the end furthest from civilization. AHAH, that is exactly what I'm looking for.

   So I enter the foliage tunnel and it twists and turns up a little canyon, crisscrossing a little steam. I actually took a little video of this but apparently I fail at taking video and held it angled too much at the ground so you don't get the feel for the awesome tunnelness which I was aiming to capture.

   Just when I'm starting to think this trail is just more and more and more of the same, it is suddenly as different as can be. Suddenly I pop out into a very unexpected situation

   Suddenly the foliage opened up to a vast desolate wasteland. Blackened trees reached for the sky like twisted fingers, dust blew forlornely along the barren ground. HOLY CRAP! I wandered amongst the charred desolation. It must be the location of that fire
   I climbed to a nearby ridge. It looked like it covered a blobular area approximately a mile across. Clearly there was only one course of action to take now .... EXPLORE THE WHOLE DAMN THING!! :D

   I hiked through the blackened shrubbery along the ridgeline closest to the meadow I'd come from observing the landscape from the various peaks. Then I walked down to the middle, of the area, which happened to be the bottom of a little valley. Here I found a babbling brook and a number of still-standing trees , leading me to suspect maybe the fire started with someone camping here. Looked like it probably had been a very pleasant place to camp. Additionally if the fire had started here, it wouldn't have been a raging inferno yet, hence the non-incinerated trees. Hoped to find a firepit or something but no such smoking gun existed. So much for amateur fire forensics.

   Wandered up to a ridge on the fire side of the little valley to check out the vantage point from there. Among other highlights I found a few animal bones, what looked like had been a garden in what must have been the middle of nowhere (chickenwire meshes in little circles the way people use them to protect little plants), and where the wild pineapples grow!! Okay they're probably not pineapples but they kinda looked like it.

   After wasting an hour or true trudging through this desolate wasteland I decided it was time to return to civilization and made my way back into the green tunnel-path and back to civilization.

   On the way back I stopped at the "Candy Store" on the highway, where I'd had delicious biscuits and gravy the other day. This time they had spaghetti with delicious meaty homemade sauce :d

Comments

[abe-lincoln666.livejournal.com]

I'd be worried about stumbling across somebody's secret weed farm; the secluded shack and the evidense of gardening sound kind of suspicious.

I've done a lot of exploring around Trabuco Arroyo, and although I've never stumbled across a commercial pot growing site, the cops do occaissional find them in the relatively inaccessible parts of the arroyo, so I always try to be careful about intruding on stuff like that.

Before they build the city of Ladera Ranch, there used to be a huge, open range area there where cattle grazed. This was probably a stupid thing for a city boy like me to do, but I often enjoyed trespassing across the cattle ranch and climbing the small hills around the arroyo and even walked clear over to the next arroyo (where they're building another toll road) to check things out.

The cattle ranch had a lot of interesting old stuff on it too; in one place, there was the remains of a rusted water pump, an old pump house and a big, rusted iron water tank. There were also several mysterious little fenced off areas that didn't seem to make any sense at all, foundations of old buildings, and another big, mysterious, perfectly square plot of land where nothing grew.

Over my years of trespassing/hiking/exploring in the arroyo, I've also found two old "Indian" grinding bowls, some great clam/mussel/scallop fossils and once after a big flood, I even found two partial fossilized sea lion skeletons.

Finding the sea lion skeletons was really weird. I'd been hiking for about two hours and I decided to sit down and take a break and drink a can of beer that I'd brought with me. So I was sitting on this adobe "shelf" beside Trabuco creek, and I noticed that there were bones sticking out of the adobe. I looked a little further, and found a more-or-less complete spinal column embedded in the adobe too.

The bones didn't look human (too big), so when I got home from my hike I called the anthtropology/paleontology/bone-digging departments at a couple of local colleges. UCI wasn't interested, but I found a professor at Saddleback college who was interested and told him about the bones and described where to find them.

The next week, I hiked back to the fossil site, and the college students had already been there and coated each fossil with plaster. The following week, I went back again and the fossils had been dug free from the surrounding ground, flipped over and the other side had been coated with plaster. Yet another week past, and I hiked back once more to find both fossils had been carted away.

It was kind of a fun experience, watching the stages of the excavation.

I think one of the people I talked to on the phone later said that the fossils were about 5 million years old. Later, I told my born-again-Christian/pot-head/Dead-head friend about it, and when I mentioned the 5 million year age, he said, "But how could that be? The earth is only 5,000 years old?"

Since I value his friendship, I left it at that.

[troubleagain.livejournal.com]

Weed farm, or even worse...meth lab.

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

Neat about the sea lion skeleton.

Yeah I definitely thought about weed farm options but the little screenings were fairly small and weed farms I've seen on TV have tree sized bushes. Also the area is traveled enough by people on nearby ranches I don't think it would make a sensical weed farm. But most of all, the place had been incinerated, so I figure no one would be defending an incinerated weed farm (:

[abe-lincoln666.livejournal.com]

Good point.

But what if it was an invisible weed farm?

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

Or a secret underground lab!