I visited Jack last weekend. They were working on a trail project in the front country at Mineral King, repairing a section of trail that got wiped out by a flash flood this spring. The valley was gorgeous and spring green, everything vibrant with life and not yet ready to let go of moisture under the hot summer sun. I hiked up to the worksite and spent the day painting while they worked. My patience paid off and I think I managed to produce one of my best landscapes yet! Anyway, I'll have another post this weekend (hopefully) with some of the chaos of this week, but I wanted to share these photos first.
In the above photo, you can see the alluvial fan of debris flow generated by the flash flood that took out the trail. That little snake running horizontally in the photo is the road, which
was paved in that section, but is so no longer. The flow deposited about 8 feet of mud and rock onto the roadway. The roads crew cleared it off and flattened it on the downhill side, creating a much-needed parking expansion without the environmental assessment paperwork!
Above is their worksite. You can kinda see the drainage cutting right through the middle down the steep hillside. It's quite a jumble in this photo as they were still very much in the midst of work. Basically they had to put in sturdy rock work that could also allow for drainage in the springtime. Quite a trick, if you ask me! That giant boulder you can see under the person in the dark sweater was actually "rolled" there by the crew a few days earlier. It started out just to the left of where that person (who happens to be named Mitchell) is standing - you can kind of see a darker depression where it came from.
I also took some time to marvel at the wonders of shooting star flowers in a rather dry and definitely not meadow environment, the English gardenscape style that the phlox was growing around the waterbars in the trail, and one of the tiniest miner's lettuces I've ever had the pleasure of making acquaintance with. And no, I did not eat it, it was too cute and tiny. Honestly, it couldn't have been much bigger than a fifty-cent piece.
Finally, at the end of the day, this is what I had to show for my efforts: a painting of Hengst and White Chief Peaks, looking down the Mineral King valley from the worksite. Two things I really like about this painting are the incorporation of "halloween" trees (those turned orange because they've died, much more common in these years of drought) and the branches in the manzanita on the bottom right - the overall effect for those turned out much better than I anticipated, especially considering that I hadn't tried anything quite like it before. I do so love painting, and I just can't get over this one. I definitely think it's a new favorite of mine!
Until next time!
