This Civil War era fort still shows the pockmarked scars from Union artillery. A later famous Lt Robert E Lee helped design the tidal sluice gates and canal for the moat which circumscribes the fort, and he had assured the commander that the walls would hold. And it did hold for 112 days against a Union siege in April of 1862. But despite the impressive moat, drawbridges, masonry, and reinforced internal structures, the invention of rifled artillery made the fort obsolete, as this test of the experimental weapons demonstrated. The wall on the left end had to be rebuilt after the spinning explosive shells opened huge gaps. After 30 hours bombardment, the fort surrendered and the port of Savannah was blocked by the Union’s anaconda. Otherwise, the fort is in good condition, with good views from the tops of the walls, and walking around the inside makes for an interesting visit.
On the left coast, last week I visited another park dedicated to a Spanish explorer. In 1542, the same year DeSoto died and Coronado gave up searching for gold, Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo sailed into San Diego Bay, before also dying on his expedition to explore America. The myth of the seven cities of gold was a powerful draw for the Spanish. Cabrillo was a slaver, who killed Aztecs by crossbow for Cortes and was rewarded with land, mines and enslaved Guatemalan natives. Wanting more, he headed north in ships built by slave labor in order to claim more land and enslave more natives. Cabrillo got as far as the Channel Islands, before dying by accident, and his crew made it as far as Oregon upwind before returning.
The monument is at the end of Point Loma, past Fort Rosencrans National Cemetery, overlooking the Naval Air Station on Coronado Island. Several different 25 minute films play on the half hour, and there’s an interesting old lighthouse to explore. Hiking paths on both bay side and ocean side offer especially beautiful views, and there’s parking near the tide pools and the sea cove connected by a lovely short trail. From the cliffs, I saw large sea lions, numerous pelicans, cormorants and seagulls. It’s a beautiful Navy city with famously great weather, and the Old Town, the Gaslamp District and the Hotel Coronado are among the interesting sights. Hopefully this post fits thematically, even though it is a bit out of trip order and way off geographically.
Upon arrival, I remembered visiting by small boat as a teen many years ago. All along the southeast coast, displaced Native Americans and escaped slaves endeavored to remain free in these low-lying delta barrier islands. Although threatened, the evocative old oaks, the Spanish Moss and the shell-filled archaeological ruins are still hauntingly beautiful.
In the 1730’s the British built a pair of forts, both named after Frederick, Prince of Wales, to develop and defend their colonies against the Spanish. Fort Frederick’s ruins are 125 miles north, next the Reconstruction Era Camp Saxton in South Carolina. Fort Frederica here in Georgia, defined the southern boundary of their colonies, north of Spanish Florida.
The British commander Oglethorpe was considered enlightened (for the time) and enthusiastic. Rather than slavery, he proposed work be done by indentured servants mostly from debtors prisons in England, making Georgia a type of penal colony where workers could gain their freedom over time. The Methodist founder John Wesley and his brother Charles first attempted a church under one of the large, mossy oaks here, and the settlement had various tradespeople, including a Native American interpreter, a blacksmith and a doctor/barkeep.
In a remarkable historical echo of the French colonial experience at Fort Catherine, Oglethorpe also tried to seize St. Augustine in Florida, besieging the Castillo de San Marco and being stopped at Matanzas. Again, the Spanish counterattacked, but faring better than the French, Oglethorpe successfully defended this fort and cleverly routed the Spanish in Bloody Marsh, despite being outnumbered. After the Spanish retreated and conceded Georgia, the British cut their military presence here and the remote island village faded away in a decade or two.
Now, while driving through these remote islands, I can’t help but be amazed by the fancy houses. Not because they’re decadently ostentatious, but because they’re so close to sea level. It is astonishing to think that many of America’s most successful retirees choose to develop luxurious estates within the zone that is most certainly going to be erased by the climate crisis. The collapse of Thwaites ‘Doomsday’ Glacier is accelerating, and rising seas will take all the land here. They may have inherited much wealth, but they won’t be leaving these houses to future generations. Apparently, you don’t need much intelligence to be rich.
The shaded grove interests me, more so than the fort. In the southeastern US, a grove like this is called a hammock, a Native American word that entered European languages with two meanings shortly after Columbus visited around 1500. Hammocks, the sleeping nets hung between trees, date back to the Maya civilization in Central America, and the Taino in the Caribbean would have been the first to introduce those as ‘hammocks’ to Columbus. Perhaps the grove meaning stems from ‘net’ as a way to describe the interlaced canopy of branches. Or, perhaps an explorer pointed at a grove asking what it was, and a native answered “that’s my hammock”. The wonderful brief boardwalk hike covers a great variety of species. I saw a great horned owl, ghost crabs, eastern red cedar, sand live oak, holly & myrtle and the burrow of a gopher tortoise.
458 years ago and long before any fort, the inlet here—with its strategic opening to the Atlantic—was named Bahía de Matanzas, or ‘Slaughter Bay’. The French had settled on the Florida coast just before the Spanish, and in 1565 Fort Catherine sent 250 French soldiers down here to seize St Augustine, 15 miles up the inland waterway. But a storm intervened as their ships were crossing the bar, and they were shipwrecked. When they were discovered, the Spanish slaughtered them.
283 years ago, the British, under Governor Oglethorpe of Georgia, also tried to seize St Augustine, laying siege to to Castillo de San Marco for 39 days in 1740. The Spanish improved their defenses in 1742, including building Fort Matanzas to guard the southern approach. That same year, the British returned and the fort fulfilled its mission by firing warning shots across the inland waterway, helping prevent another sneak attack on St Augustine.
The fort itself is small and unremarkable, but it has a commanding view of the narrow channel. Unless you have your own kayak, you have to take a gasoline-powered ferry to get there (no ferry Monday or Tuesday). Of all the places to convert a boat to electric, this seems perfect. The ferry has a large flat roof that could charge up by solar and it only runs a short distance on a limited schedule. But for all the talk about “saving nature forever”, not enough practical steps are being taken to protect wonderful natural habitats like this from the climate crisis.
As you approach St Augustine, you may see the signs proclaiming it to be the nation’s oldest city. That’s not true, of course, there are several older, continuously occupied Native American settlements, including Acoma’s Sky City, Taos, Zuni and Oraibi. St Augustine is the oldest continuously occupied city in the US which was founded by Europeans. This euro-centric bias is even more inappropriate when you realize that the fort was used repeatedly by the US military to imprison many Seminole, 74 survivors of the Sand Creek Massacre, and many Apache.
This is my favorite fortress park. Still, too many Americans still haven’t heard of St Augustine, don’t know that the first thanksgiving mass with natives occurred here, that the fort was unsuccessfully besieged by the English (twice) and by the French, and didn’t know that the Spanish were here two hundred years before the US declared independence from England. So, a visit here is bound to be educational. The programs here sometimes include costumed re-enactors, gun firing demonstrations and tours of the various rooms, walkways and defensive lookouts, so it’s fun for kids of all ages. The fort’s strategic location means that it has a beautiful view of the boats traveling through, and years ago my kids enjoyed seeing a nearby museum with pirate treasure.
Almost forgot, but on the way east from California, I finally stopped at this obscure unit between Mojave National Preserve and Nevada. This is an undeveloped park in all senses of the word. There are no park facilities (besides the small sign), and the center of the park is still a open pit, unprofitable gold mine, which is supposed to be transferred to the park service soon. Not much to see, despite lots of warnings about not running over the Desert Tortoises. From the Castle Mountains on the left, you can look across at the Castle Peaks on the right, but the former don’t look like castles and the latter are outside the park in the New York Mountains. (I blame the miners for the naming confusion).
The “roads” in the park are 4WD high clearance only and sometimes wash out completely. Since I’m trying not to damage my car again (Chaco!), I thought I’d test out my new e-bike on the 10 mile road in from Clara Bow’s old ranch (now a Nature Conservancy reserve). My car would have bumped along well enough until the park entrance, but then it might have gotten tricky. There’s another even rougher way in from the Ivanpah Road. (If you’ve ever driven around here, you’ve seen the Ivanpah Solar Towers which use mirrors to boil salt but burn natural gas each morning to get warmed up. And they kill birds.) Anyways, there was a nice sunset lighting up some of the Joshua Trees, but I didn’t stop to take another photo on my way out.
The redwoods here are coastal, Sequoia Sempervirens, and are not the shorter, but more massive giant sequoias up in the Sierra Nevada mountains. Both types of redwoods, and a relative, the dawn redwood found in China, once lived all around the northern hemisphere, but now their numbers are drastically reduced. The coastal redwoods are the tallest living beings on earth, each one living for centuries. Dinosaurs walked through these coastal redwood groves.
This old growth forest was donated in 1908, made a national monument by Teddy Roosevelt, named for his friend the naturalist John Muir, and was the site of a UN founding meeting held in 1945 in memory of FDR. Despite the many visitors (parking or shuttle reservations required), it is still possible to find a quiet moment among these silent sentinels and connect to the ancient world.
I’m pretty sure these are the endangered Las Vegas Bearpoppy with yellow flowers in spring. Endangered, because Vegas sprawl exceeds monumental. Honestly, there wasn’t much else to see in this “still in planning stage” park site. There’s a temporary 3.25 mile Alicante Loop Trail and parking on North Aliante Parkway at West Moonlight Falls Ave, but the desert is subtle in natural features. There are mats of desert mistletoe in the acacia and mesquite, but they’re parasitic plants best appreciated by the rare silky flycatcher. Despite free dog waste bags and signs, the locals use this place to let their pets run off leash and much of the brush has poop and trash stuck in it. The park extends for miles from North Vegas up 95 northwest, and hopefully they will soon be employing a ranger to protect the park from the residents and pets of the lushly landscaped neighborhoods across the street. Vegas isn’t known for keeping realistic boundaries.
I hiked out here 2 miles round trip to Spectra Point to get a view with Bristlecone Pines, so that you can tell this is not another photo of Bryce. There are a number of Bristlecone Pines here and a few more near Chessmen Ridge Overlook, although they are likely younger than some at Great Basin. By the way, if you’re looking for cedar trees, there never were any. Early visitors from back east mistakenly thought that the juniper trees were cedars, and the misnomer stuck. Cedar Breaks is over 10,000’, so it’s a step or two above Bryce, but since it extends down through and exposes the same layer of rock, it looks similar near the top. The view down the gorge looks down over 5,000’ towards also misnamed Cedar City, so you get a good look at the various layers of the grand staircase. Be careful hiking here, as high altitude contributes to vertigo. Due to the heights and erosion, there aren’t any recommended trails down from the rim, but there are a few rim trails and seven overlooks, four of which are near parking. While the road and trails may still be open, there was frost on the trail when I visited, and the roads will close as soon as it snows. The temporary visitor center and store has now closed for the season, and the new visitor center at Point Supreme Overlook is still under construction. Hopefully it’s open next year.
For millennia people had been using this spring to live, grow crops and travel through, but then the Mormons built a fort and walled it off. 80% of the Kaibab Paiute population died off between 1490 and 1860, many from starvation. The Mormons also enslaved the natives, technically 20 years of indentured servitude, after purchasing them from native slavers, a practice the natives learned from the Spanish.
On this trip I saw both the Green River at Dinosaur and the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon explored by John Wesley Powell, who employed Kaibab Paiute guides. Years later when Powell became director of the US Geologic Survey in DC, a Mormon missionary, translator and expedition member named Jacob Hamblin wrote to his old friend about how the Kaibab Paiutes were dying of starvation.
“The foothills that yielded hundreds of acres of sunflowers which produced quantities of rich seed, the grass also that grew so luxuriantly… the seed of which was gathered with little labor, and many other plants that produced food for the natives is all eat out by stock.”
Hamblin to Powell, 1880
Eventually, the US government intervened and gave the Kaibab Paiutes rights to 1/3 of the water, along with 1/3 to the perpetrators who were using the fort as a hideout for ‘plural families’, and 1/3 to the federal government. Like many wrongdoers, the Mormons at the time tried to justify their killing of the natives by saying that some natives had killed two Mormons, that they were bringing civilization to the natives and that they were more productive. I wasn’t interested in the Mormon pioneer fort or the old self-serving justifications, but the historic conflict over marriage rights seemed ironic, given the 2008 Mormon campaign against gay marriage in California. In any case, the native history is fascinating and helps explain why Utah is 1% Native American and over 2/3 Mormon. There’s a garden run by the local tribe that grows the three sisters (corn, beans & squash) along with Amaranth, which was a beautiful deep purple.
Overall, Utah does an exceptionally good job in managing its remarkable natural resources, but the climate crisis allows no time for delays. Today the spring above is full of toxic algal mats that can release deadly Cyanobacteria neurotoxins, which appears to be spreading as the climate warms. Civilization is destroying life on earth, via carbon pollution, so it hardly deserves the name.
Zero Carbon Travel 