Smoke gets in your skies

Welcome, homebound reader, and as you're no doubt aware the news is dominated by the wildfires which are now causing havoc up and down the west coast of the US. Smokey skies and poor air quality have become routine here, although I think most of the smoke we're seeing now is from fires that are hundreds of miles away.

Perhaps the oddest experience we've had was this Wednesday, when the air quality was fine, but smoke high in the atmosphere caused the natural light to take on a heavy orange tinge, turning downtown Palo Alto into something which looked more like Mars:

Fortunately we only really had one day like this; otherwise, the smoke makes it overcast and thus relatively chilly for this time of year (i.e. as I write this on the porch I need a jumper on). But we're fine here, if a little more housebound than usual.

So to finish off the Mendocino weekend, we took in a number of walks around the coast and up the river valleys of the region. It's a beautiful coastline:

We were also able to walk through a river valley (for some reason called a 'gulch' here) to this pretty little waterfall:

Like the good English tourists we are, we avoided the path labelled 'closed for repair work' on the way back. Our American cousins, however, didn't bother: we sat chuckling to ourselves as we ate our lunch and watched party after party just step over the taped-off bit of the path and carry on their own sweet way. Live free or die!

Mendocino County has its own heritage railway, which bills itself as the 'World Famous Skunk Train'. This is a standard gauge line, built from Fort Bragg on the coast, approximately 40 miles up the Noyo River valley to the town of Willits. Both Willits and Fort Bragg were founded on the logging industry: the Noyo valley was, 200 years ago, packed with massive Coast Redwood trees. These were progressively felled in the mid-late 1800s, from the coast inland, and shipped down the coast to build the city of San Francisco. To get them there, the railway was progressively built up the valley from Fort Bragg.

This is a steep, mountainous river valley, and the railway curves tightly and clings to switchbacks to navigate the ascents and descents. In some ways it's reminiscent of the narrow gauge lines in Wales. All the track is still there, but due to one tunnel collapsing and fire damage in the middle section, currently it's only possible to ride 3 miles at the Fort Bragg end, and about 8 miles at the Willits end. We chose to do the latter.

As the train loops backwards and forwards through the dense forest, it's difficult to believe that this area was completely cleared of trees by logging operations by 1900. Since then, the redwoods have taken over again, but these are relatively young trees, with just a very few old growth trees still standing. The train itself runs to the town of Crowley - well I say town, there was a town of 1000 people here once, but it was abandoned by 1930 and there's now nothing to indicate there was ever a town there. Here's our trusty iron steed stopped at Crowley:

The ride on the Skunk Train was a real highlight and highly recommended: not particularly exciting from the railway standpoint, but very evocative of the economics that shaped this area when Northern California was still being built.

After our break it was back over the Golden Gate bridge, and before long the smoke descended. Now everything is covered in a thin film of ash. Let's hope we see the sun again soon.