Street Trumpeter (c) Jack Fulton, 2008
My good friend Jack Fulton and I have taken many car trips to the California Sierra mountains and to Nevada, Arizona, and New Mexico. Jack is a real photographer and we both love driving down new roads, scanning the landscape for photo-worthy scenes. We’re fascinated by the world out there, and we stop and shoot continually. When we were doing this in the ’60s and ’70s, Jack was always saying he was “… stunned and amazed,” and that phrase has stuck with me. It describes much of what I find on my travels. I’m stunned and amazed by buildings, people, beaches, mountains, landscapes, I bring this up if you’re a reader of this blog because I find myself writing the word “amazing” a lot and I may sound a bit pollyannish or like the boy crying wolf, but goldarnit, I am just knocked out by what I run across.
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In 1972, Jack and I were on a 2-week trip shooting photos for the book Shelter, and we ended up on a dirt road in Navajo territory in Arizona. We stopped at a trading post that had a traditional hogan next to it. A few minutes before, a striking young Indian guy had ridden past us on a paint horse, a bandana on his head and his shiny black hair in a long braid — powerful image. It was cold and windy and as we were shooting pix of the hogan, a big pickup truck pulled up, and a woman jumped out. She looked like a cross between an Indian princess and Tina Turner. An aura of vitality and beauty. Wow! She went into the store, and Jack looked at me and said,
“Don’t you just love ’em?”
https://jackfulton.net/
Small farm building often have perfect proportions for a tiny house. This one is on an old dairy farm near Pt. Arena, Calif. Note the concrete lower half of the walls, it was probably a milking room or milk storage room.
Peter King from Johnson, Vermont, on tiny houses (his is 100 sq. ft.):
•”Tiny houses are for people who can entertain themselves…”
•”Tiny house people are generally a different breed; they’re not from the “stuff” nation…”
•”The tiny house forces you to get rid of your junk…”
•”I’d rather be very poor and have lots of free time in a beautiful place, than have all kinds of money and no free time…”
I’m on my 3rd Toyota Tacoma 4×4 truck. It’s got 80,000 miles on it, has never failed to start (well, with depleted batteries, twice), has carried me across creeks, up gullies, along sandy beaches, up impossibly steep hills. 4 cylinders, 5 speed, stick shift. Anyway, this is for all you Toyota drivers out there:
Just ran across this amazing video of a skater on a Loaded longboard. He seems to float.
Elevator to the “Top of Vancouver” revolving restaurant. I wasn’t prepared for the scenic ride; the elevator has glass doors and is on the outside of the building. Ulp!
This looks like the builder took a large quonset hut (with curved corrugated steel) and used it to make this nice little barn.
Nice setup, canoe and all. The idea of having a trailer be your station central — kitchen, (maybe bathroom), sleeping on rainy nights — while you spend a lot of time outdoors. You could have a barbecue on the deck, table for eating, bed so you could see stars at night.
This photo of these magnificent animals was on the wall at Stewart Mineral Springs.
I was pretty exhausted driving home from Canada on Hwy. 5, had slept 4 hours in my truck, and crossed from Oregon into California, and pretty soon saw the magnificence of Mt. Shasta looming in the background. Somewhere near the town of Weed (heh-heh), I saw a sign saying “Stewarts Springs Road,” and dimly remembered a resort by that name. I used my GPS to get the phone number (it was under “lodgings”), called, yes they had hot mineral baths, so I detoured out into the countryside. Turns out that they are not hot springs coming out of the ground, but rather heavily-mineralized waters from a spring that are heated and channeled into bathtubs in private rooms.
They make your skin tingle and you alternate between the waters, sauna (a wonderful large sauna room heated by a glowing iron wood stove (burning oak), and cooling off. Well, for cooling off, there was a green pool in a flowing stream that had ice on the edges, and, thinking of hardy Finns jumping in the snow, I dove in. And got out pretty darn fast. Man, this was a level of cold as of yet unexperienced! But circulation gets to work immediately and the effect is stimulating and wonderful. I recommend this place if you’re ever heading south from Oregon on HWY 5. $25 for the routine. They also have food and lodging
https://www.stewartmineralsprings.com
Idea for a tiny home (by side of road near Sedro Woolley Washington). The addition on the side could be a bathroom By the way, probably the best roadside breakfast I’ve ever had was at the Iron Skillet in Sedro Wooley yesterday.
I caught about 4 hours comfortable sleep in the back of my truck last night and am writing this from the Stage Door Cafe in Mt. Shasta City, Calif. (Driving south on Hwy 5, Mt. Shasta suddenly looms in the distance, a powerful presence, a definitely magic mountain). Apparently storms are about to hit the coast, from BC down to the SF Bay Area. We need the rain.
