Renaissance Faire at Lake Tahoe

Lake Tahoe, in northeast california, is a very popular resort, complete with gorgeous scenery, crowds, high prices, real estate developments... One of the older summer cottages.

The car, 1911 Winton, was owned by a guy who actually drives it; he got 8 of his family and toured through Yellowstone, and then Tahoe. What a way to go...

Lake Tahoe being such a happening place - upscale summer places, urban sprawl, good restaurants, and of course gorgeous scenery - I suppose it makes sense that they'd hold a Renaissance Faire here.

This medieval engineer (in fact a military engineer, the only kind there was back then; the next kind that evolved was of course the civil engineer) is demonstrating a model of a ballista, used for throwing big stones at enemy castles. (No, a catapult is different; it uses twisted ropes instead of a counterweight.)
Dudes: I guess the Arab's authentic to the scenario; not so sure about the barbarians...
Tobia the Adequate -
Duellists. In the real case, of course, they didn't have any safety equipment.

Medieval Dancers - they were good.
So was the music.
More dudes. About half of everybody there was in costume, most of them very elaborate.
Death Dancers. Had to do with the Black Plague.
The Black Plague was a big deal - something like a quarter to a half of everybody died. The Jews didn't, as much, because they believed in heathen customs like bathing and not having rats around. Unfortunately, some Europeans concluded that the reason they didn't die was because they were in league with the Devil; the remedy for which was to persecute them.

A tilting contest. One of the contestants, representing Scotland...

The other, representing England

The Queen, or Duchess or whatever, with her court and courtiers

A contest in spearing a wild boar - represented here by a bale of hay...

A brave man, standing with a apple (?) on his head. The contestants are supposed to use their sword to cut the apple in two, without hitting the man. Only one hit the apple, but they both missed the guy.

Beginning of the actual jousting. When they did it for real, the result, in something like a third of the cases, was a seperated shoulder or broken bones for at least one of the participants. So in this case, they used breakaway lances; the contestant whose lance shattered was the one who made proper contact, therefore the winner.


The Queen and her court, again.

More Barbarians

More scenery

Whqat happened to a lot of the old-growth trees: Thet were cut down for use in shoring up the shafts in the Comstock and other gold mines.

A monument to early pioneers





Commemoration of the Donner party. They started out for the west coast from St Louis a bit too late in the season, so that when they came to going over the pass in the Sierras to California they got caught in a series of disastrous snowstorms. By the time they could be rescued, several of the party had died, and been eaten by the others.

Down the road a little bit: a dragon
...made of recycled materials
...of all sorts.
The little yellow things they use to mark the center line, but all over the road.

Gnarly Trees and the Devil's Postpile

The Devil's Postpile - What a name (They told us that there are, in California alone, 150 geographical features that are blamed on the Devil - quite a record for a guy who isn't even supposed to exist). Note that these pieces of rock are quite long, regular and all about the same size. Sometimes, after being formed, they get bent...
And they're three-dimensional: Here's the top. It seems that if a lot of rock (Basalt, in this case) is spit up by a volcano, and is pretty uniform in composition and cools at exactly the same, rather slow, rate, it will contract little by ;little until a crack forms. This crack tends to propagpte in a straight line; after about 10 inches it splits into two cracks at 120 degree angles. These cracks in turn wioo split at the same angles, and voila! a whole array of hexagons, like a bee's honeycomb.
This pic is to show the size:
Sometimes the ends end up uneven - don't know why. There are quite a lot of these around, if you think to look for them. But this formation is the most reguar one known; over half of the posts are regular hexagons

Down a little stream, there is this, which I call the Elephant Rock. Looks like it's coming down to drink...

Everyone knows about the Appalachian Trail. However, there's also a Continentql Divide Trail, and this one, all in the state of California.
On the road -
Alpine flowers tend to be quite small, and exquisite:
The Bristlecones. Sequoia trees are the largest living things; California Redwoods the tallest; but Bristlecone Pines are the oldest. This is in eastern California, in the Sierra Nevadas This is all one tree; it is partly dead, but the part at the back could live on for centuries.

The needlesw-five in a bundle

The cones
The secrets of old age: The trees that grow on an exposed slope, in poor soils with little moisture, grow extremely slowly. This results in there being a lot of tannin in them, which kills the bugs that would eat them and the bacteria that would rot them. This makes them live a long time, and (along with the extreme altitude) keeps them from decaying even after they're dead.
Shakespeare, yet.
These are tree rings; they are really close together.
Now, this is copmplicated: Because there are unique combinations of dry and wet years, a particular sequence of thich and thin rings can be given a date. The oldest known living bristlecone is 4600 years old (the dendrochronologist - neat word, no? - who found it won't tell where it is, so that it won't be bothered). However, there are older ones that are dead but haven't decayed, so by matching these thick/thin sequences they can find wood even older, back some 6000 years.
The interesting part is that historians have dated wooden artifacts by radiocarbon dating: finding the ratio of radioactive Carbon-14 to normal Carbon-12. Since the C-14 decays at a known rate, and since the amount of C-14 in the tree when it was growing is known, this gives us the age of the tree.

However, for dates older than 200 years, this gave wrong answers. The problem turns out to be that the amount of C-14 in the atmosphere hasn't always been the same, due to sunspot cycles. But now, by comparing the tree-ring age of pieces of bristlecone with the radiocarbon dates, they have corrected the radioca4bon dates of these artifacts. Who knew?

The only other tree that can grow here is the Limber Pine.
These trees are incredibvle. The Japanese do wonderful things with Bonsai, but nothing like this.

Again, this is all one tree. Fire or erosion can tear away strips of bark and kill parts of the tree; but as long as a part of the tree has one strip of bark connecting it with the ground, that part can continue to grow.

One thing bristlecones have going for them is that they like very alkaline, dry soil, which almost nothing else can deal with. On this hill, the trees are spaced out, but nothing - not even grass or cactus - grows between them. The hill behind is entirely bare. This is in the Grove of the Ancients, at 10,500 feet.
Beautiful sunset - note the 'Glories' streaming down.