Wacky races redwood springs
Start in San Francisco, equal parts earth-mother and geek-chic, or Los Angeles, where nearly 90 independent cities are rolled into one multicultural mosaic, then drift down the coast, past perfect beaches, to surf-style San Diego. Or escape to the peaceful Sierra Nevada mountains, detour to soulful SoCal deserts, cruise agricultural heartland valleys and lose yourself in northern redwood forests. On sunny days when the coastal fog lifts, over miles of Pacific Ocean coastline await. And no matter where you go, vineyards never seem far away. Golden Gate Bridge from Sausalito, California. Free thinkers, top-tier museums and groundbreaking arts scenes thrive here.
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Content:
- 10 of the Most Epic Northern California Trail Races
- Mendocino and Humboldt counties, California
- Art on the Move
- California regions at a glance
- In Awe of Ann Trason
- The Big List of 100+ Strange, Fun & Unique Attractions in Southern California
- Redwood Empire runners collect 3 medals at state track and field championships
10 of the Most Epic Northern California Trail Races
Originally published in Arthur No. Tired of dealing with state governments that seemed more concerned with distant population centers—and not with repairing the decrepit bridges and mud-choked roads leading to their sparsely populated mining, fishing and timber communities—the people of Northern California and Southern Oregon took steps to secede from their respective states.
The new state would be called Jefferson—a name arrived at by way of a newspaper contest—in honor of Thomas Jefferson, third president of the U. Childs governor. At his inauguration he was photographed with a bear on a chain that appears to have a severed human hand in its jaws. Though small in number, benign Jefferson State secessionists still hold meetings, run a Web site and paint slogans on their barn roofs.
The Jefferson State movement points to a spirit of individualism that thrives in Northern California, especially in Humboldt County. For the race, the least noteworthy of the entries appearing on the starting line in Arcata is a gray-haired, bearded guy wearing a suit and riding a bicycle.
Six pilots sit inside dressed as chefs, complete with poofy white hats. They do all of this at an average speed somewhere around mph, meaning the race never gets much faster than the wheelchair-bound vets in the Memorial Day Parade that precedes them at the finish line in Ferndale. The KSR combines the tedious pace and muddy wallowing of a tractor pull with the budget-minded engineering of a demolition derby and the physical punishment of an Iron Man triathlon.
Dozens of participants return every year. Some have two decades of consecutive races behind them. The race means many things to many people, but as far as Hobart is concerned its primary purpose is to serve as a weapon against suicide. You have to be seeking Humboldt County in order to get there.
Garberville, the largest town in southern Humboldt, is miles from San Francisco. The two largest towns in Humboldt—Eureka and Arcata—are over 70 miles further north. Though Jefferson State is now mostly history, it is a given with locals that Northern California, particularly Humboldt, is separate from the rest of California. For his part, Hobart Brown subscribes to the theory that, along with Hawaii, Humboldt is one of the last outposts of Mu, a mythical lost civilization akin to Atlantis.
The best road to Humboldt from the rest of California is U. The same freeway serves as a 25 mph main street further north in Willits and Laytonville. The towns stay charming, but as you move north there are fewer high-priced bistros and more stores selling generators, solar panels and livestock supplies. Outside towns, the road is flanked on either side by acres of farmland and deep forests. Country lanes open up throughout Sonoma and Mendocino Counties, lined by roadside invitations to join the landed gentry in their wine tasting rooms from 11 a.
Logging trucks hauling gargantuan pieces of timber, farmers driving tractors between their fields and rusted VW buses filled with vintage hippies discourage speedy drivers. The archetypal Humboldt vehicle is a mud-spattered 4WD pickup truck with a Grateful Dead sticker and a National Rifle Association decal sharing the same bumper. Croft is a sewing machine repairman who moved to Humboldt County with his wife when he retired from the Coast Guard ten years ago.
Croft works with an organization called the Humboldt Kinetic Association HKA , an alliance of local non-profit groups that purchased the KSR from Hobart last year with the intention of turning a somewhat anarchic event into a smoothly functioning, money-making venture. He would like this to be a more family-friendly event, and for everyone in the family to have a place to go to the bathroom. Some participants seem indignant that they guy handling all the bureaucratic shit-work has never raced the course.
About eight or nine thousand people did that. I let Croft off the phone so that he and his wife can finish programming mobile phones for race volunteers with relevant contact numbers. Like a lot of places in Humboldt, the town of Ferndale offers creepy and quaint in one fog-shrouded package.
There are cute fudge shoppes with sweet little old ladies tending the counter and a second-hand bookstore with shelves of sale books sitting on the sidewalk 24 hours a day. Men with radical beards drive pickup trucks up and down the street. A sprawling cemetery overlooks the town, its century-old crypts and crumbling headstones spread up the side of a hill like a macabre amphitheater until they fade into a fog-filled forest.
The floor is carpeted and the walls are graying redwood. It feels like the inside of a barn. His towering works of sculpted brass run down the center of the cavernous bottom story. Hobart is surrounded by decades of stories, some glowing, others damning. He seemed to keep a removed presence during the event, emceeing at the starting line and then following along intermittently in a white stretch limousine. When asked about Hobart, people seemed to either be overcome with a vague sense of awe and gratitude or they just sort of snuffled a bit and muttered under their breath.
If the downstairs of Hobart Brown Galleries is an art-filled barn, the upstairs is straight hillbilly Addams Family. There is a petrified pork chop, discolored with freezer burn. A Vampirella poster is plastered on the ceiling 14 feet above. KSR paraphernalia is everywhere: stickers, posters, ribbons, press clippings, trophies. Three hunting arrows protrude from the wall. A pot-bellied stove sits in the middle of the room.
Hobart welds his sculptures in his living room. Tanks of flammable gas stand behind a furry white sectional couch. Bill Croft and Hobart are sitting and talking when I arrive, and in the middle of our interview, Croft—who radiates his Coast Guard past with a warm vest and a dense beard—fires up a blowtorch and starts melting brass.
The century-old building, Hobart tells me, used to be a brothel. The rest of the upstairs consists of tiny, windowless bunkrooms often inhabited by his many guests. Hobart also mentions that he used to be a prostitute. We set up for an interview on a coffee table covered in all sorts of paper. Copies of Popular Mechanics abound here, as well as in the living room. The toilet seat is labeled and dated. There is a guest book in the bathroom as well as in the living room and another downstairs in the gallery.
Hobart is a funny little man. Bill Croft calls him a goof. He wears overalls with blue and white stripes. Some sort of KSR medallion rests on his chest, held there by a blue ribbon. His moustache is uneven, the right strands hanging down longer than the left. His right eye is slightly more squinty than his left and his hair is disheveled. Hobart has done hundreds of interviews in the 34 years since he started the race. He keeps a list of all the media outlets that have covered him, his folk art gallery or the KSR and gives me a photocopied index.
Hobart loves attention. The genesis of the KSR is a concise, well-rehearsed tale. Hobart loved this thing, says he thought he had done his own Sistine Chapel. A friend, Jack Mays, saw the sculpture and decided to make his own. Supposedly it was Mays who came up with the idea to race the sculptures down Main Street in Ferndale—an obscure historical detail that has threatened Kinetic Schism on more than one occasion.
On race day Hobart claims 10, people showed up, a boast that everyone shares when I ask about the first race. Randall Frost, who curates the Kinetic Sculpture Museum, shows me photos of the event and the figure seems almost believable. In a history that is less easily narrated, the race expanded to the current three-day triathlon of the arts. The sculptures became rugged orgies of bicycle engineering and folk art rather than the more delicate originals upon which they were modeled, graceful machines that were powered by rocking chairs hooked to drive trains, vehicles that made their way down the street propelled by the downward velocity of running water.
The thing that helps make Hobart such a big deal up here—his Humboldt County celebrity status springs from a history of events including Halloween bacchanals, wild pig hunting expeditions and confrontations with the chamber of commerce—is his willingness to embellish stories from his objectively festive life to anyone who will listen.
His claim that he used to be a prostitute, for example, stems from a particularly promiscuous period in his life when he would ask his partners—women friends from around the way, mostly—to give him a dollar each time he had sex with them. He punctuates all of his stories with the sort of mischievous smile that on a younger man might result in just such a bevy of willing partners.
Hobart is extremely good at preaching the ideals of the race though, revealing the philosophical implications of its arcane rules and guidelines. He turns every little twist of KSR history into an aphorism making the case that the world will be a better place the more people participate in kinetic sculpture racing.
It turns race participants into devotees who schedule their lives around the event. Name one unknown artist that made it. So I rest my case. The way you do that is you give them a sense of purpose. Correlating suicide rates and indexes of depression in rural northern California with the frequency of participation in kinetic sculpture racing is not a project anyone has undertaken just yet.
But regardless of the lack of research on the subject, talking to Hobart makes me want to believe that it works. Langford, Ph. I applaud his efforts. Hobart thinks his mother tried to commit suicide when he was growing up in Hess, Oklahoma. One afternoon she told him they were going to take a nap, and that he should lie down and go to sleep. He got thirsty though, and when he went to the kitchen for some water, he found the gas running.
He took some classes at UCLA and attended a lecture by celebrated sculptor Alexander Calder that had a substantial impact on his life. Like Hobart, Calder pursued technical training over art school, and spent the early s putting his engineering degree to work. In the agrarian climate of Oklahoma, Hobart felt there was no place for him except as a farmer, fieldworker or mechanic. After relocating to California and hearing Calder speak, he began to consider making art the focus of his life.
He relocated the gallery to Ferndale, into the building where he now lives, in A rickety network of tiny scaffolding and ladders winds around the copper mass, stopping off at ledges and caves that depict various life stages and their accompanying challenges: Descend the ladder past the cave of early death, cross the dangerous bridge of adolescence and you arrive at the cave of rejection.
Make it through there and you find early rewards. Resist those and there are more ladders and caves to endure until you end up naked in the cave of self-realization and finally cross the gateway of eternal wisdom.
Mendocino and Humboldt counties, California
Todd Power M Atholville Dean Mercer M Rothesay Sylvain Arseneau M Petit-Rocher Sacha Hourihan F Sussex Corner John Herron M Bloomfield
Art on the Move
This page is a list of all the quests in the game, as well as the post in the blog that it is covered in. Once on the post, you can use the search function again to jump to the quest you are looking for. Quests may be out of order that they appear in game or do not correspond to the actual day number. This is because when new quests are added, they are sometimes put in the middle of the quest progression. While they are new to me, they may be available to you at a lower level. Violet Silvergarden said:. December 11, at am. Maggie Oldcamp said:. December 11, at pm.
California regions at a glance
Whether you are looking for live music or the latest in gourmet cuisine, you can find it within a short drive of Pajaro Dunes Resort! Learn about the work of Scientists and their studies of dolphins, sea lions, elephant seals and harbor seals. The Reserve has 5 miles of trails that meander through oak woodlands, wetlands, and meadows. Tours will be offered first-come, first-serve on Saturdays and Sundays at 10 am and 11 am with limited capacity one household unit or mixed groups of up to 5 people. Find out more….
In Awe of Ann Trason
The editors then promote their favorite posts in an article on their site. A lot of runners think Ann Trason is more than awesome. We got to know each other more than 15 years ago, and then she faded from the scene, mainly because she was injured and got serious about cycling. I lost touch with her, but then a mutual friend got us back in touch this spring. Over the past several months, she started running again and working with young runners.
The Big List of 100+ Strange, Fun & Unique Attractions in Southern California
As the most desirable state to visit, California sees a lot of tourists and recently, sites like Yosemite, Death Valley, Big Sur, and Kings Canyon have become almost Disneyland-like with crowds. If you want a quiet moment with nature to experience the cliff-lined beaches, redwood forest, towering mountains, and arid desert, there are still a few hidden gems left in the Golden State. With some of the most beautiful, varied terrain in the country, check out these smaller state parks to discover something new-to-you. This gem in the heart of the Mojave Desert is like something off the pages of the Wizard of Oz. Out of the stark, dry grasses comes an overwhelming display of poppies, which just so happen to be the state flower. Visitors can learn more about this phenomenon at the Jane S. Pinheiro Interpretive Center, then enjoy hiking and a picnic. Impressive even from the interstate, the true beauty of Castle Crags is best enjoyed on foot.
Redwood Empire runners collect 3 medals at state track and field championships
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Mark McKenna. No event epitomizes Humboldt County like the Kinetic Grand Championship, where the quirky and clever come out for a good time Memorial Day weekend. Onlookers delight in the elaborate, human-powered sculptures that maneuver over a treacherous mile course on land, water and sand. In previous years, fire-breathing dragons, mammoth aluminum sharks and a googly-eyed Extreme Makeover were some of the creations that dazzled crowds.
The youth, named Joshua, had become a fixture on Denton's downtown square and other spots around town. But not just Joshua. Liechty, a computer programmer and DJ who attended UNT from to , called the event, which took place this past December, Dentonpalooza. The event was very Denton. It not only showed off the city's quirky characters, but it also displayed its unique ability to come together and support the community. Generosity, talent, craziness, history, friendship.
This is a list of all custom tracks made for Mario Kart Wii. Some tracks also are not in any custom track distributions. For each custom and retro track, the translations can be entered on the track page. Therefore, the usage of Template:Language-Info is mandatory.
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