Two Trees

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As you go North from the Pacific Ocean, through Ventura and up the hills/mountains, you'll run into an interesting site known as 'Two Trees'.  Probably  because on the top of one of the hills are 2 trees growing, nothing much else, just 2 trees.  You can see it for miles from all over the Oxnard Plain area and from out in the Ocean.  Here's some directions to get to 2 trees:

You got to get closer to 2 trees than this so here's a pic from space courtesy Google Earth (or not, I really didn't ask them to extend me any courtesy).  I'm the Red plus in the lower part and 2 trees is the circle in the upper right.  They're about at the 800' elevation mark so it's a physical deal hiking up there. 

Nicolas and some of his friends hiked up yesterday.  Understand that it's private property and they don't take much to people going there but it happens a lot.  Just don't damage or trash the area, eh?  Used to be 5 trees until some Halloween teenagers set fire or hacked down 3 of the trees.  Now you kind of understand.  Anyway.  Here's some pics I've taken from street level:

Normally, what green you see in these photos is for only 3 months a year at most.  During the 'rainy' season.

So, we've all seen pics of 2 trees from down here, this is what 2 Trees sees, courtesy of Nic:

And if you get at ground level near the edge, this is what a rabbit would see, just before the Red Tail swooped down and carried it off....

Yesterday's weather was kind of weird.  We've been through record heat and still are running above normal temps.  There's a Low Pressure thing-ey just off our coast pumping moisture into all that heat.  For the last few days, we've seen terrific thunderheads in the North, maybe 30-40 miles away, or more.  We'll see lightning at night but get no sounds of thunder.  Yesterday, we had a storm cell covering most of the Oxnard Plain and we could watch it, the entire thing, edge to edge, top to bottom.  Really cool with the rain pouring out of the bottom center, lightning hitting something on the ground, lightning going from the top of the cloud to the bottom of the cloud.  I'm from Thunderstorm/Tornado Town and I miss Mother Nature's Violent Work.  Saw a little demo of it yesterday.  Oh, yea, as Nic, camera in hand turned around to shoot what 2 Trees can see over it's back, he took this pic:

This picture stunned Travis as he's not used to seeing clouds with shapes.

Because our clouds are mainly on the ground in the form of the Marine Layer, that giant fog bank that lives off the coast of California, we get no shapes or features in the clouds - just flat and grey.   I took this mid-morning a week ago as a beautiful sunrise and sunny morning turned cold and damp.  This is the Marine Layer attacking all the way to ground level.  This picture is almost 3D if you click on the little version and get the bigger one.  

   Novel and pretty!

                                               "Mountain top views provided by "The Man"