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Columbia Missouri – Third Grade Revisited

After leaving Kansas, my next scheduled stops were to visit friends & family in Hannibal MO, and Rochester IL. The line East was drawn directly through Columbia Missouri. It was one of the college towns we lived in for a while when I was a kid where I attended the second through fourth grades. There had not been any occasion for me to return for forty some-odd years, so I thought I’d stop in and check it out.

Finger Lakes State Park

As luck would have it, just to the North of town I located a fine spot to camp at Finger Lakes State Park. The weather was a bit drippy and cool, which was a shame because it would have been a great place to rent a kayak and paddle around at bit.  The rain was just like Chain O’ Lakes in Indiana where I camped back in June – another park that featured small lakes linked by creeks. Only as I write this do I recognize the coincidence!

One really nice feature was a public shooting range just outside the State Park property. I’m not sure if it was operated by the county or state, but it was super nice and completely free to use.  There were sections for different ranges from handgun out to 100 yards, complete with shooting benches and target stands. I took the opportunity to break out the pistols and shoot some paper targets. Seems I can still put the metal bits where I want them to go. Fun stuff.

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Humboldt County CA – Ferndale & The Lost Coast

Welcome to SoHum

Humboldt County has more coastline than any other County in California. Most of the County’s population is concentrated near Humboldt Bay in the cities of Eureka, Arcata and Fortuna, leaving the mountainous and forested areas largely vacant of humans. In my grandfather’s day, this meant the land along the coastal King Range was a good place for hunting, and he referred to the area as “down around Petrolia”. Today, this remote section is the home to Humboldts most reclusive characters, and the locals refer to it as SoHum (Southern Humboldt).

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Humboldt Bay, California

Informational sign posted at the parking lot at the end of the South Jetty

Humboldt Bay is big – 16,000 acres. The bay’s port at Eureka is the only protected deep water harbor between San Francisco and Seattle, so Humboldt Bay is a pretty important place from both an economic and ecology perspective. If you visit Humboldt Bay today, you’ll find three distinct  zones: South, North and Central.

The North and South consist of long barrier sand spits barely connected to the mainland. The Central section is the protected harbor, divided between mudflats teeming with wildlife and the City of Eureka, Humboldt County seat. Most of the central bay is private property. It’s the two spits that are the most accessible to the public as recreation areas, thanks to access roads the Corps of Engineers put it when they built a jetty at the end of each spit in 1890. The jetties were needed to stabilize the harbor entrance, which until then involved a risky transit over ever-changing sandbars.

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