Spent the last week at a Wild Wonder nature journaling workshop in the Sierra Nevada – a last gasp of my sabbatical, and a great preparation for this fall semester’s environmental studies teaching.

Spent a week learning with John Muir Laws and Robin Lee Carlson, both of whom have taught me a lot through their books.

And I was blissfully offline, since we met at the San Francisco State University Sierra Nevada Field Campus, where there is no wifi and no cell reception.

We spent a lot of time outdoors, and some time sitting at microscopes to look at bees and other invertebrates. And when we needed information about species, habitat, etc, we did some radical stuff: we asked one another (a lot of us there had expertise to share) and we looked in books.A rustic wooden bookshelf filled with well-worn nature field guides and maps

Now I’m catching up on email before beginning the 2000-mile drive home. I’ve got my tent and sketchbooks in my car, and I plan to stretch this out a bit, so if you email or call, you might have to wait a while for a reply.

Most likely, I’ll be sitting on a hill or by a river somewhere, sketching and journaling. Feel free to leave a message.

Here’s an unedited photo of the sunset two nights ago from Saddle Pass. The colors were stunning as the sun set on one side and the moon rose over the Sierra Buttes on the other side. We alternated between trying to capture the colors with ink and paint, and just sitting there in awe of the wild wonder before us.

Auto-generated description: A misty landscape features a silhouette of trees against a gradient sky with hues of pink, orange, and red, bordered by distant rolling hills.

Not a bad way to bring my summer to a close, and an excellent way to prepare for another year of teaching.