So it's the third week of March, 2001. I'm going to do a two week survey of what spring is like this year, here in Southern California. We sometimes get rain till April, but this year the storms stopped at the beginning of March. So our rain/snowfall levels are well below average. I started out here in the desert near Thermal, one of the hottest places in the country. 120 degrees is not too unusual. Hot and dry, below sea level, but still plenty of stuff grows out here. My destination two weeks from now is the top of a mountain in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Conditions should be different up there.

Here's a spooky sign! I shot this one as I was going uphill, what a relief. It's even spookier when you're going downhill past it, knowing that the Pacific Ocean would gladly rush in here through the smallest crack in the ground. The sign is about 75 miles from the ocean. But much of that distance is also below sea level, and there are big earthquake fault lines through there...