This from my Brother who followed me on a very nice Motocycle ride yesterday :

Finally, the recent rains have moved away from So. Cal. So today, the Norton Motorcycle Club of L.A. decided to have a ride up to Ventura, to visit a large private motorcycle museum owned by a guy whose business makes industrial control equipment. He has a couple of hundred bikes, mostly racers and high performance street bikes. He has Steve McQueens Indian and the same model bike that T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) was riding when he crashed and died. A good mix of British, U.S. and Japanese bikes.

About 100 bikes showed up at Cafe 50s in West L.A. for breakfast, to start the ride. Cafe 50s holds about 50 people, and has a regular Sunday breakfast crowd, so it got a little crowded, and maybe rowdy. The manager pointed out that most biker groups call ahead to make meal arrangements for group rides. No one had done that for this run.

After chowing down on psuedo-50s breakfast fare, the group headed west on Santa Monica Blvd. to the ocean and picked up Pacific Coast Highway, heading north through Malibu. This is a pretty standard route, up PCH then turn inland at Latigo Canyon and twist and turn through the mountains heading toward "The Valley." Unfortunately, Latigo Canyon Rd. is closed because of damage from the recent huge fires and subsequent earth movements (mudslides). So we went up Malibu Canyon Rd. (which runs past Pepperdine University's beautiful campus overlooking the Pacific Ocean).

Once a few miles inland on Malibu Canyon Rd., we could see the extent of the recent fires. Miles and miles of scorched earth, trees burned entirely away. Places on the road where hillsides had subsided in the rain and blocked one lane (these are mostly 2 lane roads). Everywhere, trucks from 'phone companies, cable companies, and the electric company, and scores of men working to replace power poles and wires. Note that this is WEEKS AFTER the fires ended, and still there were hundreds of utility workers out on a Sunday trying to get all the damage repaired.

There were grate examples of corporate-think going on. All the power poles and poles for telephone and cable lines burned away. They were wood, and wood infused with creosote, so they basically acted like matches in the fires. AT&T is busily installing new WOODEN poles. The electric company is putting in reinforced metal poles. Which ones are going to survive the next fire, I wonder. Metal utility poles are usually eyesores, with bright silvery metal disrupting the natural environment. But many of the new metal poles being installed have a dark brown finish, much more appropriate to the setting.

This area of southern California is now largely state and national forest land. But there are lots of places that people around the world have seen. These mountains are constant filming locations. M.A.S.H. was partially filmed in these mountains (both feature and TV series), but the location was in the fire path and burned over. Cecil B. deMille used this area as "Egypt" for his first, silent version of the Ten Commandments, back in the 19-teens. Clark Gable's San Francisco used these mountains as background, and no viewers knew the difference.

From Malibu Canyon Rd. we turned on to Portero Rd., through Hidden Hills, and the expansive "horse farms" of some of your favorite music stars. Even if they don't have horses, these folks like to put up miles and miles of white fencing, to make their estates look grand and active. Most of the fences these days are not wood, but plastic or metal extrusions. And most of them (most of Hidden Hills) seem to have escaped much fire damage. But there were a few miles of melted fencing,with sections toppled over and heat formed into fantastic shapes.

We were supposed to stay on Mulholland Highway for some time. But at Cornell Rd., Mulholland is closed due to fire damage. So turning onto Cornell Rd., we rode past the Paramount Movie Ranch, where there has been a "western town" set since at least the 1920s. Thousands of movies, TV series and commercials have been (and continue to be) shot there. It was one of the locations for the current series Westworld. But the fire destroyed the entire town. Not just the set buildings, but all the staging areas where crews maintained equipment, fixed costumes that got damaged during filming, and the vast covered pavilion where craft services made sure that everyone was well fed during shooting days. ALL gone, EXCEPT a church that was built a few years ago, out in the big meadow, and the railroad station. These two structures were away from both the town set and any big trees, so they were able to survive the flying embers, and didn't light up.

Decades ago, when we still cared about heritage, and public spaces, the Paramount Movie Ranch was deeded over to the National Park system, which continues to run it as both a national park, with hiking trails and wildlife preservation and an active film shooting facility. Lots of horse riders clumping through every day. The shooting fees bring in a good income for the Park Service, so we tax payers get the benefit of both wonderful settings for our popular entertainments AND big income to fund maintenance, keeping the hiking and horse trails tended, and keeping the wildlife protected.

The Park Service had announced plans to clean up and rebuild the western town. But with the Trump shutdown, there is no one there to even begin the clean up work. Because it's such a popular place, many people coming through take care to pick up trash. But others clearly think that it's appropriate to dump their trash, where ever they want.

From the Ranch, we kept on, northwest through the mountains, on more twisty 2-lane roads, toward Ventura. In Ventura we dove out of the mountains to the coast, where endless farm fields are growing food and flowers for the nation. The temperature climbed into the high 70s, under a virtually cloudless sky as we arrived at the motorcycle collection. The owner had set up a grill and was providing cheeseburgers as fast as people could grab them. A few other groups / clubs also showed up, probably less than 500 riders in all.

Motorcycles are in a down period right now. Millenials don't ride them, Gens Y and Z don't either. So a big group like this is mostly men and women in their 50s and older. Lots of grey hair and big bellies. Also, lots of "baseball" style hats. But in this crowd of almost exclusively older, exclusively WHITE people, NOT ONE "maga" hat! That's a good sign.

We're already planning for the annual VJLA motorcycle club ride to Death Valley, at the end of March. Lots of people came up to ask if the "Big Orange" (my old CalTrans truck) would be on the Death Valley run as a chase truck. Of all the chase trucks in the 25+ years of the VJLA Death Valley ride, the Big Orange" is the most popular. Since the ride is designed for "vintage" bikes, having a 40 year old chase truck seems a reasonable idea. We'll be working on the truck tomorrow, to see if we can get it past smog testing (360 V-8 with a Holley 4-barrel, so it puts out a LOT of exhaust).

One of the nice things to see in the mountain valleys we ran through today was that, except on the steepest hillsides, there is bright green ground cover already growing back in. No matter how much damage fires do, and no matter how much worse the fires are because of global climate change, Mother Nature just keeps on doing her thing. Even if mankind makes the world uninhabitable for humans, nature is going to grow other stuff and keep the world going.

I mention some of the road names, so you can look on GoogleMaps and see the area I'm talking about. Unfortunately, Google has not updated its satellite images. So the fire damage isn't really visible from the recent fires.

Now I'm going to out and see if I can see the lunar eclipse.

Tom .

BTW : the lunar eclipse was cool, I hope some here took the time to look at the "Wolf Moon" as it turned red.....

__________________
-Nate
1982 240D 408,XXX miles
Ignorance is the mother of suspicion and fear is the father

I did then what I knew how to do ~ now that I know better I do better