01-Jul-2026 -- Well this was a surprise! After mountain biking near Nevada City (in the Sierra Nevada foothills), I decided to make a short detour (on my way back home to the San Francisco Bay Area) to revisit this point. I had previously visited this point 9 years ago, in 2017, and 9 years earlier, in 2008, but decided to visit it a third time, to get a ‘drone’s eye’ view. This time I didn’t bother to look at satellite imagery beforehand; I just assumed that the point would lie in a field of bare dirt (as it did in 2008), or in a field with a vegetable crop growing (as it did in 2017).

Imagine my surprise when I pulled up to my usual parking spot (a farm road that passes just to the East of the point), and discovered that the field now contained a large orchard, filled with orderly (North-South) rows of mature trees - growing some sort of stone fruit. These are most likely almonds - a very commonly grown (and highly profitable) crop here in California’s Central Valley. (In fact, the Degree Confluence Point [37,-120] - two points diagonally to the Southeast - also lies in an almond orchard within the Central Valley.)

Coincidentally, the Degree Confluence Point lies right in the middle of the (North-South) path between two of these rows of trees. Fortunately there was a large enough gap in the tree canopy overhead to allow me to launch my drone. Here is a remote-controlled aerial video of this confluence point.

Reviewing satellite imagery afterwards, it appears that the orchard was planted within a year after my 2017 visit (at which time it was a field of sunflowers). Perhaps I’ll return in another 9 years (in 2035), to see if the field has changed yet again.