Swimming on the 4th of July

it was hot.  It was the 4th of July.  So we did what all good patriots do and found a swimming hole.  This hike took us from Toad Lake to Porcupine Lake in the Shasta-Trinity NF, and the flowers were blooming like firecrackers in the high mountain meadows.

Daisies and asters, tiger lilies and corn lilies, a small endemic epilobium and tall bear grass, the meadows were blooming red, white, blue, yellow and orange.

And bookending the meadows were these two pools of cool blue water.

An early, dry summer at Little Shasta Meadows

At the end of June, we took a mid-week overnight to see how the meadows were doing and found things pretty dry.  The camas had already come and gone and one brave mariposa lily was showing its face at the Special Botanical Area.

But what we did find in abundance was downingia.  I identified this earlier as D. insignis, but this is our own Cascade calico flower, D. yina.  Below, it forms a small blue "lake" in the drying mud between FS Rd. 70 and 46N09.

This white hyacinth, Triteleia hyacinthina, was having a good year.  And someone else found this puffball type fungus with an interesting pentagonal honeycomb structure.