Another Toad Lake tour

We like to revisit places we've been before, often earlier or later in the season, or--really--just another year, because every trip is unique, every winter has more or less water, every summer more and more heat.  Catch the site on a different week and there will likely be a whole new palette of bloom and leaf, a variation in the bird chorus, an unexpected bee swarm or a green rattlesnake to see.

Our 2015 visit to Toad and Porcupine lakes, at the head of the middle fork of the Sacramento River, followed a lovely wet winter and featured an explosion of riotous wildflowers.  This trip took place only two weeks later in the year--after one of the driest years on record.  There were still plenty of flowers, and my favorite were these Epilobium siskiyouense, on the ridge saddle between the two lakes, in lean, rocky soils:

On top of the world in the Salmon Mountains

Back to Carter Summit and south on the PCT again, to find the headwaters of the South Fork of the Scott River and the wet meadows that line the trail there.  The view from the top is of a long, glorious, green slide down to Scott Valley.

There were still plenty of water crossings in late June, despite a perilously dry winter.  And at every water crossing, a dense green tunnel of ferns, tiger lilies, corn lilies, cow parsnip and angelica, columbine and aconitum, nine-bark and mountain maple.  Through it all flits hundreds of butterflies of all kinds.  

In the dry sections, coyote mint and scarlet gilia:

Cliff penstemon (mountain pride) and paintbrush in their neon glory:

Teeny, tiny plants take over

We took the one-mile hike off the Pacific Crest Trail to Hidden Lake, south of Carter Summit, to find the tiniest of flowering plants carpeting the exposed, sunny talus on the way there.  Teeny dots of white, pink, blue, yellow, fuchsia--an entire garden of miniature marvels.  (Click on any photo to see larger.)

The delightful and undaunted monkeyflower:

A Calochortus lily, C. elegans, no bigger than your thumbnail, hiding in the huckleberry oak:

Ball-headed sandwort:

We don't know what this one is.  Do you?

The well-named pink pussy paws:

Rock and heat-loving sedum:

Little Maiden Mary Blue Eyes:

And one big one: Purple milkweed (which, technically, is a cluster of tiny flowers).

On the way to this eponymous hidden treasure, a cool respite from the heat of the trail:

The view to Mt. Shasta is paved with phlox

Yreka Phlox (P. hirsuta), that is.  Here's this year's bouquet to the mountain, from its home on China Hill on the NE side of Yreka:

Late Season in the Eddys

Leopard lilies flame above the dry skeletons of corn lily on the Parks Creek/Deadfall Lake trail section of the PCT.

Sneezeweed (Helenium autumnale), bog lily, tall onion and yarrow still bloom in the fen fields at the top.

Prostrate yew, Pacific rhododendron, sneezeweed, cobra lilies and leopard lilies grace the flank of a spring on the Caldwell Lakes trail nearby.

Gentian bursts blue from the cobra lily fen.

Bistort maybe?  and Cirsium andersonii (Anderson's thistle) in the decomposed granite of the trail.

Sex In the Sagebrush

Back at Willow Creek Mountain, these two furry and charismatic megamoths, Hemileuca hera marcata, engaged in a long, meditative exchange of bodily fluids as they clung to their caterpillar host food Artemisia tridentata. I love the ferny black antennae, furry orange bodies and striking patterning of these beauties.

More delicate, but just as striking, the rare endemic Greene's Mariposa Lily at Little Shasta Meadows Botanical Area on Willow Creek Mountain.

Return to Little Shasta Meadows

After an astonishingly wet winter and a fairly long, easy spring, we escaped the heat of Yreka (84-degree day, heavens!) by heading up to the high country on the east side.  We caught Little Shasta Meadows in that awkward stage, between the yellow bells and lewisia and before the camas and mariposa lilies.  Instead, the meadows were filled with buttercups and larkspur--and showed the promise of what is to come a little later in the season.

Most of the snow has melted, making creeks run cold and fast.  Here a little water backs up

 into a calm pool just right for incubating tadpoles and mosquitoes.

A few of the camas lilies are beginning to bud open.

And pedicularis, which loves to have its feet wet, pops up in amongst the buttercups.

Pearl marble butterflies keep other pollinators company on a native mustard.