LAX dune cleanup

We spent the morning working this beautiful area with degraded habitat near Los Angeles International Airport. I found some cool Great Horned Lizards - three or four depending upon whether I was double counting one of them or not.

Ahhh. Sunset...

 Ahhh. Sunset at Point Vicente on October 16th.  What could be more beautiful?

Goodbye, Canada

I learned that there's a Mediterranean climate in Canada's coastal islands in the vicinity of Victoria. A Garry oak woodland on many of the islands is in decline. It shares characteristics with oak woodlands in California.

Flora of Lair of the Bear 6-16-13

I took these pictures last summer during a family vacation near Pinecrest.  Pinecrest Lake is shown below.

I took a simplistic approach to identifying them with the help of CalFlora.org and my own intuition, so the IDs could be wrong.

Early fall in the San Gabriel Mountains

It's my favorite time of year - fall.  Fall in the southern California mountains has some nice surprises in it - even those plants that have gone to sleep to endure the summer still often have something to offer.  A case in point is the Crystal Lake to Mt Islip trail, which I've hiked a couple times in the past year.  It's a good hike, rising from around 5,000' to about 8,000'.  The Curve Fire in 2002 wiped out many of the established conifers, but there has been some regeneration of the understory plants.

I think this is Hesperoyucca whipplei  (chaparral yucca).  This used to just be called yucca, but there was a recent renaming.  Don't let anyone tell you that the Latin names never change, because they do. 

More below.  As always, I welcome corrections on my plant IDs.

Kings Canyon 6-29-13

Kings Canyon 6-28-13

Kings Canyon 6-27-13

Kings Canyon 6-26-13

Kings Canyon 6-25-13

Kings Canyon 6-24-13

We hit the trail early the next day. The young men I traveled with were 15, 16, and 15 years old (left to right below).  This was their first long term backpack trip.

Most of the shots I will post here will not be people pictures.  Click on to the rest of the blog post to see the interesting wildlife and plants that I saw.  I may or may not get around to ID'ing the plants in this blog post.

Kings Canyon 6-23-13

One of the highlights of my summer was a backpacking trip in Kings Canyon.  Here we are on approach:

Rae Lakes

Looking across the lake at Painted Lady peak. This was a camping spot one night.

There's tons of great botany here, but that takes more effort to appreciate than this great view.

Glen Pass

A low-functioning ecosystem - Western Ave hillside at Dodson

I had emailed my local CNPS Chapter Vice President, David Sundstrom, a couple weeks ago about some Broom plants growing above Western on the untended hillside.  I was hoping that he could call out the troops to eradicate the Broom.  There's little of it on the peninsula, so keeping it out is a lot easier than trying to remove it once it's got it's hooks in. (Added 09 May: I used the What's Invasive web interface to add Broom to the list of invasive plants on the Palos Verdes Peninsula.  It's there in a combined Genista / Cytisus spp category.  I believe this Broom is French Broom, Genista monspessulana, based on the hairy pods, though I didn't take close enough observations to be certain.)

Since we live in a relatively affluent community, there must be City resources to do this job, no doubt supported by an annual gala fundraiser, right?  Not so much.  David and I were the "troops" and we met for about two hours on Sunday to demo the Broom.  My childhood spent doing yard work stood me in good stead this day as I wielded lobbers with samurai-like precision cutting the plants to the ground.  One plant appeared to be the mother ship, as David called it, and he had to take that on with a saw - the trunk was maybe 4-5 inches in diameter.  Most others were amenable to the loppers.  Seed pods for this year were not deemed viable yet, so we mulched the plant material in place.  However, there were signs of multiple years of growth on some plants with last season's dried seed husks still on them.  I guess we're due for a few years of return trips to knock down the sibling plants.  Our cooler coastal climate is probably not ideal for Broom.  I would guess it likes the hotter and more inland foothill and mountain ranges more, so perhaps the plants have been held in check by local climate conditions.

These snails of unusual color were on many Broom plants and on the mustard as well.

A functioning ecosystem - Backbone Trail to Circle X Ranch

I had the great pleasure to lead a group of Scouts on a backpacking trip in the Malibu mountains last weekend.  We hiked a segment of the Back Bone Trail, a trail that is nearly a complete 65 mile run from Will Rogers State Historic Park to Point Mugu.  I was a bit outwardly focused, especially when starting the trip, and forgot my good camera.  I still had my trusty cell phone camera, however.  What I saw was a beautiful and functioning ecosystem.  I saw flowering lupines, blue eyed grass, mimulus, and salvia species and much more.  Lots of pictures below:

Plants seen backpacking

I was backpacking with my son in the area behind Ojai, California last week. We hiked down the Sespe Creek about 10 miles and overnighted at Willet where there is a sulfur hot springs.

The point of the trip was NOT to survey the native plants, but I did snap a few photos along the way.

This was a low growing ground cover that I saw in the shade under a small scrub oak in an otherwise very exposed location. It seems to have passed its peak of growth for this year - much of the more exposed portions had already browned completely. I thought that this bit, though showing some brown, still had an appealing charm. A little bit of web browsing suggests that it is Selaginella bigelovii (Bigelow's moss fern) but I'm not 100% on that ID.

These Clematis puffballs had climbed high up in some trees.  At one point, back-lit by the sun, and hanging high in a pine tree, they really caught my eye. 

 More scenery photos below.

Napa river walk

Juli and I had a nice vacation in northern California over New Years. We stayed in the town of Napa, which has a certain amount of appeal all on it's own, even leaving aside the fact that it's the gateway to the Napa Valley wine region. Napa celebrates its river in ways that we don't see much of here in Los Angeles.

Near the place we stayed is a 1.2 mile paved trail that runs along the Napa river.







Interesting side paths go down to the river's edge.











I think we stayed at River Pointe - a timeshare. The buildings are all mobile and the infrastructure is designed to accommodate seasonal flooding. These fences pivot as water washes by but that wasn't a concern for us: all the locals were commenting on the lack of rain when we were there.



- Posted at great expense from my iPhone

Local trails and busy but not forgotten

I'm busy doing some things other than blogging.  One of the fun things I'm doing is familiarizing myself with local trails.   It turns out there are plenty of obscure and undocumented ones, such as the "Mailbox Trail" which quickly devolves into a single track along the edge of George F Canyon.

 George F turns into another canyon system further along, and the trails are wide and well maintained in this area (for horses).

That's Toyon (Heteromeles arbutifolia) on the left with the red berries and Lemonade Berry (Rhus integrifolia) looming over the right hand branch of the trail.  They're easy to tell apart this time of year with the red berries only on Toyon, which is also known as Christmas Berry.  When they are not in bloom, I think the easiest way to tell them apart is by the leaf edges:  Serrations on the Toyon, smooth or wavy on Lemonade Berry. This seems to be locally true, anyway.

I have been assured that all trails are public access, yet already I've run into what appear to be bogus trail closings promulgated by local homeowner groups (thinks to self, "Hmm.  I don't see the advertised trail hazard that motivated trail closure with not one but two chain link fences across the trail.  Curious - these fences seem designed to cut off down-trail access into a gated community that is advertised as open at the public-access trailhead.  Wow, even the horsemen passing within eyeshot of the trail closure don't seem to think there's a hazard.")

I sense some advocacy in my future. Until then, I'm just a quiet trails anthropologist and I'll keep a photo record documenting trail conditions without trying to perturb the system. 

I'll be back in a bit to tell you more about native plants - I have tremendous plans for my new yard.  Until then, I'm a bit busy.  See you on the trails.

Backpacking Point Dume

I went backpacking with the Boy Scouts to Point Dume back in March.

I'm happy to report that the wildflowers were magnificent! There were more Giant Coreopsis that I could have imagined, all in the prime of bloom. Ceanothus was just past prime bloom. The particular variety that grows in the canyons we hiked had a pale blue color to the flowers. Some were almost white. It's not hard to imagine one of the white garden selections having these particular plants as ancestors. Mimulus was growing in profusion - I think it was the dominant plant in several areas, and I saw several Venegasia Carpesioides (Canyon sunflower), a plant that I found almost impossible to find in the trade but that was right here in our backyard. Some bulbs that I couldn't identify and Indian Paintbrush (Castilleja affinis)rounded out the flowers.

I'll try a slide show of selected photos below:



For those without Flash, here's link: direct link