Mitchell Canyon, 2009
For the past few years I've been going to Mitchell Canyon in the spring to look for wildflowers. It's a fantastic spot: you get a wonderful variety of woodland and grassland flowers as you hike up along the stream, and as you get higher you start getting scrub species, and at the top along the Eagle Peak trail you get a bunch of odd, semi-alpine species. Fun stuff.
This year I think I was a little earlier than usual. No Mt. Diablo fairy lanterns blooming, no pipestem (and sadly no Orobanche), but so many other wonderful things were out in force. I think the highlight of the day for me was the Mt. Diablo jewelflower, a tiny, scrappy little flower found only on Mt. Diablo. I'd seen it a few years back, but this time I found lots of them. Very cool.
Weather was overcast, occasionally rainy, and real windy. Forecast for Sunday was t-storms (which have not come to pass, damn you wunderground), so I figured clouds were better than getting zapped. Still, some weather made it feel like an adventure.
I might head back in a few weeks to see some of the later stuff. So many things to see there.
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kuedaתיאור
Another plant I was very much hoping to see, and this time I saw it in profusion! There were many tiny plants growing at select points along the higher parts of the Eagle Peak trail, pretty much up until Eagle Peak itself. All no more than 10 cm high, growing on gravelly slopes.
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kuedaתיאור
I was really hoping to find Mission bells today, but after passing the spot where I'd seen them before, I figured it was a wash. Put down my bag, grabbed my water bottle, and of course, right next to the backpack, were a couple Mission bells. Hard to see and not exactly easy to photograph either.
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סוג Nomadaמתצפת.ת
kuedaתיאור
A cold, cold bee sucks sweets from a fiddle. Perhaps 8 - 10 Earth milimeters long.
ID provided by
terraincognita96 on Flickr.
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Despite the large and somewhat gaudy flowers, this plant is kind of hard to see. However, I think the tall, erect stem and leaves are pretty distinctive. Must remember to look for them and not the flower.
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This looked a little different from the other star lilies I've seen, so I was kind of hoping it was Death Camas, but no luck. I think Fremont's star lily probably just looks a little scraggly on mt D.
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kuedaתיאור
I thought black sage bloomed way later. Maybe that's why I always miss it...
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kuedaתיאור
I thought this plant was poison oak for the longest time, until the good folk of Flickr set me straight. It's actually Western hoptree, and it's just starting to leaf out and bloom on Mt. D. One thing I learned this year was that it smells wonderful! A sweet and surprising fragrance. Between that and the Ceanothus blooming everywhere, it was a very fragrant hike (despite the wind).
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Proposed name change. Indian warrior was still blooming abundantly at higher elevations in scrubby areas, under chamise, next to soap plant.
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