I recently joined a group led by Bob Muns and Jane Strong and including Mickey Long, Oscar Clarke and Jay Sullivan for a car trip along the Glendora Ridge Road, which traverses a section of the front range of the San Gabriel Mountains west of Mt. Baldy Village. We made a number of stops along the way and then several more on the Glendora Mountain Road which descends on one side of the ridge to the East Fork of the San Gabriel River and on the other to Glendora. It might be of some interest to read the log entry I made for a drive along Mt. Baldy Road and Glendora Ridge Road in June of 2005 when I found many species not in evidence on this trip, and also to refer back to a photo gallery I made in June of 2008. As I often do, I returned to this same vicinity a few days later to do some additional photography and found a number of other species which had not been observed previously. Then a few days after that, Jane Strong and I drove along the Glendora Ridge Road/Glendora Mountain Road again with Tom Chester and Jim Adams. We wanted to confirm the identification of Lupinus formosus for the lupines above Mt. Baldy Village, and we conducted a survey of the lupines along the route to see if there were any Lupinus longifolius, or whether they were all Lupinus excubitus var. hallii. They all turned out to be L. excubitus. Interestingly, some of them had a strong grape soda fragrance detectable forty feet away, and some of them did not. I had previously believed that only var. austromontanus had this odor. And again we found more plants in bloom that had not been blooming on the previous two trips. So this gallery represents six complete transits of the road from Glendora to Mt. Baldy Village. An upside-down V next to the common name indicates a species that was new to me when I photographed it on this field trip, and an asterisk indicates a non-native taxon.

Clustered broom-rape
Orobanche fasciculata
Orobanchaceae

Yellow-throated phacelia
Phacelia brachyloba
Boraginaceae

Fire poppy
Papaver californicum
Papaveraceae

Bush monkeyflower
Mimulus aurantiacus
Phrymaceae

Baby blue eyes
Nemophila menziesii var. menziesii
Boraginaceae
[Named for Archibald Menzies, 1754-1842]

Large-flowered cryptantha
Cryptantha intermedia var. intermedia
Boraginaceae

Mexican pink, Indian pink
Silene laciniata ssp. laciniata
Caryophyllaceae