Puma Canyon Ecological Reserve is a wonderful 320-acre piece of land managed by the Transition Habitat Conservancy, an organization particularly interested in transition environments, such as the northern slopes of the San Gabriels which is a transition zone between the mountains and the Mojave Desert. The Reserve is in the Pinon Hills area, just south of the 138. On 4/26 I hiked up Sheep Creek Wash to one of the disjunct sections of the Reserve with Tom Chester, RT and Shaun Hawke, Walt Fidler, Adrienne Ballwey, Frank Harris, Nancy Accola, Justine Curicio and Wendy Walker, and on 5/1 I walked the major loop trail around the main part of the Reserve on my own. I also returned on 5/4, 5/6, 5/21 and 5/28 to do some follow-up photography, get the trail system more straightened out in my mind, and explore a couple of different areas that I had not visited previously. As with other places I've been this year and considering how many species I encountered here, I can only wonder what this area would be like in a good year. Tom Chester's page on the flora of Puma Canyon Ecological Reserve is online here. An upside-down V next to the common name is for a taxon that was new to me on this field trip and an asterisk indicates a non-native species.

Southern mountain woolstar
Eriastrum densifolium ssp. austromontanum
Polemoniaceae

White tidy tips
Layia glandulosa
Asteraceae
[Named for George Tradescant Lay, 1799?-1845]

Desert almond
Prunus fasciculata var. fasciculata
Rosaceae

Curved-stem phacelia
Phacelia curvipes
Boraginaceae

Copyright @ 2015 by Michael L. Charters.
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