In anticipation of a planned outing later this month with John Game, Jeff Greenhouse and Heath Bartosch who are coming down from Berkeley to look for some rare plants in the meadows around South Fork, I hiked from Poopout Hill to Dry Lake to check out the state of things. Many of the species I saw in bloom later in July and on into August two years ago were not yet in evidence along the trail, but there was a good deal of water in the lake with ducks happily splashing about which certainly was not the case back then (see here). Next year I will try to get up there in May or early June because it must be beautiful when it's full. I did take one brief detour down into a section of the meadows where there was a lovely display of blue-eyed grass, shooting stars and white-flowered bog orchids growing in great profusion. On my next trip I will spend a day in the meadows which is a truly special place because it is such a rare thing in Southern California to find such habitats. 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 denotes a non-native taxon.

Flowers growing along the Flume
trail: streambank lotus, great red
paintbrush and orchids

Hartweg's iris
Iris hartwegii ssp. australis
Iridaceae
[Named for Karl Theodor Hartweg, 1812-1871]

Yarrow
Achillea millefolium
Asteraceae

Moss gentian ^
Gentiana fremontii
Gentianaceae
[Only location in California]

Lodgepole chipmunk
Tamias speciosus
Sciuridae

Mojave linanthus
Leptosiphon breviculus
Polemoniaceae

Bigelow's sneezeweed
Helenium bigelovii
Asteraceae
[Named for John Milton Bigelow, 1804-1878]

Meadow starwort
Stellaria longipes ssp. longipes
Caryophyllaceae

Great red paintbrush
Castilleja miniata ssp. miniata
Scrophulariaceae

Tiling's monkeyflower
Mimulus tilingii
Phrymaceae
[Named for Heinrich Sylvester Theodor Tiling, 1818-1871]

Plain mariposa lily
Calochortus invenustus
Liliaceae

Western wallflower
Erysimum capitatum var. capitatum
Brassicaceae