On my last morning at the retreat, I sat beside another unfamiliar plant to nature journal. We had no cell reception there, so no checking iNaturalist, but I’ve since ID’d it as white-veined wintergreen or whitevein shinleaf, Pyrola picta. This perennial herb in the heath family is native to western North America from southwestern Canada to the southwestern United States.
It is not a source of wintergreen oil; that comes from plants in the Gaultheria genus.
Veratrum californicum (California corn lily, white or California false hellebore) is a beautiful but extremely poisonous riparian plant that I encountered in the Sierras. Its steroidal alkaloids can cause serious birth defects in animals such as sheep, horses, and other mammals that graze upon it. I’m guessing pregnant humans shouldn’t munch on it, either.
Wolf lichen is my new favourite lichen. The Klamath Indians in California soaked porcupine quills in a chartreuse extract of Letharia vulpina to dye them yellow; then wove the quills into their basket patterns. The pigment is actually vulpinic acid, which is relatively toxic to meat-eating mammals as well as insects and molluscs (but not toxic to rabbits and mice). It’s been used historically as a poison for wolves and foxes.
Just one of the many new-to-me wonders in the Sierra Nevada.
The Sierra Buttes are a dramatic formation fairly close to the SNFC. We didn‘t hike up to the fire tower perched on the peak, but I‘d love to do that another time.
We had fun exploring the Sierra Nevada Field Campus site from a cross-sectional point of view.
One of the goals for my time in the mountains was to learn to reliably identify a handful of alpine trees. Here are three that I got to know (some more intimately than others).
hashiworks 