California Visitors Come to See the Wildflowers

     David and Karen live in the Berkeley hills of California, a beautiful place with many wildflowers. Being botanical enthusiasts, they wanted me to take them on some wildflower hikes when they came to visit earlier this week. 

    My favorite request! The Siskiyou Mountains are renowned for their many unusual, endemic, and even rare plants. I love showing off the wildflowers of Southern Oregon and the Applegate. The difficulty was in choosing which of my favorite trails to take. The high-altitude trails weren't accessible due to the unusual rain and snow we have been having, but there were still more low-elevation hikes to choose from than my friends would have time to do. I could choose only two.

   I chose the East Applegate Ridge Trail for the first day, Table Rock Mountain for the second.

   It was raining when David and I got out of the car at the East ART trailhead. Undaunted, we donned rain gear and started up the trail. It was an immediate success. David was excited at once to see a mariposa lily, a flower so common here I had almost stopped seeing how beautiful it is.

Photo by David Edelson

But in the Berkeley hills mariposa lilies come one here, one there. Through David's eyes, I could see this flower again in its unique beauty. 

        It only got better: wild iris, buttercups, ookows, crane's bills, balsam root. And then we saw a scarlet fritillary.

Photo by David Edelson

And then another. And another. Glory knows no bounds. If I didn't know a flower, David did. Those that he didn't know, I often did. Sometimes we used iNaturalist to identify one we both didn't know. We walked through rain showers, snow showers, hail showers, and sun showers. The clouds lifted enough from time to time to reveal the peaks of the Siskiyous over the Applegate valley. The views, like the flowers, were stunning. The excursion was a stunning success. 

    The next day David, Karen, and I hiked Lower Table Rock Mountain, famous for its wildflowers. I have hiked that trail many times. It takes me 32 minutes to the top. This day it must have taken over two hours. We stopped at every flower. We puzzled over identification. We stopped to admire the color combinations in fields of blue camas,

Photo by David Edelson

purple vetch, and pink sea blush; the border of blue-and-white blue-eyed Marys; a tiny monkeyflower Karen found tucked into the crevice of a rock wall. 

    We walked across the flat top of Table Rock Mountain under a deep blue sky with mountains of white clouds. Bright yellow flowers called goldfields made swaths of yellow through purple mounds of ground-hugging lupine and masses of white popcorn flower.

Photo by Karen Garrison

 Each of us found flowers we hadn't known before. 

    The birds were as awe-inspiring as the flowers. Just as we started the trail, David spotted an acorn woodpecker. Farther along, we stopped in a grove of madrone trees where birds were flitting and flying and endlessly singing. I forgot the flowers and stood there listening. It was like a tape for a massage session, with more different bird songs and calls than I could keep track of. David nudged me out of my reverie and handed me his binoculars, pointing to a bird on a far limb: the gorgeous red and yellow Western tanager. Black-headed grosbeaks, other Western tanagers, and unnamed birds were darting from tree to tree. It took us a while to leave the haven of birds and continue up the trail, our eyes again on the ground, finding flowers.

    We identified forty flowers on the five-mile East ART,  forty-five in two miles on Table Rock. "When it comes to wildflowers, Southern Oregon sets the bar high," David said.

   I was intensely pleased. It gave me great satisfaction to take these good friends, such knowledgeable flower-lovers, to some of my favorite places. I love my mountains. 

Photo by Karen Garrison