This tiny hike can be accomplished in flip-flops, although the poison oak does abound at this time of year, so take caution! Its just a very accessible, small part of the massive Backbone Trail system off of Topanga Canyon Rd. Apparently, parts of the Backbone Trail are still under construction, but the whole trail should be complete in a few years, and will span 65 miles, connecting Will Rogers State Park to Point Mugu. We got intrigued to check out this tiny offshoot of the major trail when we saw signs posted for the "Greenleaf Interpretive Trail" in sweet, hippie-esque print (to the right). Actually, one of the signs did alert us to the presence of woodrat nests, which we started seeing all over the place, although the woodrats did not come out to greet us. Very few flowers were in bloom, but we did catch a glimpse of a narrow-leaf milkweed (Asclepias fascicularis), and the cud-weed aster (Corethrogyne filanginifolia), as well as what I think is western goldernrod (Euthamia occidentalis). Also, the coast live oaks were richly green against the drying landscape, and the bright red berries on a southern honeysuckle (Lonicera subspicata) added cheerful color to our walk.
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I always forget that nature is the answer to most of my life's problems. This past Sunday I was really depressed-- like, crying at the end of yoga in corpse-pose, depressed. I kind of blame my yoga teacher, she was talking about her father who had passed away last year, and it was father's day... but it is also just the way my brain is. It likes sad things, it is constantly scanning my memories and current thoughts to find sad subjects to cling to. The important point I have to remember, though, is that my brain also LOVES flowers. I think I was a pollinator in a past life, and my soul has this intense attraction to brightly colored petal-landing pads, nectar guides, and sweet scents. The space in my head lights up with a crazy drug-like joy when I see a new species of flower... and luckily, we live in the California Floristic Province, one of the world's biodiversity hotspots. One interesting/difficult group of flowers to identify that I have noticed blooming lately are those in the Phacelia genus. Apparently there are about 200 species worldwide, 13 of which occur in the Santa Monica mountains. I saw three species on Sunday, the first probably the Large flower Phacelia (Phacelia grandiflora, above) at Rocky Oaks Park. The park is tiny but offers gorgeous views of nearby vineyards, and harbored a new -to- me species of wildflower: the purple, tubular Foothill Penstemon (Penstemon heterophyllus, pictured at left). After a quick jaunt around Rocky Oaks, we drove further down Kanan Dume Rd. and parked at the trail-head to the Backbone Trail. There were TONS of heart-leaved penstemon blooming (including a yellow morph), and the fantastic Scarlet larkspur (Delphinium cardinale-- the genus Delphinium is named after the flower's spur-shape, which looks like a dolphin's fin! so cool! Pictured right, and above). Also blooming: slender sunflowers, bush mallow, and other Phacelias (below). On the way home, we saw a field of Farwell-to-Spring flowers (Clarkia bottae). The stigma (the dark pink head of the style, where pollen grains are deposited), is kind of weird-looking, with a dark "x" etched into it. Upon some googling, it seems that this stigma hasn't opened yet, and will unfurl into four parts, as seen here. I love thinking about plant reproduction, because it can get so wild; stigmas are kind of like the plant versions of a woman's cervix-- they are the gateway for plant sperm (pollen) to germinate pollen tubes, and ultimately fertilize ovules. Stigmas can be picky, and help discriminate between pollen from the wrong plant species, or from genetically-similar pollen (which would promote inbreeding). These stigma behaviors are one of several traits called self-incompatibility mechanisms. Plants are awesome and crazy! I have to say, this is not my favorite place for a hike, given that it is so close to the far more interesting trails in Temescal. Having said that, if you aren't committed to a real work out, and don't mind the surreal sounds of a Polo game in the background, this is a good option. The main trail in the park is a loop, up to Inspiration Point. Somehow, my friends and I got lost and never made it to the Point, but that is probably because I was taking too many pictures of flowers, of which there were a surprising number! The most exciting was the Pink Mariposa Lily (Calochortus plummerae), which has dense yellow hairs in its inner petals, and takes my breath away every time I see it. We also saw a large lizard scamper away that may actually have been something other than the usual western fence lizard... I need to consult my herp friends for the ID, but there is a blurry pic below. We also noticed strange foamy drippings from several Eucalyptus trees at the end of the trail, the cause of which remains a mystery. Googling "foam buble Eucalyptus" gives you suggestions such as "slime flux", a bacterial disease of trees that sounds pretty gross and weird. But, they aren't native, so maybe its ok if they get the slime flux..? An interesting question. Ok, I think I might have just had the best flower day EVER. I can't believe I had never been to the Antelope Valley Poppy Reserve before!!! Its amazing, a truly beautiful place. The poppies were probably at their peak a week ago, but there were still so many hyper-saturated orange petals fluttering in the wind, it was dazzling. So much orange! Its like a burst of beta carotene burning straight through your retinas into your brain. But in a wonderful way :) The Reserve was pretty packed, which is kind of great-- I love when people are interested in nature, and engaging in funny things like flower tourism. To be clear, I am not just a poppy fanatic, I am a general wildflower fanatic. So we took a meandering path to get to the Reserve, winding along San Francisquito Canyon, to see a variety of blooms. This area is apparently infamous for the St. Francis dam disaster, which killed 600 people in 1928. But it also has some great blankets of purple lupines right now, and pretty but painful poodle-dog bush (immediate contact dermatitis if you touch the leaves). And blooming yuccas! Also around the Reserve, there were lots of other awesome species blooming: Goldfields, Lacy Phacelia, Tidy Tips, Fiddlenecks, and Douglas Locoweed. Check out the pics below for scientific names. We drove home a different way, on Highway 14, and stopped at Placerita Canyon Nature Center, which is another hidden gem in the area. I was tired and lazy, so asked the woman at the gift store where to find wildflowers. She didn't think there were too many, but suggested the "Ecology" trail… and it was packed with lovely flower surprises. I found an elegant Clarkia (Clarkia unguiculata, to the left), a flower I have never seen before, and one that has always intrigued me with its super-extended anthers. It looks like a work of art! Also blooming (and pictured below): black sage, woolly blue curls, scarlet bugler, wishbone bush, holly-leaved cherry, monkey flower, and another Phacelia species. I was heading to a party in Topanga last weekend, to celebrate my friend Hilton finishing his PhD (go, Hilton!!!), and the thought of not stopping somewhere first for a quick hike was killing me. So we headed to Red Rocks Canyon Park, which has a few awesome in-and-out hikes with glorious views, off of Old Topanga Canyon Rd. There are tons of beautiful rock formations, but the reddest ones are actually right at the entrance to the park, which feels like its in someone's front yard-- you have to follow a very narrow dirt road to get to the park, which meanders directly next to mansions and old shack-like houses. You definitely feel like you are trespassing, but it does make the park even more interesting once you find it. Not much was flowering, but Sam spotted a lone, lovely prickly phlox flower in the rocks, and there were quite a lot of wild cucumber vines in bloom and in fruit. They look invasive but are actually native (yay), but also apparently poisonous (boo). We also spotted some golden yarrow, hoary leaved Ceanothus blooms, and a Hollyleaf Cherry tree with some flowers. There were also a delightful smattering of ferns, and I was able to look up their species' names with the always amazing Santa Monica Mountains wildflower/plant finder page. Luckily, the nature didn't stop once we got to the party, and we got to see some very aggressive hummingbirds duke it out at the feeders. I know some studies on nectar bats in Arizona have shown that these nectarivores are actually quite dependent on the sugar water people put out in hummingbird feeders; wonder how dependent these guys are on this "unnatural" food source. I haven't been hiking in quite a while, for various reasons. It turns out writing the dissertation is time consuming (doh) and there has been this record-book-breaking, awful drought in California, that has made me pessimistic about seeing wildflowers this spring. But, this intense nagging thought kept returning: I need to get outside and see what's going on! What's blooming, is it green at all, are there squirrels playing and birds singing, etc. So today I left my laptop and we took a short hike through Rivas Canyon, in the Santa Monica Mountains. Its not a loop trail, which always bums me out, but it joins Temescal and Will Rogers park, and is a nice break from the nearby crowded Temescal Canyon option. There was a glorious flannel bush blooming at the entrance to Temescal Park, and it seems like the Coast live oaks are flowering (or have just stopped). I found some white nightshade flowering, and one lonely fuschia-flowered gooseberry was starting up (but several others were bare). On the way down into the canyon, I spotted a very cold little butterfly, who was vibrating to keep warm and therefore didn't mind my getting close to take a pic, and there were a few hawks out and about towards the sunset. The clouds were threatening, but alas, the rain did not come. Its just getting cool enough now, in mid-November, to start hiking again. So I decided to check out a hike we did in May, and see how the views and wildflowers had changed. The yuccas all had cool seed pods, and the California buckwheat flowers have turned a rust-brown color that makes the hills look kind of autumny. There were also a ton of birds out and about, checking out berries on shrubs. Apparently the yucca species in the Santa Monica Mountains is Yucca whipplei, which is pollinated by the female moth Tegeticula maculata. W.P. Armstrong of Palomar College describes this amazing relationship in intimate detail here, but basically the female moth lays her eggs into the ovary of the yucca flower, before depositing many bundles of pollen onto the flower's stigma, thereby pollinating the flower and providing food for her larvae, which will grow over the next several months inside the ovary and consume a portion of the developing seeds. Its fascinating when plant-pollinator relationships have an underlying layer of uneasy complexity (i.e. pollinator is also a seed predator) between the mutualistic partners! Below are some other images from the hike. Warning: this hike inspires cliches. Getting to the trailhead requires driving to the end of Corral Canyon Rd, off the PCH in Malibu. This drive might be worth the trip alone, with its exhilarating hairpin turns (cliche 1). But the trails awaiting you at the end of the road are definitely not to be missed. These include a truly awesome ridge hike connecting you to the Backbone trail, and forays into the mountains and riparian areas around the trail-head. The views and sandstone outcroppings are phenomenal (cliche 2). May is a lovely time to go, since the yucca are blooming and so many insects are out pollinating flowers and filling the air with a symphony of sounds (cliche 3). Besides the yucca, California buckwheat was also in full bloom, and the black sage was just starting. This is definitely one of my favorite hikes in the LA area, because it is easily accessible off of Sunset Boulevard, and it is a rewarding loop trail that passes a tiny waterfall before climbing to a nice panoramic view of Santa Monica and the ocean. The hike this day was even more awesome than usual, because we saw newts!!! And some were in amplexus!! I had heard from my friend Gary, a California newt expert, that this year was dry and he hadn't seen many in the Santa Monica Mountains. Maybe the rain on March 31st helped these guys come to the stream and have fun newt times. Apparently, these newts do not have internal fertilization, rather the amplexus functions as a way to sway the female newts into later picking up a package of sperm the male has left... she seems to make her decision based in part on how well the male rubs his chin on her head while they are joined, which is almost too cool for words. We also ran into several interesting hikers on the way down, one of whom was an environmental lawyer and alumni of Tulane University (my alma mater, her Tulane shirt sparked our conversation :) She is a co-founder of the Plastic Pollution Coalition, which is trying to reduce the amount of single-use plastic that is used and dumped everyday, and ends up in the ocean, either poisoning and killing sea animals and/or creating huge depressing gyres of plastic that continues to break down into smaller particles, but never actually decomposes. Some other highlights were a plethora of wildflowers! Photos below, with attempts at species names in the captions.
Yesterday, I went hiking with a group of friends around Switzer Falls, in the Angeles National Forest. We saw snow! At the tops of the mountains, but still exciting to a chica living in Southern CA. We took the trail through Bear Canyon, which follows a stream and has lovely riparian scenery. A botanist friend was along, and showed us we could eat "miner's lettuce" (Claytonia perfoliata), a little fleshy plant growing along the shady damp river banks. Apparently this is a staple in the urban foraging lifestyle, and grows over a large distribution of North America. Some other cool items we saw were the edible if not tasty "witch's butter" (Tremelia aurantia), a fungal parasite that feeds off of another fungal parasite, the definitely inedible "hairy turkey tail" fungus (Stereum hirsutum), which lives and eats decaying logs. What a fun fungal feeding microcosm we found!
One of the common plants we saw flowering was the California bay laurel (Umbellularia californica), whose leaves are strongly aromatic, and are used in cooking (although the chemical in the leaves also causes headaches in some people). Coincidentally, some urban foragers also like to eat the bay nuts of this tree. It seems there are all sorts of little treats in this forest for the adventurous forager. |
AuthorI like nature! And hiking, and taking pictures, especially of nature. Archives
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