We drove both vehicles to the Trail Canyon trailhead and camped near there in a lovely spot in a Pinyon-Juniper woodland. Very intimidating thunderstorms were looming all along the White Mountains and ranges to the east. We decided to delay for a day in Trail Canyon, and stay in Cottonwood Basin the following day.
The White Mountains of California / Nevada are the little known younger sister of the High Sierras.
What are the common alpine lichens found in the High Sierras of California? This handy six page guide just might answer that question. Jason and I made it for naturalists, alpine enthusiasts, and citizen scientists, with the hope that it […]
An ecotone is a transition zone between two ecological systems. Ecotones can range in size: in some places ecotones are wide (e.g. forest – grassland ecotones), in other places they are quite narrow (e.g. riparian – arid shrub steppe). In […]
Last April, Jason and I surveyed lichens in the northern Mojave. It’s the second field season of a three year study involving lichen biodiversity along the ecotone of the Great Basin and Mojave Deserts in Southern Nevada. And what did […]
Part 1 covered the hike, but we didn’t touch at all upon the lichens on Mt. Whitney! So let’s do that here. Firstly, you might be wondering – what’s the history of lichen collections of Mt. Whitney? Two words: its […]
Mt. Whitney, the tallest mountain in the conterminous U.S., looms over the Owens Valley, once a thriving agricultural area, now increasingly arid as its the major supplier of the Los Angeles water supply. It’s a striking landscape characteristic of the […]
Dear Kearsarge Pass, With your striking red furrowed bark of Foxtail Pines, cousin of the Bristlecone Pines. Soft rounded valley formed by the ancient lapping of glacial tongues. And alpine lichens slowly crawling on the teeth of giants. Loved every […]
Its hard to remember all the great articles that one comes across during the course of a day, but there’s always a few that seem to pop out and need to be acknowledged, remembered, noted. The two prominent ones from […]
Bishop Pass is one of the more species-rich alpine locations in California that Imshaug collected in during his 1955 surveys. Despite the lack of well-developed soil, he found a number of soil crust lichens (terricolous lichens), along with dozens of […]
