Darlingtonia in the wild "goldmine" site, Del Norte Co, CA
Oct 28, 2014 16:02:36 GMT -5
stevebooth, rmeyer, and 1 more like this
Post by meizzwang on Oct 28, 2014 16:02:36 GMT -5
I haven't been back to this site for a long time, probably because the road is so dilapidated, even offroad vehicles have a hard time driving on it. Rob and I decided to take the long-cut and walk the whole thing, which seemed to be the theme of our trip: visit the sites that are impossible to drive to and require strenuous hikes. Good idea, right? Well, this wasn't back-breaking, uphill hiking like the last site we visited, but you still need to be in decent shape to do it. We were very tired already: the previous 2 days, we had walked all day every day, and it was catching up to us....but the Darlingtonia bug hit us harder, so we kept going despite being extremely tired.
As we were walking to the site, I told Rob to be prepared to take off his boots because we have to cross a river twice, and the water in the river is about knee deep. When we got there, this is what we saw, and I was shocked:
Yup, last time I was here, this was a raging river! People want to know how bad the California drought is...well, here you go!
That was a shot upsteam, here it is downstream:
Almost a mile down the path was the second crossing. At this point, we had to cross the same river, although due to the drought, this once raging river is a mere puddle:
Another shot:
What you can't tell from these photos is that these are some of the largest darlingtonia I've ever seen, and check out how beautiful those red tongues are:
A shot of the patch, still hard to tell just how gigantic these traps are:
we also found some red-ish Pinguicula macroceras ssp. nortensis here, check out all the babies:
Speaking of babies, one of the Pinguicula flower stalks loaded with seeds fell over, and they all sprouted. Makes me think these don't need stratification:
If you look carefully to the right of the dry river, you'll see D. californica and some Cypripedium californicum plants:
Darlingtonias and butterworts hanging on the serpentine cliffs:
More photos to come, gotta get back to work
As we were walking to the site, I told Rob to be prepared to take off his boots because we have to cross a river twice, and the water in the river is about knee deep. When we got there, this is what we saw, and I was shocked:
Yup, last time I was here, this was a raging river! People want to know how bad the California drought is...well, here you go!
That was a shot upsteam, here it is downstream:
Almost a mile down the path was the second crossing. At this point, we had to cross the same river, although due to the drought, this once raging river is a mere puddle:
Another shot:
What you can't tell from these photos is that these are some of the largest darlingtonia I've ever seen, and check out how beautiful those red tongues are:
A shot of the patch, still hard to tell just how gigantic these traps are:
we also found some red-ish Pinguicula macroceras ssp. nortensis here, check out all the babies:
Speaking of babies, one of the Pinguicula flower stalks loaded with seeds fell over, and they all sprouted. Makes me think these don't need stratification:
If you look carefully to the right of the dry river, you'll see D. californica and some Cypripedium californicum plants:
Darlingtonias and butterworts hanging on the serpentine cliffs:
More photos to come, gotta get back to work
Here are images of plant progress on 03/16/2023