Natural History Wanderings

Oregon Wildflowers has a report for Duffy and Santiam Lakes Trail

The elevation of this trail in the Mt. Jefferson Wilderness is from 4,080 feet at the trailhead to 5,130 feet at Santiam Lake. On the lower parts of the trail we saw flowering bunchberries, phlox, vanilla leaf, a couple of blooming bear grass stems and a few others that I didn’t identity; at the higher elevations, we enjoyed a few just-getting-started paintbrush blooms and thousands of shooting stars in two meadows between Duffy and Santiam lakes. The shooting stars were decidedly the most impressive.