Natural History Wanderings

submitted by Ter Sullivan

 The flowers are so plentiful and varied right now in the Carson Pass area, I want to encourage every plant enthusiast to get going right away to see the display at its peak. Our natural history group, which. by the way, has an entire condominium buidling at Kirkwood to itself, hiked to Round Top Lake yesterday. Here’s a list of some of the plentiful flowers along the trail that you can photograph: thousands of subalpine daisy; wavyleaf, giant red, and dwarf alpine paintbrushes; sulfur and marumleaf buckwheats; Sierra, royal, and firecraker penstemons; Brewer’s, Torrey’s, largeleaf, and spurred lupines; scarlet gilia, roundleaf snowberry, fernleaf biscuitroot, Norwegian mugwort, Shasta knotweed, Gordon’s mousetail, California valerian, antelope brush, stemless goldenweed, roundleaf snowberry, Sierra tiger lily.  Back to the Kirkwood area: Suprisingly to us, we could simply walk the paved road and spend hours botanizing both sides of the two-mile road, and there’s no traffic during weekdays.