Granite Chief Wilderness

Lake and stream in the Granite Chief Wilderness.

The Granite Chief is the northern-most wilderness of the high Sierra, located west of Lake Tahoe and north of Desolation Wilderness. Up to about 7000 feet, most of the snow in this part of the Sierra has now melted. However, at in the Five Lakes basin to which I hiked last weekend (about 7000 ft elevation), most of the ground was still covered with snow, hardened presumably by repeated melting and refreezing. The firm ground made for easy hiking, though once up in the vicinity of the lakes, I lost much sense of where the existing trails were supposed to be.

The lakes were mostly frozen, but thawing. At the third lake I arrived at a thin transparent sheet of ice like glass was just receding from the edge of the shore. Water flowed out of this lake and fed an active stream that rumbled through naked deciduous trees down into a valley.

Phlox, Granite Chief Wilderness.

Without discernible trails, I didn’t venture far into the wilderness, but did hike up a ridge of exposed granite boulders that overlooked the lake basin. Here little carpets of Phlox were abundant. The flowers amass in dense aggregations of white to pinkish 5-lobed disks, each corolla of petals fused towards the base, protecting a few partly recessed bright orange stamens. There were also orange-red paintbrushes and yellow stalks of wallflowers blooming too, but Phlox was most abundant.

I made an effort to identify the common conifer species in the area; learning the diverse conifer flora of the western US is one of my long-term goals. By far, pines and firs dominated the landscape. I felt moderately confident identifying western white pine (Pinus monticola), lodgepole pine (Pinus contorta), California white fir (Abies concolor), and red fir (Abies magnifica). However, distinguishing the fir species was sometimes a challenge, particularly when the trees were small. I also found a mountain hemlock (Tsuga mertensiana; this species is common in the Three Sisters Wilderness of Oregon) and a lone gnarly Sierra juniper (Juniperus grandis), an old sentinel on the granite ridge overlooking the lake.

Juniperus grandis.

Reference

Kauffmann ME. 2013. Conifers of the Pacific Slope. Backcountry Press, Kneeland, CA.