Scoliopus bigelovii

I was out on the northern California coast last weekend for the excellent low tide series. Saturday night I camped at Stillwater Cove Regional Park with the plan to head up to Mendocino County the next day. The clear moonless night gave way to a cool morning and I hiked a bit up the redwood-filled canyon in the park.

Down in the forest understory I noticed pairs of variegated leaves, standing stout like small green vases and eventually found some in flower. The distinctive leaves I’d probably seen before, but I’m not so sure about the even more distinctive flower. It seemed like a new discovery. Back home, a relatively quick look through the lilies in the Jepson manual landed me on Scoliopus bigelovii, a monotypic genus of plants found on the northern California coast (Baldwin et al. 2012). Lilies, including Calochortus, have long been one of my favorite families of plants and now I have found another!

The showy flower has parts of three (indicating a monocot) and appears early in the calendar year according to Jepson and the Marin chapter of the California Native Plant Society. That latter source indicates that the plant’s leaves are still rather small when the flower appears on a long stalk that eventually nods towards the ground when the flower has been pollinated. If you're out on the redwood coast during the early months of the year, see if you can find this beauty!

Oregon redwoods

According to the fossil record, redwoods once occupied a large expanse of territory across North America. Today they are restricted to a narrow coastal band along the Pacific coast where year-round temperatures are mild.

The modern day range of Sequoia sempervirens stretches from Big Sur in Monterey County, California to just across the California-Oregon border. At the southern end of the range, the trees tend to be shorter, tucked away inside steep valleys cut into the Big Sur coastline. They may survive courtesy of tongues of fog that roll in from the cool Pacific into the coastal valleys, while finding the dryer warm hillsides too inhospitable. Towards the northern end of the range in Humboldt and Del Norte counties, the redwoods reach their most favorable conditions, at least as evidenced by the size of the trees. In Tall Trees Grove in Redwood National Park in northern California, for example, several contenders for the world's tallest tree thrive near Redwood Creek.

Though I have spent much time among the redwoods throughout much of their range, until this week I had never seen the northernmost trees in the southwest corner of Oregon. The occasion was the first leg of a Pacific Northwest vacation in northwestern California and southeast Oregon. After an early morning exploration of rocky tidepools in Crescent City, I thought it would be an opportune time to make a detour to find the redwoods before heading to Oregon Caves National Monument (hopefully more on these adventures in later posts).

After crossing into Oregon heading north on US101, one heads east to follow the course of the Winchuck River for a few miles and then turns off onto a narrow one-lane road that winds into the western reaches of the Rogue River Siskiyou National Forest. About 2-2.5 miles into the road, the distinctive clusters of redwoods begin to appear among other conifers and at 4 miles the road ends and the Oregon redwood trail begins.

Redwood sorrel and wild ginger.

Maianthemum sp. 

The old growth forest hosts the typical consortium of understory species in Sequoia forests: carpets of redwood sorrel, tufts of sword ferns, and rhododendrons. I also observed huckleberry bushes, wild ginger, and a few orange tiger lilies.

Reference

Turner M, Gustafson P. 2006. Wildflowers of the Pacific Northwest. Timber Press, Portland, OR.

Summer showers in the Ventana Wilderness

This month I completed my fourth backpacking trip to the Ventana Wilderness along the Big Sur coast. Actually, my first visit to Ventana some 16 years ago was my first backpacking trip ever*, a fun adventure with friends right after college. This time, like before, I traveled via the popular Pine Ridge Trail from Big Sur Station east into the wilderness. I originally intended to travel no more than the 7-8 miles to the campground at Barlow Flat, but decided en route to go an extra couple miles to Sykes, a popular destination because of its hot springs. Starting at Pfeiffer Big Sur State Park, the trail ascends and descends along the northern slope of several mountains in the Santa Lucia Range, running roughly paralleling the Big Sur River.

A south-facing slope north of the Big Sur
River. Mountain valleys, with their more
mesic soils, support populations of red-
wood, Sequoia sempervirens.

The Ventana Wilderness is located in the northern part of the Los Padres National Forest, south of Monterey on the Big Sur coast. Big Sur is of course world renown for its dramatic coastline, where mountains several thousand feet in height immediately hug the Pacific coast. The result is spectacular views of a vast Pacific expanse that transitions from turquoise near shore to deeper blue offshore. The marine influence creeps onshore when the coastal valleys fill with fog, but the higher mountain ridges and valleys farther inland are dry and warm.  

Vegetation along the Pine Ridge Trail alternates between chaparral, oak woodland, and redwood forest. The drier hillsides and ridges tend to support chaparral, while the river valleys and folds between mountains contain redwoods which are dependent on the coastal fog. Madrone, with its beautiful red bark (often peeling back from the trunk in curls) was common throughout my hike.

Tiger lily!

At the floor of the valley below the Pine Ridge trail runs the Big Sur River, which has never seemed to have much water during my visits. This month, flows were likely reduced even further because of the lingering drought in California. The valley floor is a pleasant corridor of riparian habitat with trees such as redwood, alder, sycamores, and oaks. The river is also a corridor for one of my favorite flowers – the tiger lily. I found several blooming along the river, the beautiful orange flowers pendant like small decorative lanterns lighting up the shaded valley.

Adiantum jordanii, a maidenhair fern.

The hillslopes of Ventana were covered in poison oak, and a week and a half later I can thankfully say that I did have a reaction to its menacing oils, even though I brushed against the plant a few times in 20+ miles of hiking. On the drier slopes, flowers included orange monkey flowers, red columbines, and some paintbrushes. For relatively dry habitat, there were also quite a few ferns. There were two or more species of maidenhair ferns, Pityrogramma, and other species.

One of the species I paid more attention to on this trip was the California bay, Umbellularia californica, a mid-sized tree that was relatively common throughout my wanderings. Snapping the leaves emitted a strong aroma. Umbellularia belongs to the Magnoliids, a group of flowering plants believed to be among the more primitive of all angiosperms. It is classified in the Laurel family, Lauraceae, that also includes Cinnamomum the host of our spice cinnamon.

Umbelullaria californica, the aromatic "California Laurel" or "California Bay".

Madrone leaf and its collection of water
droplets after a day-time summer shower.

My initial hike up the Pine Ridge Trail felt very humid and the midday sun turned to cloud cover and then eventually to a half hour or so of rain showers, even moderately heavy at one point. This was a refreshing change for the usual dry California summer. It brought back memories of a backpacking trip here years ago in late June when a daytime summer storm was also accompanied by lightning. We were evacuated from the wilderness early the next morning when it turned out that one of the lightning strikes started a fire. Later named the Basin Fire, it became one of the largest fires in recent history in California. This year, fire scars were evident, but not particularly abundant.

The Ventana gets heavy use, but it is one of the few wilderness areas situated right along the Pacific Coast of the lower 48 states. For the diversity of plant life, close proximity of varied habitats, and a chance to see redwoods near the very southern end of their range, it is certainly worth a visit.

Redwood sorrel, Oxalis, a common herb of the redwood understory. The plants at left were in the shade; those at right had folded to minimize exposure to direct sun.

*In the intervening years, I have definitely learned to travel lighter on overnight trips (though camera lenses and books are a constant temptation). On this first trip I probably had a pack that weighed some 50-55 lb, the culprits being a heavy book, at least one canned food item, a steak (yum) and other gear.

Reference: Baldwin BG et al. 2012. The Jepson Manual. Vascular Plants of California, 2nd ed. UC Press, Berkeley, CA.

Incredible plants: Sequoia sempervirens

The giant redwood of the western US is among the largest organisms on Earth. It is one of fascinating group of conifers and is the tallest tree on earth. Aside from their impressive size, these trees form the foundation of one of the most interesting, productive, and beautiful ecosystems on earth.

Headwaters Forest Reserve, Humboldt County, CA.

Redwoods are members of the Cupressaceae, a family of conifers (usually cone-bearing, but not flower-producing, seed plants) that includes cypresses and the Giant Sequioa of the Sierra Nevada. Fossil distributions show that the ancestors of redwoods used to occur throughout much of the northern hemisphere (Chaney 1990). Today, redwoods are distributed from central California north to the very southwest corner of Oregon. These trees thus occupy a relict distribution, one that is just a fraction of its former empire. All redwood populations are found relatively close to the coast where they thrive in coastal fog (Eckenwalder 2009).

Sequoia sempervirens has a life span of about 2000 thousand years (Eckenwalder 2009), making it one of earth’s oldest organisms in addition to one of its largest. Although plants produce copious amounts of cones (and thus presumably millions of seeds per individual), new trees can also spread vegetatively from the bases of existing trees (e.g., from “burls”). This process in fact, can lead to the circular growth patterns of the trees. Over time, the central older parent tree dies but leaves a ring of younger descendants growing in a ring.

Redwoods reach their full glory in Humboldt County where extensive groves line stream basins and the slopes of the mountains along the coast. They can be found in nearly monotypic (single species) stands, but co-exist with other trees such red-trunked madrone, white-trunked alder, tan oak, big-leaf maple and Douglas fir (Jepson 1984). Tall Trees Grove in Redwood National Park in northern Humboldt County has some of the tallest individual trees known in the world. The trees are immense indeed, but from the perspective of the forest floor, they are so massive that would be hard to discern any difference between the record-breaking individuals and their almost equally tall neighbors.

The southern most populations of redwoods are in Big Sur, the rugged stretch of coastline between San Luis Obispo and Monterey. The forests are fairly extensive around the Big Sur Valley and then just occur in isolated in steep valleys right along the coast farther south.

Redwood is a popular lumber tree. It has soft, but beautifully grained and pleasantly aromatic wood. Previously there was intensive logging of redwood trees to provide lumber for the burgeoning growth of cities such as San Francisco. Unfortunately, a large percentage of original forest has been harvested, leaving only a relatively small percentage of remaining old growth forest today. Much of that old growth is preserved in state or federal park lands (Eckenwalder 2009). With a bit of observation there is an unmistakable difference between the structure of old growth forest and recovering secondary forests. The former is like an open pavilion with huge columns of ancient trees. Recovering forests are darker and more dense, the younger trees vying to not be the ones that will be crowded out as the forest matures.

References

Chaney, R.W. 1990. Redwoods of the Past. Save-the-Redwoods League, San Francisco, 8 pp.
Eckenwalder, J.E. 2009. Conifers of the World. Timber Press, Portland, 720 pp.
Jepson, W.L. 1984. Trees, Shrubs and Flowers of the Redwood Region. Save-the-Redwoods League, San Francisco, 16 pp.