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| California Gold Field |
This afternoon I heard President Biden on a radio news program use the phrase, "Come hell or high water." Also in the news recently: extreme heat and flooded cities. It appears that hell and high water are here already.
Like me, a lot of people (for a Monday) headed up to Mt. Tamalpais to celebrate Earth Day with a beautiful spring hike. I arrived at opening time, 7 a.m., and hardly saw another soul for more than an hour. The only exception was a bicyclist who stopped to snap a photo of the ocean and rolling green hills of Bolinas Ridge.
I hiked up the Lagunitas-Rock Spring Road to a serpentine outcrop to look for sickle-leaved onions and was pleasantly delayed by the temptation of Douglas iris flowers. I was early for the onions, which were putting up enclosed buds for the most part, so I observed all the insects necataring among the manzaitas for a while, then headed back to the serpentine outcrop near Rock Spring which I recently visited on a bike ride.
While trying to protect my bare knees from sharp pebbles, I was hunkered down over a sprig of phacelia when a curiously high number of cars drove by. Later on I drove out to the redwoods near the intersection of West Ridgecrest and Fairfax-Bolinas Road to look for Clintonia andrewsiana. All the parking spots were taken: I'd found the destination of that train of cars.
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| Morning sun on the hills, with a hazy layer of fog over the Pacific. |
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| Iris flower with still-sleeping insect. |
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| A lighter-colored batch. |
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| One of the very few sickle-leaved onions I found blooming in the serpentine. |
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| Nectar of the gods... and the drone flies... |
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| ...and the bumblebees... |
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| ...and crazy-looking flies. |
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| Damsel at Rest |
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| Phacelia divaricata |
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| Cream Cups (Platystemon californicus) |
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| This was a different patch of goldfields. |
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| Focus-stacked version to capture the foreground goldfield flowers. |
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| Like the sickle-leaved onions, it was a little early for the Clintonia at my go-to spot under some redwoods on Bolinas Ridge, but a few of the rosy flowers had opened up atop their tall, slender stems. |
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