Late summer is getting toward the end of the wildflower season in the North Cascades. There’s not a whole lot still blooming after the long dry summer except the asters and goldenrod. Last weekend Natalie and I went up to Colonial Creek on Diablo Lake to camp for a couple of nights and have a little relaxed time together in the woods.
While poking around at the edge of Diablo Lake near the campground we found purple asters blooming. At first, they all looked the same. On closer examination we found there were three species. One of these was the Great Northern Aster pictured here.
Great Northern Aster, Canadanthus modestus (formerly known as Aster modestus), is unique among the purple asters with very glandular stems and involucral bracts. That last term, for the uninitiated, means the little leaf-like things at the base of the flower head. On this species, the bracts are fairly long, sharply pointed, curving outward, and purplish in color. That makes them pretty distinctive. The stem and involucre are both noticably sticky to the touch, an easy way to tell if a plant is glandular.
Great Northern Aster grows in moist places. We found it just a few feet back from the edge of Diablo Lake between the woods and the gravel beach. These photos were made at the moist edge of Thunder Lake, which is the pond between Hwy 20 and Thunder Knob just west of Colonial Creek.
I’d often wondered what the shore of Thunder Lake was like, but never had time to stop and hike the short distance down to it until this weekend. There’s no trail around the lake, which was a disappointment. I thought I could walk in the shallow water at lake’s edge, but my feet quickly sank ankle-deep in the muck and I decided that wasn’t a very good idea.
Besides the asters, we found foliage of marsh cinquefoil, yellow pond lily, a nice grass we couldn’t identify in Pojar & Mackinnon’s Plants of the Pacific Northwest Coast, and on a fallen Douglas-fir log extending out into the pond were numerous carniverous sundews. At the south end were some large rushes, but we didn’t get close enough to ID them. The only plant I photographed was the aster, which I hadn’t seen up close for several years.
After getting tired of trying to identify plants I decided the lake was warm enough for a swim, so I stripped off and dived in off the log. The water was a perfect temperature and I swam to the opposite side of the lake and back, returning refreshed and relatively clean for the drive home.
I’m a pretty healthy guy. I watch what I eat, get lots of exercise, and spend a lot of time outdoors. I’ve lost nearly 20 pounds in the last couple of years and am getting close to where I think I should be. I see my regular family physician once a year for a physical and rarely have need to visit in between. I take no drugs except an occasional ibuprofen for a headache or muscle pain when I’ve overdone it. With all that I’m probably outside the norm for most Americans.
I’m also self-employed, which means that if I want health insurance to cover some catastrophic health event I pay as an individual. I don’t get the benefit of an employer-negotiated and subsidized rate with the insurance company. Last year at the “open enrollment” period we switched companies to get a lower rate. Then they raised it more than 10% mid-year. Our family coverage costs us $402 per month for a high-deductible plan. We pay the first $3,400 of medical costs each year before insurance kicks in. We’ve got the accompanying Health Savings Account, but basically just run medical expenses like eyeglasses and the dentist through it for the tax advantages. We certainly haven’t built up a balance there and other investments pay a better return.
The folks in the photo above, Frank and Liz Morrow, caught my attention this afternoon while bicycling a loop around Lake Samish. They were holding their banner on the North Lake Samish freeway overpass to help spread the message. I stopped to talk with them briefly. Liz told me that most of the drivers passing by honked or waved their support for the message of universal health insurance coverage. She said she thought most people really do support it, but agreed with me that there’s a lot of paranoia being spread around by a few people who are opposed. Liz and Frank’s t-shirts promote Health Care Now!.
My friend David Perry posted this great video explanation on his Facebook page tonight. It’s worth sharing as it’s one of the clearest explanations I’ve seen.
At the end of the day, I want a system that provides basic fairness in health care and health insurance to everyone in our nation, which is not the case now. Access to health insurance should not be based on employment status any more than it should be based on religion or political party. A federally-run single payer system is one good model that can be very fair and efficient. It may not be the only way to reach the end goal, but it deserves a chance.
Thanks to the folks on the overpass for motivating me to share these thoughts tonight and for letting me snap their photo with my iPhone.
I guess it’s a sign of being a true plant nerd to take off on a day trip halfway across the state to look for one plant that may not even be in bloom.
There’s been a fair amount of chatter recently on the Native Plant Society of Oregon e-mail discussion list about sightings of Orobanche pinorum, pine broomrape. It’s one of the plants I missed finding in bloom while I was working on Wildflowers of the Pacific Northwest so I wanted to find and photograph it. But I didn’t feel like driving down to southern Oregon to the places where this uncommon parasite had been reported. I checked the WTU Herbarium online records and found it reported in Yakima and Klickitat Counties in Wasington. Then I queried the Washington Native Plant Society e-mail list and received a response saying it was just east of the Cascades near Leavenworth. The herbarium records said plants in bud in July and gone to seed in September. The third week of August seemed possible to find it in bloom.
Sunday Natalie and I hopped in the truck and zipped over Stevens Pass to Fish Lake, just up the road from Lake Wenatchee. We parked at the Cove resort and started poking around under every ocean spray (Holodiscus discolor) we could find. That’s the host plant for the misnamed pine broomrape. After about half an hour of searching I found the specimen in the photo. It was just off a small trail along the south side of the lake, about at the drip line of a small ocean spray. There were ponderosa pines towering overhead.
As you can see, we were about three weeks too late to catch it in bloom. It’s still an interesting plant, and now that I know at least one place where it grows I can go back earlier in the season another year.
Since we were already east of the mountains I thought it worthwhile to go looking for another uncommon plant I’d missed in a previous year. continue reading »
Common Cordgrass, Spartina anglica, is one of the aquatic scourges of Puget Sound. One of three species of Spartina that have been introduced to the west coast, it aggressively alters its habitat by trapping sediment and raising the shoreline. As a result, productive mudflats disappear, invertebrates die, and the birds that depend on them have no food source.
Fortunately, there is a major program underway in Washington to wipe out the Spartina invasion. There has been major progress in the past four or five years, primarily through a combination of herbicide spraying and mowing. Spartina spreads both by floating seeds that can travel long distances and rhizomatous roots.
Last Saturday a group of us kayakers joined in a shoreline survey along Deadman and Little Deadman Islands in Skagit Bay south of Snee-oosh Point looking for Spartina. We really hoped we wouldn’t find any, but our group located several small clumps. Each one was only about a meter across and they were widely dispersed. We recorded the locations with GPS coordinates, which will be passed along to an erdication crew that will come in and spray. We surveyed by kayak on a rising tide so we could get close to the shore, travel slowly, and make careful observations. In a couple of cases we thought we saw clumps of Spartina that turned out upon closer observation to be good native plants.
For further information about Spartina visit Common Cordgrass on the Washington Noxious Weed Control Board website.
Sunday was our first really nice day after more than a week of summer that felt more like autumn. The sky cleared and the air warmed to the upper 60s. In short, a perfect day for a hike in the mountains. A couple of weeks previous I’d been up on the side of Mount Larrabee and looked over at Tomyhoi Peak. I decided to go for the reverse view.
I hadn’t been on Tomyhoi since a climbing class trip back in the early 1990s. I set out to go all the way to the summit. It’s about 12 miles round trip with over 4000′ of elevation gain, topping out about 7100′. I hoped there would still be lots of alpine flowers blooming so I carried my big camera, a couple of lenses, and tripod. I also stuck my ice axe on my pack, expecting to need it on the final snow slopes. I hike pretty fast when I’m by myself and gained the first 1000 feet in 30 minutes, the turnoff from Gold Run Pass to Yellow Aster Butte in 45 minutes. Then I slowed down to enjoy the scenery.
But since I really wanted to get all the way to Tomyhoi, I didn’t stop much as I contoured around the basin and climbed up toward Yellow Aster. Then I dropped down the steep switchbacks to the tarns where I stopped to make a few photos and then continued on north. From a distance, Tomyhoi looks like a long gentle slope from the Yellow Aster tarns. As mountains go, I guess it is gentle. But when hiking uphill it certainly seems steeper.
I passed krumholtz subalpine firs and mountain hemlocks, groundcover carpets of kinnikinnik and juniper, fields of lichens studded with sparse heather and huckleberries. I dropped into and climbed back out of a big notch, eventually gaining the ridge. That’s where I found this nice little clump of rock paintbrush, Castilleja rupicola, blooming all by itself. Actually, it was coming up out of some Davidson’s penstemon that had already finished blooming. I made the photo with the camera on the ground, 32mm lens, and hardly able to see through the viewfinder because of the rock blocking my head. That’s Mt. Baker in the background. It’s a high noon shot. continue reading »
Great Northern Aster, Canadanthus modestus (formerly known as Aster modestus), is unique among the purple asters with very glandular stems and involucral bracts. That last term, for the uninitiated, means the little leaf-like things at the base of the flower head. On this species, the bracts are fairly long, sharply pointed, curving outward, and purplish in color. That makes them pretty distinctive. The stem and involucre are both noticably sticky to the touch, an easy way to tell if a plant is glandular.
I guess it’s a sign of being a true plant nerd to take off on a day trip halfway across the state to look for one plant that may not even be in bloom.
