Myriopteris Gracillima, Lace Lip Fern

Day 350: This small rock-dwelling fern (Myriopteris gracillima, Lace Lip Fern) was a new one for me. Subalpine plant life tends to be a lot smaller than its cousins from the lowlands, and ferns are no exception. In fact, you might be forgiven for not thinking they were ferns at all, but rather the foliage of some vascular plant. The fronds of Lace Lip are only about six inches long and grow as a dense mat of greenery. The foliage is rather leathery and somewhat stiff. Recognizing it as something new for a natural-history post, I bailed over the edge of an embankment to get a closer look while Joe remained safely on trail. I thought for a minute I was going to have to ask him to pull me back up, but I managed to crawl up the scree on my own. The things we do for science!

Thalictrum Occidentale, Western Meadow Rue

Day 265: I first became acquainted with Western Meadow Rue (Thalictrum occidentale) while hiking with my mother on the Purcell Mountain Trail near Packwood. We each made similar mental associations for the dangling stamens which trembled at the slightest whiff of breeze, mine being somewhat more family-friendly than hers of "whorehouse lampshades." To me, they brought to mind Victorian era decor, silken pastel petals and long strands of beaded fringe. It's not an uncommon plant, but years went by before I saw it again because I was looking in all the wrong places. During a recent Team Biota hike, we found it in abundance on the east side of the Pacific Crest, recognizable by its columbine-like leaves. It was not in flower at the time, buds swollen but not quite bursting, so we made a second trip to the site a week later to find all the "lamps" lit and their fringe shivering in the breeze.

Ozomelis Trifida, Pacific Mitrewort

Day 263: This exquisite plant wasn't in a position where I could do a Penny Perspective, so get out your metric ruler and measure off two millimeters. Not centimeters...millimeters. That's a generous estimate of how big the largest flower was from petal tip to tip. The detail wasn't visible in the photos I took on June 25, so I went back with an additional macro filter, stacking them for a total of 5x magnification on top of the camera's 2.1x macro zoom. My botany partner Joe had seen them a week earlier and had identified them as Pacific Mitrewort, but taxonomy being what it is currently, his Latin was out of date. The proper binomial for this little beauty is Ozomelis trifida, "trifida" referring to the separation of the petal tips into three fingers. The plant is also called "Three-toothed Mitrewort."

Letharia Vulpina

Day 256: Team Biota ventured somewhat outside the Park boundaries yesterday to hike to Sheep Lake and Sourdough Gap from Chinook Pass, the trail slightly east of the Cascade Crest. Joe had been to the lake only a few days earlier and had found a lichen he knew I'd have to pursue: Letharia vulpina, aka "Wolf Lichen." We have two species of Letharia in Washington and both are primarily "east side" dwellers. The second species (L. columbiana) usually bears an abundance of fringed apothecia which are so distinctive that Northwest Lichenologists uses the lichen as their logo. I was hoping we might find both on our seven-mile trek.

And there's a point right there: Washington Trails Association's website claims the gentle hike to Sourdough Gap covers a mere five miles. Trusting in them, we left our lunches in the truck. Using my new GPS which tracks your actual route, we had covered seven miles by the time we got back at 3 PM. The largest discrepancy occurred between the lake and the pass. WTA claimed it was 0.75 miles one way. My GPS showed 1.4 miles.

That said, we found Letharia vulpina in abundance, noting that it occurred primarily on dead cedars and alpine fir. Brodo refers to it as preferring barkless branches, and indeed this was what we observed, although we also found it growing on bark. We did not find the second species, but felt we were much more than compensated by the number of "new" vascular plants we discovered, including a couple of species I had not seen before. I still have a few left to identify, but many will be featured in this blog over the next week. Stay tuned!