Plant Trail Reports, San Diego County, 2008

Table of Contents

3 January 2008: Anza Borrego State Park: Desert Gardens, First Crossing to Lower Willows
7 January 2008: Anza Borrego State Park: Coyote Creek Dirt Road Cholla Survey; Desert Gardens, First Crossing Area
12 January 2008: Santa Margarita Ecological Reserve: Stone Creek Loop
16 January 2008: Anza Borrego State Park: Little Surprise Canyon and the hunt for Carlowrightia arizonica
21 January 2008: Anza Borrego State Park: the extreme northeast corner of San Diego County and the search for Opuntia acanthocarpa var. coloradensis
29 January 2008: Anza Borrego State Park: Survey Of Annual Growth From West to East; and Villager Peak Trail (partial) (DSon)
2 February 2008: Anza Borrego State Park: Henderson Canyon (DSon)

6 February 2008: Anza Borrego State Park: Little Surprise Canyon and Borrego Palm Canyon Alternate Wash: the second hunt for Carlowrightia arizonica (DSon)
21 February 2008: Anza Borrego State Park: Upper Palm Wash / Calcite Mine Area (DSon)
26 February 2008: Anza Borrego State Park: Little Surprise Canyon (third hunt for Carlowrightia arizonica) and Smoke Tree Canyon (DSon)

 

3 January 2008: Anza Borrego State Park: Desert Gardens, First Crossing to Lower Willows (see Flora of Desert Gardens and First Crossing to Lower Willows)

I was very excited about returning to Coyote Creek and heading upstream along the flowing creek. There were ten species in bloom just in the little bit of creek I explored last time, so I expected to find more by walking along the creek. I hoped to see a blooming Rush Milkweed, Asclepias subulata, reported in this area, which I hadn't seen in southern California before in the wild.

Furthermore, I had read about Lower Willows and Santa Catarina Spring for some time, and was drooling with anticipation of being there.

I stopped first at the Alcoholic Pass Trail to check on a shrub we had not identified on our previous visit. I had been suspecting it was a dead indigo bush, Psorothamnus schottii, and it turned out that was precisely what it was.

At Coyote Creek, I immediately sought out some plants of Mexican sprangletop, Leptochloa uninervia, to properly greet them by name now that I knew who they were (see previous trip report). I also headed to an Oriental mustard, Sisymbrium orientale, and made sure of that id by observing that the pedicel width was the same as the fruit width.

It was indeed a delight heading upstream along the creek. It might have been the case that the species were relatively the same all along the creek, since the habitat seemed almost identical most of the way to Lower Willows, but I kept coming across new species regularly. I found 30 additional species over the 41 we had found on the last trip, and amazingly, there were a total of 32 species in bloom! See the list of blooming species, and my estimate of the total number of plants of each species with blooms.

The highlight was coming across a specimen of rosy apricot mallow, Sphaeralcea ambigua var. rosacea, with a single bloom on it. I have been looking for this taxon for years, and was ecstatic to finally come across it.

Near Second Crossing, it became difficult to follow the creek. As I left the creekbed to maneuver around the difficulties, it turned out I was right next to the road, so I followed the road the ~0.7 miles to Third Crossing since I was getting anxious to be there.

I was confused when I got to Third Crossing. There was a sign pointing left toward Third Crossing, and warning that the crossing was very deep. The path to the left at 90° appeared to be solid water, so that one would be walking in the middle of the water to go that way. However, looking at Google satellite imagery, it appears the crossing is actually a bit beyond that sign, almost straight ahead at a slight angle left. In the field, I saw that road going off on the other side of the creek, and it looked like I could have fairly easily crossed the creek with the aid of a big sandbar. But in the field I wasn't sure that this was the road, and it also wasn't clear how deeply I would sink into the sand of the sandbar if I tried to cross it.

So I elected to skirt the side of the creek without crossing it, and immediately found myself on a clear road going ahead. On Google maps this road is much clearer and wider than the road on the west side of the creek, and in fact this is the Jeep Trail shown on the topo map. I had little trouble following this road, which quickly turned into a trail.

I was simply amazed at how lush the vegetation was here. Even though I was still not yet at the green-stippled area on the topo map, the creek was choked with vegetation. It amazed me that any water at all could escape the roots of all the willows and other vegetation in the creek.

The trail itself stayed outside of the incised streambed, so it was easy to negotiate. I hiked the trail about 0.1 miles past the dry streambed of Box Canyon, and the trail began to have some vegetation across it. It was getting late, and I had shorts on, so I decided to turn around at that point. From Google maps, it looks like this point is only 500 feet from where the newly-cleared trail through Lower Willows crosses to this side of Coyote Creek. The topo map shows the old Jeep Trail making that connection, and this is the route shown in Schad (1998). I'll return in the future to see how well it connects.

On my return, I decided to take the Ocotillo Flat Trail, and almost immediately regretted it. The trail is in very deep sand, making the hiking extremely tiring. It hasn't been much used in the last month, since the trail itself had an abundance of annuals growing in it. It was distasteful to me to be stepping on all the beautiful baby Fremont pincushion, Chaenactis fremontii, and suncup, Camissonia sp., plants coming up! Worse, I found no new species along this trail.

That trail is beautifully signed and marked, however, making it very easy to follow. But after about a mile, the trail came very close to Coyote Creek, so I went back to hiking along the creek, which again was delightful. I found three more species on the trip back, since I tried to be on a different side of the creek than earlier.

 

7 January 2008: Anza Borrego State Park: Coyote Creek Dirt Road Cholla Survey; Desert Gardens, First Crossing Area (see Flora of Desert Gardens and First Crossing to Lower Willows)

I had a number of different goals today:

I also was curious how much Coyote Creek had risen due to the massive rainfall at high elevations from the last series of storms.

I didn't have to wait long to get an answer to my last desire. Instead of the very small amount of water flowing across mile ~1 of the Coyote Canyon Dirt Road, there was almost as much water there today as was at First Crossing two miles upstream four days ago. I went ahead and blustered through on my 2 wd car, and was pleased I made it. (Also see the pictures at the end of this report.)

I spotted the first cholla where the road reached the alluvial fan and turned left; it was Opuntia ganderi, and began GPS'ing them from the car.

I soon spotted a possible O. echinocarpa specimen, and got out of the car to examine it. It turned out to be a depauperate O. ganderi, only resembling O. echinocarpa from the non-robustness of the stems, and having three clear traits that ruled out O. ganderi. The plants were multiple-trunked, not single trunked; the tubercles were very long and slender, not the less extreme tubercles of O. echinocarpa; and the branches were ascending and not spreading.

I did a foot survey at mile 2.4, and found about half the O. ganderi plants were dead or dying, which caused the stressed branches to be non-robust as above. Every plant I saw here, and everywhere along Coyote Canyon, was O. ganderi.

I did spot some baby probable Lupinus arizonicus plants in one location, and photographed them.

I stopped at Desert Gardens to check on the unknown plant that I had guessed might be Malacothrix, but which didn't seem to match that id very well.

The plant looked the same from the south side. But this time, I went around to the east side of the cholla it was under, and saw the flowers on this plant! It is a young Stephanomeria pauciflora, which nicely accounts for the tangled appearance of its stems. (:-)

I continued the cholla survey to just before the road dips into Coyote Wash, where I parked and went in search of the Asclepias subulata.

It took me an hour or so to find one. Normally, it is very easy to spot these tall milkweeds, but all the similar-appearing-from-a-distance ocotillo make the job harder here.

The plant I eventually found is 0.2 miles north of Coyote Creek along a wash that parallels the route of Coyote Creek Dirt Road from just west of Desert Gardens to First Crossing.

Here's how hard I worked to find that plant:

  1. I parked my car, and surveyed 360° by eye. I only spotted ocotillos and a few creosote bushes with long most-naked stems that mimicked A. subulata.

  2. I headed west on top of the north bank of Coyote Creek, along the lowermost terrace, and explored a small loop close to the car.

  3. I then went into Coyote Creek Wash, and surveyed a larger loop. I surveyed closely the north bank of the dry wash, and then returned along the south bank of the dry wash, which is the north bank of the wet wash.

  4. I then decided to head up the side wash coming from the north, where I finally found a single plant. I surveyed a fairly large distance; my survey route went well north of the latitude of Desert Gardens.

This effort was worth it, since this was the first time I had seen this species in San Diego County. I thank Bill Sullivan for making it possible by putting online his report of a blooming specimen of this species here.

These surveys, combined with my previous survey to third crossing, definitely say that this species is rare here! I wonder how this species manages to reproduce here, or whether this is a "sink" population coming from a larger concentration of plants elsewhere.

When I did the large loop described in #3 above, I thought about quickly crossing the Creek in order to GPS some of the previously-found plants. (I didn't GPS plants on my first two surveys for some dumb reason.) I went to the Creek, which was flowing much more strongly than it was four days ago. It was not possible to cross the creek in most places without getting wet.

I found a place downstream where the Creek braided into three creeklets, but even those creeklets were not pieces of cake to cross. One had to do a bit of leaping, which always has the potential problem of slipping on take-off or landing, or sinking deeply in sections that turn out to be wetter than anticipated. I decided to continue the Asclepias search before doing that crossing. (;-)

After the Asclepias survey, I returned to this place and made it across with no problems.

Relieved, I set out to GPS the plants from my first survey. I did that up to about mile 0.6 from the car, which got most of the plants except for the ones past Second Crossing. At that point, I took off cross-country to go to the Creek, and attempted to find the plants I wanted to check on in detail.

I got to the Creek in short order, but my 3 January 2008 path along the Creek was no longer always available due to the increased water. So I mostly followed the Creek at a farther distance, and was able to fairly quickly pick up where I was in my notes.

My main objective was to get some fruit from the Sphaeralcea ambigua var. rosacea. I found that plant fairly quickly, but it was now in the middle of a wide stream! There was no way to get to it without getting wet. I decided it wasn't worth it; there will be fruit in the future when the stream flow lessens. (;-)

But since I had taken a pix of this plant four days ago, it made a great comparison with the pix taken on this trip:  

The picture below was taken on 3 January 2008, about 0.4 miles upstream from First Crossing. The flowing water is confined to the channel seen in the upper right of the picture, outlined by the plants growing alongside it. You can glimpse the water along the top of the picture, just a bit right of middle.

The picture below was taken on 7 January 2008. The picture is not taken from the exact same spot since that spot was now covered with water.

I checked on the determination for a few other species, and then it was time to return to the car.

On my way home, I stopped at the field across from The Mall in Borrego Springs to GPS and photographed some Opuntia echinocarpa, with O. ganderi nearby. This is an excellent location to see both species side by side.

 

12 January 2008: Santa Margarita Ecological Reserve: Stone Creek Loop (see Plant Guide to Stone Creek Loop)

The docents walked the Stone Creek Loop after a short presentation by Dave Bailey on the 30 most common birds of Santa Margarita Ecological Reserve (SMER).

It was wonderful to see green, green, green, nearly everywhere. At the beginning of the loop, the leaves of black sage, Salvia mellifera, at least the ones that survived the drought near the top of the stems, had done their amazing resurrection act and gone from the dead-looking leaves of two months ago to vibrant, green, healthy leaves. I don't know of many other non-fern or non-fern-ally species that can do this trick.

For example, behind the black sages, the scrub oaks (Quercus acutidens, but usually called Q. berberidifolia by most botanists) were still leafless. They dropped their leaves in the drought, and so have to grow new ones, which are still very tiny. But these were the only non-deciduous shrubs that had lost their leaves. Even the plants of deciduous chaparral beard-tongue, Keckiella antirrhinoides var. antirrhinoides, were already full of adult green leaves.

Annuals were everywhere. We're on target to get a "double-bloom" again this year, just like in 2003, if the rains continue. The double-bloom comes about because every year only a certain percentage of native annual seeds germinate. Since there were no annuals last year, we will get both the ones that would have bloomed last year, and the ones scheduled to bloom this year. Of course, this will vary by species, depending on what the signals are that tell the seeds when to bloom.

Several areas of this loop were carpeted by baby eucrypta, Eucrypta chrysanthemifolia var. chrysanthemifolia. The road bank south of SMER, and the corner of this loop by the entrance gate, had zillions of fiesta flower, Pholistoma auritum var. auritum, seedlings. Oddly, though, I saw no seedlings of chia, Salvia columbariae, or wild canterbury bells, Phacelia minor, that were present here in previous years. Perhaps these germinate later.

The north-facing bank of Stone Creek was filled in places with ferns coming back to life, mostly coffee fern, Pellaea andromedifolia, and California polypody, Polypodium californicum. There was also some resprouting California chalk lettuce, Dudleya pulverulenta ssp. pulverulenta, along with extensive displays of liverworts, mosses and lichens. One docent noted those cute little mushrooms with curved bases that often grown out of liverwort banks. The east-facing bank of Stone Creek (higher up, before the Creek turns west) had lots of coast-range melic, Melica imperfecta, resprouting as well.

We encountered quite a few different mushroom species. The most notable, besides the tiny ones mentioned above, were one purplish large individual toadstool and one large cluster (~one foot across) of ~10 brown toadstools with the edges of the cap turned up.

One mission manzanita, Xylococcus bicolor, was in full bloom on the east slope above the Santa Margarita River, acting for all the world like it had rained last year. However, another plant, on a drier south-facing slope above Stone Creek, still looked near death. This species, along with true manzanitas, Arctostaphylos spp., were hard hit by the drought, looking very stressed nearly everywhere from the Santa Rosa Plateau to Mount San Jacinto.

Wild cucumber, Marah macrocarpus var. macrocarpus, was also starting to bloom.

There was one large clump of silky lotus, Lotus heermannii var. heermannii, that was perhaps three feet across and very healthy looking. It was in heavy shade, and must have managed to survive the drought with its stems intact, unless it can grow that much in only five weeks.

Patches of Bigelow's spike-moss, Selaginella bigelovii, were mostly looking good, but they had suffered some death from the drought. In some patches, perhaps 20% of the branches had died. But overall they were looking so good that Dave spotted some patches across a tributary to Stone Creek from a distance of about 200 feet!

Back near the South Field Station, in the disturbed cultivated area, there was a mint-family species in bloom I had never seen in the wild before. It was so robust it looked like a resprouting shrub, but it turned out to be a summer-flowering annual, Bells of Ireland, aka Shellflower, Moluccella laevis.

 

16 January 2008: Anza Borrego State Park: Little Surprise Canyon and the hunt for Carlowrightia arizonica (see Flora of Little Surprise Canyon)

I have digitized and perused a lot of floras, and the first species listed on several of them is a species I'd never seen, Carlowrightia arizonica. It is in the first dicot family in the Jepson Manual, Acanthaceae.

A week ago I ran across Aaron Schusteff's photograph of this species from Little Surprise Canyon. Little Surprise Canyon is a location for which I had soon intended to do a plant checklist. With the motivation of seeing Carlowrightia arizonica, Wayne Armstrong, Paula Knoll and I went there today to compile a checklist for the Canyon, and to search for this species.

The name Surprise Canyon is ambiguous, since it is used for several locations. The main use is for a canyon in the Mountain Palm Springs drainage. It is also an alternate name for Flat Cat Canyon immediately north of Hellhole Canyon.

Little Surprise Canyon is the name used for a very small canyon south of the Hellhole Canyon parking lot. There is very little mention of Little Surprise Canyon online or in reference books. Although the name is mentioned on the display board in the parking lot, it is not mentioned in Schad (1998) or Lindsay and Lindsay (2002). Fortunately, the Anza-Borrego Desert Natural History Association has a nice page on it, mentioning it as a nice wildflower location.

We quickly discovered the appeal of this Canyon. It is a beautiful little canyon, with steep (albeit short) walls rising quickly above you which makes it very scenic. It is indeed a good wildflower location, since we saw good annual growth in this fairly-low-desert-rainfall year. I was able to take more baby pictures. The favorable environment is due to decent rainfall in this west-side desert location, good concentration of that rainfall along the bottom by the walls of the canyon without too much runoff, and an abundance of niches in which plants can grow.

We surveyed up the west branch, as recommended on the above webpage, finding a number of species, but not the Carlowrightia arizonica. After ascending a brief steep area to the upper part of the canyon, we found an single stem fish-hook cactus, Mammillaria sp. on the ridgeline above us.

One of the differences between the fairly common M. dioica and a species I have been dying to see, M. tetrancistra, is the number of apparent stems. (The apparent stems are described as branches from the base of the plant, but they appear as separate stems to the eye). Munz 1974 says that M. dioica typically has multiple stems whereas M. tetrancistra typically has single stems, and essentially all the specimens I've seen have had multiple stems. If this plant was therefore M. tetrancistra, this was exciting, especially since M. tetrancistra has not been vouchered in the northern part of Anza-Borrego.

So I walked up the easily-accessible ridge to check it out. Unfortunately, it was clearly M. dioica, with a single central spine and fewer than 20 radial spines. In total, we ran across perhaps five specimens of this species, all with a single stem.

Since the area on top of this south wall of the canyon was a very different habitat than we'd seen so far in the canyon, we explored it a bit. Another pleasure of being in this area is that I've seen it countless times as I've driven down S22, but never explored it previously.

Just beyond the M. dioica was a barrel cactus, Ferocactus cylindraceus, which had six barrels, four of which were the same height. I got as close as I could to it to try to see if it had any cottony fruit, just to make sure it was not Echinocactus polycephalus. I found none. In fact, quite a few of the barrel cactus had multiple barrels in this area.

Surprisingly, we soon ran across a M. dioica with buds that were just about to bloom. But that was about it for additional species for the checklist. We spotted a way up the north wall of the Canyon, so walked back down our ridge into the canyon bottom and then that route up the other side.

We easily traversed the flattish area on top of the canyons, went over to the east branch of the canyon, but found no easy way down into it. We decided at that point to go back the way we came, but now with the main purpose of discovering the picture location to find the Carlowrightia.

I've relocated old photo locations a number of times now, and nearly all the time it is a tricky business. There are many locations that are almost right, but only a single location that is exactly right.

We quickly figured out that the peak in the background of the picture was Indian Head, that the ridge in the middle background had to be from the immediate area, and thus that the plant was photographed on the top of the west-facing slope of one of the two branches of this canyon. We saw no place along the west branch that could fit the picture location, since the angle to the Indian Head Ridgeline was wrong.

We headed over to the east branch, but it was clear that we needed to be up on east rim of that branch. We climbed to the top of the first ridge, which seemed to be the ridge in the middle background, but once again couldn't easily cross the tributaries to the drainage in the east canyon. We also were a bit troubled that the ridge didn't have quite the same shape as seen in the photo.

We went across highway S22, just to verify that the picture location wasn't in the hills on that side. We then decided to walk up S22 a bit to get on the next ridge south of the ridge in the middle background. We quickly got very close to the location of the photo, but once again we were on the wrong side of the east canyon.

Looking at the probable location of the picture, we saw a handful of dead-looking plants on the inaccessible bank of the east canyon that very well could be Carlowrightia. However, we saw no plant at the top of the canyon that could have been the plant in the photo. Worse, we didn't see the rock outcrop next to the plant in the photo.

Wayne found a way down into the east canyon, but it was steep and filled with ball-bearing rocks. We decided at that point to punt, and go to Borrego Palm Canyon to check on a Carlowrightia voucher by Larry Hendrickson.

Borrego Palm Canyon even smelled moist when we got there, and was filled with annual growth. I took more baby pictures, and the three of us explored the south canyon wall in the waning light. Unfortunately, we struck out once again. Larry Hendrickson later told me that the plants there were still dormant, hard to see, and scarce there. It was thus not surprising that we didn't find any specimens, but disappointing nonetheless.

I had also anticipated seeing one more species new to me at Little Surprise Canyon, Erodium texanum, a native filaree. Unfortunately, all we saw were tons of the non-native E. cicutarium.

Fortunately, Wayne knew of another location. He had often taken his botany classes on walks on the flat sandy area near the water towers south of the visitor center, and seen E. texanum there. Unfortunately, the flats there were covered with E. cicutarium, without a single plant of E. texanum in sight.

Perhaps the rainfall this year wasn't enough to germinate the E. texanum, but this seems doubtful, since the first rainfall event here was 0.88 inches and there are many annual species that have germinated well. It seems more likely that the non-native E. cicutarium has eliminated it here in this unfair competition.

Although I was 0 for 2 in finding anticipated new species today, it was still a delightful day. We compiled a good initial checklist for Little Surprise Canyon, we saw a lot of healthy baby annuals, we got some good exercise in beautiful surroundings, and I got to see my first blooming Mammillaria dioica, which we found on the trip back down the west branch. We should also be able to return to this area and quickly head to the exact picture location on our next visit, and see whether the Carlowrightia plant is still there.

 

21 January 2008: Anza Borrego State Park: the extreme northeast corner of San Diego County and the search for Opuntia acanthocarpa var. coloradensis (see Flora of Extreme Northeast San Diego County and Wayne Armstrong's pictures)

Wayne Armstrong, Bill Sullivan and I had a very exciting goal for today: to search for the specimen vouchered as Opuntia acanthocarpa var. coloradensis from the extreme northeastern corner of [San Diego] County by Frank Gander in 1937.

This was the only cholla taxon in Anza-Borrego Desert State Park that I hadn't seen previously. I did a number of cholla trips in early 2007 to sort out the other species, but had not previously gone to this corner of the county for three reasons. First, this area is remote, almost an hours drive from the town of Borrego Springs and thus 2.5 hours from my house in Fallbrook. Second, this area has no trails or old roads, and so one must travel along uneven, rocky ground. Third, the chollas could be anywhere within an area of 20 square miles or so. Looking for a very rare cholla here might be similar to looking for a needle in a haystack.

Fortunately, I began an extensive email correspondence with Bill Sullivan a few weeks ago, and in the course of a discussion on chollas Bill mentioned his previous searches for this taxon here. This fired up my interest in checking this out, so Bill, Wayne Armstrong, and I planned this outing to look for it together. Bill had been to this area a number of previous times, which helped immensely in knowing how to get to this remote location.

Philip Erdelsky came along, and pointed out how exciting this trip was from a non-botanical point of view. We were visiting the EXACT northeast corner of San Diego County, a Huell Howser kind of trip!

Nearly the entire drive from Fallbrook to Borrego Springs was in drizzle or light rain. Raindrops were even falling in Borrego Springs, although they were few and far between. But the raindrops quickly ceased as we headed farther east.

To refresh our minds on the habits of Opuntia ganderi and O. echinocarpa, we stopped in Borrego Springs across from the Mall. As Wayne was getting out of the car, he noticed an Erodium texanum right next to his feet, one of the elusive goals of the trip reported above! It was an auspicious start to the day.

As we drove through the Badlands of Imperial County along S22 about three miles east of the San Diego County line, Bill's sharp eyes spotted another quarry for me, Orcutt's woody-aster, Xylorhiza orcuttii. I was quite impressed at how large these plants were, and even more impressed that there was a bud on one! This spot even had a few baby annuals that had germinated from the road runoff from sparse rainfall here, including Spanish needle, Palafoxia arida, and what looked like hairy desert-sunflower, Geraea canescens. I was also excited to see Arizona honeysweet, Tidestromia oblongifolia.

We turned left on CA86, and were surprised to see plants in the median with dense green leafy growth. But it was too hard to identify them from 65 mph.

We turned left on Avenue 86, just over the Riverside County line, and proceeded up the dirt road. Bill was surprised to see a new (date?) palm orchard on the left, along with a new sturdy gate placed before the Coachella Valley Water District Pumps. We learned later that this gate was installed to try to prevent copper theft, an ongoing terrible problem ever since the price of copper soared.

The gate was open, so we drove through it and parked at the end of the dirt road, 0.1 mile beyond the Imperial / San Diego County border. The GPS led us to the three county intersection, where we found a one foot tall wood stake. Amusingly, there is a much-taller five foot metal stake located some distance inside San Diego County.

We took the obligatory pictures of each of us being in three counties at once, and then began our plant survey.

Our plan was to follow the route shown in the map given here, heading directly to the base of the mountains and exploring along them, since that was the habitat in which I had previously seen Opuntia acanthocarpa var. coloradensis at the base of the Cargo Muchacho Mountains near Yuma, Arizona. See Flora of Extreme Northeast San Diego County for a description of the plant habitats along our route.

We planned to do a plant checklist for this area as well, and were just beginning it when two workers from the Coachella Valley Water District came up to us. They kindly told us they were about to lock the gate, and that we might prefer that my car be on the other side of the gate. I moved my car, and they were even nice enough to give me a ride the 0.5 miles back to the northeast corner of San Diego County.

As we began our plant survey around noon, the most stunning feature was that annuals were everywhere. We had all expected this to be an extremely dry location, in the rain shadow of the Santa Rosa Mountains, which themselves are in the rain shadow of the peaks to the west. Yet this area looked much more like the area immediately west of the town of Borrego Springs in terms of wetness right now! It was more than a little puzzling.

We finally realized that these two areas both get "spill-over" rain that had been squeezed out of the clouds by their mountains to the west. Amusingly, this means that this area on the rain-shadow side of the Santa Rosa Mountains gets more rain then the area on the southwest side of the Santa Rosa Mountains. This was very evident in the flora, with indicators of extreme dryness such as desert holly, Atriplex hymenelytra, present only on the southwest side and absent here.

Another interesting feature of this area was the relatively large amount of cryptobiotic soil present. This indicates soil that has been undisturbed by human or heavy animal footprints for a very long time. See trip report for Fonts Point Area for more information.

When I told Jon Rebman we were searching for Opuntia acanthocarpa var. coloradensis today, he had kindly told me about the collections Frank Gander had done here in 1937. I had done my homework and looked at the list of those species, and was excited that they included five species I had never seen in the wild before. I studied their characteristics so I would be ready to greet them if I saw them.

It didn't take long to find the first one, sticky fagonia, Fagonia pachyacantha. However, it did not fit its description in the Jepson Manual, so we initially concluded that this specimen was probably the species seen commonly in the desert here, California fagonia, F. laevis. In particular, F. pachyacantha was supposed to be a prostrate perennial, whereas F. laevis is a much-branched shrub with stems ascending to erect. The first specimen we saw was as tall as it was wide! The other characteristics, whether the leaf stipules were curved or not, and the shape of the leaflets, were ambiguous and so didn't help sort out the determination.

We encountered quite a few more specimens. Many of them were a bit flattened, up to twice as wide as tall, so we were suspicious that these in fact could be F. pachyacantha and kept checking them. We soon came across a somewhat prostrate specimen that had stipules much longer than we'd ever seen for F. laevis, 5-8 mm, and finally knew we were seeing F. pachyacantha. We'd never seen F. laevis with long stipules. We later saw a true specimen of F. laevis, in a different habitat, and its tiny stipules of only 1-2 mm stood out. That specimen also was more erect than most specimens of F. pachyacantha.

Later, at home, we found that Munz (1974) said that both species are subshrubs with similar habit, exactly as we observed! Munz uses the length of the stipules to separate them, which is what we independently deduced here.

We found a single specimen of a Lycium in full bloom, with pretty purple mostly-single flowers. I was very pleased since I rarely get to see Lycium with blooms or fruit. I was even more pleased when I got home and determined these plants as another species I hadn't seen before, L. parishii, which is listed as RARE in CA in the Jepson Manual. It turns out this is also the first record of this species north of Mountain Palm Springs in San Diego County.

The count of new species for me was now up to three, and we had hardly begun our survey here.

We got to the base of the mountains around 2 p.m., and the exciting phase of the trip began, the search for Opuntia acanthocarpa var. coloradensis. We looked all around the slopes and their base for the next 0.75 mile, and even explored a ways up a west-flowing drainage amidst the steep slopes. We found no chollas at all except for an occasional pencil cholla, Opuntia ramosissima. It was a bit disappointing, since it was now getting late in this short day.

Our route then encountered a little valley between two ridges projecting north from this arm of the Santa Rosa Mountains. This valley consisted mostly of an old north-facing alluvial slope (bajada) which is being dissected by the current drainage system. Large areas of the slope are still intact, bounded by deeply-cut drainages on the east and west, and the alluvial slope itself is only very shallowly dissected.

We quickly encountered a cholla, but it was clear at a glance it could not be Opuntia acanthocarpa var. coloradensis. Since the plant was small, it was a bit hard to be sure whether it was O. ganderi or O. echinocarpa.

We decided to split up, with two of us taking drainages and two of us taking the intervening ridges. All of us found chollas, which were most abundant on the old alluvial slope itself, and they were all very clear O. ganderi. (See Opuntia ganderi In Extreme Northeast San Diego County.)

Since Frank Gander (yes, the namesake of this species) had returned with only one type of cholla from here in 1937, it was immediately fairly clear that his cholla specimen was simply misdetermined as Opuntia acanthocarpa var. coloradensis. This is a very easy thing to do, since the taxa are similar in a number of respects, and very hard to tell apart with a small voucher specimen, especially with a voucher 71 years old. The differences between these two taxa are most apparent only in the habit of the entire plant, easily seen in the field, but not in a voucher.

By the way, O. ganderi was only recognized in 1938, as O. acanthocarpa ssp. ganderi, from another Frank Gander voucher, so Gander's voucher was originally determined as O. acanthocarpa.

Of course, we covered only a small portion of the 20 square miles here, so we cannot claim definitively that Opuntia acanthocarpa var. coloradensis does not exist here. However, Gander spent only one full day here in 1937, so he could not have scoured the 20 square miles here either, and he most likely traveled much the same route we did. Our route was the quickest route to the montane habitat, as well as the nearest palm grove.

In addition, our finding that this area was actually fairly wet makes it extremely unlikely that a taxon found only in the driest part of the Sonoran desert near the Colorado River would live here. See Opuntia acanthocarpa var. coloradensis for more details, including a distribution map for this taxon.

This was a bit disappointing that we found no Opuntia acanthocarpa var. coloradensis, but at least we had solved the mystery of Gander's voucher. And as a result, we had found the farthest east occurrence of O. ganderi.

My disappointment quickly turned to joy, when we found a fourth species new to me, another one I had long sought, fish-hook cactus, Mammillaria tetrancistra. This was a beautiful specimen, and fit the floras exactly for the differences with M. dioica.

Interestingly, in reviewing vouchers for this species just two weeks ago, I had found that none existed for the northern part of Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, and so I had taken it off my list of plants for this area. It's now back on!

 

29 January 2008: Anza Borrego State Park: Survey Of Annual Growth From West to East; and Villager Peak Trail (partial) (see Plant Guide to Villager Peak Trail)

In the Borrego Valley area, my previous trips this season found that the rain of 12/1/07 had germinated annuals primarily from the town of Borrego Springs west. For example, many annuals germinated in Borrego Palm Canyon, and the other plants there looked happy, but essentially no annuals germinated in Fonts Point Wash, and the other plants looked near death there. I'd wanted to quantify this a bit, and took an hour today to do so.

Since I was heading to the Thimble Peak trailhead, about 12 east-west miles from the Visitor Center, I decided to collect data at five to six locations, roughly every 2.5 miles.

I began just south of the Visitor Center Parking Lot, a bit west of the trail to Hellhole Canyon. Of the ground not covered by shrubs, about 50% was covered by annual growth at this time. Unfortunately, about 90% of that coverage was due to the non-native redstem filaree, Erodium cicutarium; the rest were native annuals and small-seeded spurge, Chamaesyce polycarpa.

Underneath the shrubs was a different world! About 80% of the ground was covered by native annuals, mostly common phacelia, Phacelia distans, and popcorn flowers and combseed, Cryptantha and Pectocarya species, along with native poppies, Eschscholzia minutiflora and/or E. parishii.

The next stop was 2.9 miles east, about half a mile west of the Borrego School. The germination and growth was already way down here, with just 10% of the ground away from shrubs covered by growth and only 5% covered underneath shrubs. By the way, this location showed possible evidence that it had previously been severely disturbed, since there was only one species of shrub here, burroweed, Ambrosia dumosa. There were at least two species of shrubs at every other stop.

The ground coverage numbers declined to 5% away from shrubs and 0% under shrubs, respectively, at the next stop 2.6 further miles east, south of the Airport. The numbers dropped to almost zero, only 1% both away from shrubs and under shrubs, another 2.7 miles east, between Rockhouse Road and Inspiration Wash.

Interestingly, annual growth picked up a bit to the east. Just east of Fonts Point Wash, the numbers were 15% away from shrubs and 10% under shrubs, and at the Thimble Peak Trailhead, the numbers were 1% and 20%, respectively.

This survey thus confirmed quantitatively that annuals, especially native annuals, are currently only found in any significant numbers west of Di Giorgio Road. It also found that there are some annuals, in much smaller numbers than at the Visitor Center area and mostly non-natives, also present east of Fonts Point Wash. This is probably because rainfall usually increases with elevation, and the elevation increases from about 500 feet at the Airport to 1000 feet at the Thimble Trailhead.

Unfortunately, except for the first stop near the Visitor Center, the survey made me sick.

Other than the shrubs, essentially the only things growing east of the Visitor Center were redstem filaree and Asian mustard, both non-native annuals. I did occasionally find native annuals, but they were vastly outnumbered. One suspects the natives won't be long for this world, since the non-natives have already tremendously crowded them out. However, this suspicion needs to be confirmed in a wetter year by a repeat of this survey, due to the low annual vegetation coverage. These non-natives require less rainfall to germinate than required by our native species, and that may explain the observed difference. A wetter year might germinate the native annuals, and give a quite different picture.

By the way, this observation means essentially all the green that one sees along S22, especially on the badland side, is due to Asian mustard, a very sad state of affairs.

The main business for the day was to compile a flora for the area around the use trail to Villager Peak. I didn't expect to get very far on the trail, since I was entirely botanizing, but I made it to 2.3 miles from S22, not counting switchbacks, to an elevation of 2320 feet. That taste of the trail made me hungry to come back and go much farther.

This is a delightful area and trail! It was exciting to be at Lute Ridge, clear evidence of one of the branches of the San Jacinto Fault going through this area. Remeika and Lindsay (1992) say that Lute Ridge is the largest known fault scarp on the North American continent existing in unconsolidated sediments. It is always dramatic to be at a location where one can sight along a fault line so well. The north face of Lute Ridge is dead linear, and lines up with the southern tip of the Santa Rosa Mountains to the east and the north tip of Coyote Mountain to the west.

The first 1.25 miles of the route are mostly in braided washes, with bits of remnant alluvial slope, and has the usual suite of species. I was pleased to see some baby buds on silver cholla, Opuntia echinocarpa, and to find the elevation where that species gave way to O. ganderi. I was especially delighted to see a handful of plants of rush milkweed, Asclepias subulata, in two locations.

I was a little nervous about what the trail going up the ridge would be like. The Alcoholic Pass Trail has a similar steepness, and it is not pleasant to descend due to poor footing. I was very relieved to find the trail is well switchbacked, making it significantly less steep, and has very good footing.

Once up the 200 foot face cut by the Rattlesnake Canyon Creek, the hiking was easy, the views were superb, and I was wondering why I had not hiked this trail before.

The only thing missing from this habitat were new species! I expected many new species once I got out of the wash, but I found a total of only five new species in the one mile of ridgeline I hiked. My only guess is that this south-facing ridge is simply too dry to have many species different from the ones on the alluvial slopes below.

It was only with great reluctance that I turned around at 3:15 p.m. so I could make it back to the car by sunset, with a bit of margin since this was my first return to the car from this point.

The trail required more attention to follow on the way down, since I was walking faster and probably also because it was harder to distinguish due to the difference in viewing angle. Fortunately, I was able to spot a bighorn sheep who took little notice of me, and walked perpendicular to the trail, stopping to munch on something every now and again. He did look alertly at me when my camera made noises.

Sometime on the way back I realized that I had not seen redstem filaree, Erodium cicutarium, here. I looked hard for it in its expected habitat on the flats, and didn't find it. This species is also missing from the extreme northeast corner of San Diego County. I'm very surprised to find any area here missing this species, and I can only speculate that for some reason it has not spread to this area yet. It would be wonderful, of course, if there were some other reason why this species is not a successful invader here.

Two other things were interesting about this area. First, the area and species found here reminded me strongly of the extreme northeast corner of San Diego County. This is perhaps not too surprising, since they are just eight miles apart.

Second, in the area of this trail, from just north of S22 to 2300 feet elevation, there was no visible evidence of the widespread rain from the latest storms of three days ago, 1/26/08-1/27/08, that dropped at least a quarter of an inch everywhere nearby. The Ocotillo Wells weather station, 12 miles away, reported the lowest 24 hour rainfall total as of 10 a.m. 1/27/08, only 0.24 inches, at the same time Fish Creek Mountain reported 0.52 inches and Borrego Springs reported 1.18 inches. This was very surprising, since there was standing water in big puddles in many places along S22, and evidence that a lot of sediment crossed S22 in Fonts Point Wash. Yet I saw no mud in the washes crossed by this trail, no water anywhere in this area away from the road, and no evidence of recent erosion.

 

2 February 2008: Anza Borrego State Park: Henderson Canyon (see Flora of Henderson Canyon)

The annuals have begun to pop into bloom!

When I got out of my car at the end of the road into Henderson Canyon, I was delighted to see how much all the annuals had grown. Many of them have begun producing their bloom stalks. Moreover, there were buds on at least some plants of four of the eight native species there, and a fifth species had its first bloom open on one plant. I came across several more annual species in bloom later in the trip, two of which had begun to set seeds!

No one should rush out here to see the bloom, since there still are very few flowers to be seen. But the bloom is soon going to be delightful on the west side of the town of Borrego Springs. There were so many annual plants growing along my route that in many places I couldn't avoid stepping on them, which always tugs at my heart. I tried most of the time to stay in the wash, where I could mostly walk without worry about stepping on plants, but Henderson Canyon is so little visited that in places there were annuals growing in the wash.

This was my first visit to Henderson Canyon, and it was pure delight. The lower canyon is open, giving good views throughout. It has scenic side canyons every so often that beg to be explored. There are some good north-facing cliffs that have a different suite of species. But after seeing so many places to the east with very few annuals this year (see previous report above), I suspect my opinion of Henderson Canyon was raised tremendously by seeing so many native annuals.

I began heading west toward the main Henderson Creek channel, going across or temporarily following wash after wash since there are no trails here (see Google Map of this area). This entire area has been the wash off and on over time; it ought to be called an alluvial wash since it most definitely is not an alluvial plain. Bill Sullivan calls them ruts since one's journey is repeatedly up and down in such terrain.

But the traveling here was fairly easy since the ruts were shallow and there were no obstacles like boulders in the way. Time was not important anyway, since I was compiling a plant checklist for this area today, and hence I was constantly scanning for species to add to the list.

The going was much easier when I got to the main Creek channel and followed it up the canyon. Even here there was no trail or constant path. The main channel was braided with many sandy routes, and one had to hop from one to another at times. Oddly, every channel seemed to have rock cairns marking them, no matter which one I was on. Most channels had a small number of footprints in them.

One dead annual remnant from a previous year puzzled me for some time, until I found the remnant right next to a bunch of baby monkeyflowers, probably Bigelow's monkeyflower, Mimulus bigelovii. Now I know what that species look likes dead! (;-)

All the usual annual suspects were growing, but for some wonderful reason there were almost none of the usually-ubiquitous redstem filaree, Erodium cicutarium. Unfortunately, there was the usual high density of Asian mustard, Brassica tournefortii.

I was very pleased to come across what looked like seedlings of Eriogonum inflatum growing right next to a mature plant of that species.

The drought had taken its toll here, but it primarily affected only three species. Nearly every plant of California trixis, Trixis californica; small-seeded spurge, Chamaesyce polycarpa; and Newberry's velvet mallow, Horsfordia newberryi, was dead. For the trixis, only plants in heavy shade from the south canyon wall, or underneath another tall plant, were alive. For the Horsfordia, only a single young plant was alive; the other taller ~six of them were dead. All the other shrub species were unaffected except for the death of part of some of the plants for some species. These plants are tough!

The spurge is a perennial, and it surely would have resprouted by now if it were still alive. I did find a handful of young plants with growth, but well over 95% of all specimens were dead. It looks like this species will have to come back from seed and will take some years to build up its former population size.

I reluctantly concluded I needed to turn around significantly earlier than I normally would have just from the mileage, since I had no idea how quickly I could primarily hike along this terrain. Fortunately, just before I turned around I found a few plants of rock crossosoma, Crossosoma bigelovii, bursting with buds, which was the highlight of the trip. I've only seen this species in two other places, Borrego Palm Canyon and a canyon near the Santa Rosa Mountains Visitor Center. Immediately after that, I was at the junction of the two main upper branches of the Canyon near 1700 feet elevation, a beautiful open area giving good views into both branches. (See view looking west up canyon and view looking southeast down canyon. It was a natural place to turn around.

I made good time going down, so decided to take the Creek to the eastern border of the Park here, and then go directly north up the boundary to my car, to continue the plant survey. (See surveyed route.) It got to be a bit tedious before I got to the boundary, but I only had a quarter mile to go at that point, so persevered. I was glad I did, since it was interesting to see the area from that vantage point. Also, I discovered that the main wash had been blocked by a berm just outside the park boundary.

The route directly along the Park boundary north was very tedious, and I don't recommend it.

 

6 February 2008: Anza Borrego State Park: Little Surprise Canyon and Borrego Palm Canyon Alternate Wash: the second hunt for Carlowrightia arizonica (see Flora of Borrego Palm Canyon; Xerophytic Desert Liverworts, and Phacelia minor in Borrego Palm Canyon)

Wayne Armstrong wanted to return to Borrego Palm Canyon to study some peculiar "black stringy prostrate stems" we had seen next to mosses on exposed soil on the cliffside on our 1/16/08 search for Carlowrightia arizonica. We had wondered about them, but since we were primarily searching for the Carlowrightia we hadn't spent any time on them. But when we got home, we couldn't find any information on them, so were consumed by curiosity as to what they were (dead moss stems? lichens? something else?).

We combined this trip with our second effort to find the Carlowrightia plants that had eluded us earlier, both in Little Surprise Canyon and in Borrego Palm Canyon.

Kate Shapiro and Bill Sullivan joined us, along with two reporters from the San Diego Union-Tribune. Mike Lee is doing a flower ecology story and interested in seeing first hand what conditions were like in the desert, and Chris Barber, a videographer for the paper's website, came along to record some video.

I had contacted Aaron Schusteff, and he had give me good directions to where he took his photograph of this species from Little Surprise Canyon. The location he gave me was in the only area we hadn't explored on 1/16/08, the east branch of the canyon along the bottom. So I felt quite confident we would be able to find his location and the Carlowrightia, especially with so many people looking for it! (We put the reporters to work on the task, too. Mike was especially good at this task, since he is part mountain goat and easily scampered up and down slopes that I wasn't keen on traversing.)

Aaron had said to stay in the east branch of Little Surprise Canyon, and that he had taken the photograph without climbing the wall of the canyon. With great hope and expectation, we went forth up that branch.

That branch had three branches of its own, and we dutifully explored each branch. Alas, Indian Head was not visible from any part of the bottom of any branch. Furthermore, we found no foreground rocks reachable from the canyon bottom similar to the ones shown in picture. So once again, we explored on top of the canyon, again without success.

We had a very promising mid-range ridge to match to the one seen in Aaron's picture, but we just couldn't get to any position in which it appeared with the right perspective. We then applied the Holmes principle and decided that the picture was actually showing a much more distant lower ridge at almost the distance of Indian Head ridge. There were in fact lower ridges at that distance that had somewhat similar shapes to the mid-range ridge, both of which resembled the ridges shown in the picture (The picture was taken with a macro lens, and everything except the plant itself was out of focus.)

We found a rock projection that looked right, and took a picture from that spot to compare to see if that hypothesis was correct. Unfortunately, detailed examination of that picture at home clearly revealed that there was indeed a very close hill that produced the mid-range ridgeline in the photo.

Applying the Holmes principle again, we will have to go back and find where a foreground ridge is at the right height to mask the appropriate amount of the Indian Head slopes. At home, I realized there was still a single location we did not visit. We met a 10 foot high dry waterfall near the top of the main branch, and we didn't go above it. This has to be the only spot we haven't now visited in all of the Little Surprise Canyon area. Logic therefore concludes that this must be the location of Aaron's photo, since Aaron, a mathematician, has given us an existence proof for such a location by his photo. (:-)

We then drove to Borrego Palm Canyon, where Mike Lee was impressed by the difference in annual growth between there and Little Surprise Canyon. I had told him about the huge difference in annual growth as one went west of the ridgeline above Borrego Springs, but seeing it is always better than just hearing about it.

To help us find the Carlowrightia, and to provide some scientific benefit if we didn't find it, we also planned on producing a plant checklist for the Alternate Wash at Borrego Palm Canyon.

We began recording all the species we saw. It is pretty liberating doing a checklist for an area, rather than the plant trail guides I have spent so much time doing in the past, since one can just wander anywhere to find new species.

We quickly ended up on the lush hillside, and the "black stringy stems" immediately revealed themselves as liverworts! This dumbfounded Wayne and me; we didn't even entertain that as a possibility. Those black stems were the rolled up leaves! See Xerophytic Desert Liverworts.

I had always assumed, without any foundation other than analogy to plant seedlings, that liverwort leaves emerged from the ground each year afresh. But instead, this liverwort, at least, has leaves that persist from year to year and just unroll to reveal the green upper surface. This "resurrection" of the leaves is similar to those of spike-moss, one species of which is known as the "resurrection plant" since it greens up within minutes of being wetted.

Thank goodness; one mystery solved, even though we struck out on the photo location at Little Surprise Canyon.

Surveying for the plant checklist was a delight. We came across masses of three blooming species that have minute blossoms only a botanist could love: pygmy-weed, Crassula connata; curvenut combseed, Pectocarya recurvata; and hairy-podded pepper-grass, Lepidium lasiocarpum. We were delighted at the robust growth we saw on all the annuals, giving promises of what might come in the near future if the weather cooperates.

Then we were stunned to come across dozens of the big beautiful blooms of wild canterbury bells, Phacelia minor! This was surprising because lower in the canyon we had seen lots of rosettes that had yet to even put up a bloom stalk. This again must have resulted from the increased rainfall to the west in the 12/1/07 storm.

We had been carefully looking for the Carlowrightia all this time, without success. We had gone past the voucher location, and were getting a little discouraged about finding it when Kate suddenly spotted some good candidates. Unfortunately, the plants were just barely beginning to leaf out, so had none of the flowers or fruit needed to discriminate the Carlowrightia from the very similar chuparosa, Justicia californica.

Worse, at this location we didn't spot one of the companion species given in the voucher, California trixis, Trixis californica. By this time, we had not seen any trixis plants at all, so it was becoming clear that trixis, an easily identifiable plant from a distance, would be the key to finding the Carlowrightia.

We persevered upstream, and soon found more treasures. We came across a dense field of our native Texas filaree, Erodium texanum, which at one stroke increased the number of specimens of this species I've ever seen by a factor of ten. Interestingly, the non-native redstem filaree, Erodium cicutarium, was not widespread in this canyon, just like I found on the last trip in Henderson Canyon. Perhaps that species really is a creature of flat areas.

We soon encountered the Alternate Trail, and took it farther up canyon to check on another rare species for here named for Arizona, Arizona spurge, Chamaesyce arizonica. We went past all three of its known locations from the plant trail guide, but it wasn't in evidence yet.

On the way down, we realized we had missed one section of the Alternate Wash, where we had taken the Alternate Trail instead of being in the wash. We backtracked to the upper end of that section, and could hardly believe it: we saw Trixis! And right by the trixis were some plants that looked like excellent candidates to be Carlowrightia. Furthermore, within feet of these plants were the specimens found earlier by Kate.

Very pleased with ourselves, we returned to the car thinking of our future return trip here to see the Carlowrightia in bloom.

 

21 February 2008: Anza Borrego State Park: Anza Borrego State Park: Upper Palm Wash / Calcite Mine Area (see Flora of Upper Palm Wash / Calcite Mine Area)

I picked this location for my botanizing today since it was predicted to have the calmest winds in the Borrego Desert this day. The prediction turned out well; the winds were calm except for a brief period in the mid-afternoon when I had to hold on to my hat while walking the lowermost section of the Calcite Mine Road right next to the Wash.

This location turned out to be a delightful choice! I had planned on primarily doing the Mine Road, but Bill Sullivan had suggested I head into Palm Wash to explore. He motivated me by sending me a photograph of what he said was the largest Peucephyllum schottii that I have ever seen. Heading up Palm Wash was by far my best decision of the day.

In fact, at the parking area 0.2 miles west of the beginning of the Mine Road, I was captivated by the deep gash of Palm Wash. I had driven by here several times previously, and had a burning desire to hike the deep washes here. So it might have been impossible for me to resist heading into the wash anyway.

As I had hoped, there were a fair number of native annuals growing and blooming here. The parking area was a delight by itself, with even a blooming desert lily, Hesperocallis undulata.

The number of plants dropped to zero in the saline area immediately at the beginning of the road. Only the dead stalks of desert trumpet, Eriogonum inflatum, from some past year broke the soil surface. I wonder if these plants are now all dead, or are only sleeping.

Down in the wash was a different story. There were treasures galore! Almost immediately I came across a number of hairy sand-verbena, Abronia villosa, in bloom, along with a fair number of other species in bloom, such as heliotrope phacelia, Phacelia crenulata var. ambigua, and even one population of longbeak streptanthella, Streptanthella longirostris.

To my great delight, I found about ten plants of Orcutt's woody-aster, Xylorhiza orcuttii, including one with a bud on it. I'd only seen this species once before, close to here along S22, and this was the first time I captured it on a trail guide or flora.

Other species new to my Borrego Desert trail guides or floras kept rolling in. White-stemmed milkweed, Asclepias albicans, greeted me with its honkingly-tall stems; I hadn't seen this species here before.

Although my original thought was just to go up the wash to see Bill's Peucephyllum, it was very clear that this was the place to be plant-wise, so I continued up the wash. It was fortunate that I didn't find his specimen right away on the way up!

I was also captivated by the beauty of the slot canyon. The sandstone walls towered above me, and would alternately close in and then open up.

Usually, species not yet seen on a given walk start to occur less and less frequently as one continues to walk in the same habitat, but not here. I kept picking up new species for the checklist at a regular rate. (See the plot here.) One of the species was Pilostyles, an old friend!

I came across one species that I had never seen live before in memory (I'd seen dead stalks of it earlier this year that Wayne Armstrong identified). This species was abundant here, and it really bugged me that I couldn't even figure out what plant family it was in. The plants somewhat reminded me of Sphaeralcea with a more entire leaf, but they had fruit like a Brassica. One plant had extremely small buds, and they reminded me of a euphorb! It was only at home later that I figured it out: heartleaf sun-cup, Camissonia cardiophylla.

The story of how I figured it out is amusing. I couldn't key it out, since I had neither flowers nor fruit. I had only pix of the dead inflorescence, fresh leaves, and the tiniest of new buds, and that was it.

I went through the Anza-Borrego Desert State Park plant list two times, and then the Santa Rosa Mountains voucher list, but I still couldn't find a match. (I of course skipped over Camissonia, since I "knew" this wasn't a Camissonia since they didn't resemble any Camissonia I'd seen before...)

I had given up, put some pix online, and was about to appeal to friends for help when it occurred to me that maybe I could sneak my way into its id. There was only one species as numerous as this one in the shaded slot canyon wash area: desert tobacco, Nicotiana obtusifolia. So I searched for vouchers of that species in this area, and looked for "associated plants".

BINGO! Camissonia cardiophylla popped right up. (:-)

Back in the wash, I then came across an excellent candidate for a species I had never before, although I've been looking for it a long time. There are tons of Thurber's sandpaper-plant, Petalonyx thurberi, in washes in the Borrego Desert. It has a cousin, narrow-leaf sandpaper-plant, Petalonyx linearis, that lives on canyon walls and is rarely found.

I found a dead plant on the canyon wall that had the linear leaves, plant gestalt, and habitat of P. linearis, and then discovered a similar live plant right next to it. Interestingly, just 30 feet away, were clear specimens of P. thurberi, growing in its typical habitat in the sandy wash, with its typical leaves and gestalt.

However, I've found specimens of P. thurberi before that have some pretty linear leaves, so I asked Andy Sanders about this specimen. He was pretty sure it was still P. thurberi, just growing in a very unusual habitat for that species. I'll try to check blossoms in the future to make sure the blossoms agree with the leaves.

I was then stunned to run across a perennial Cryptantha, C. racemosa, looking happy, healthy, and flowering. I've been dying to see a perennial Cryptantha, and here one was! It was a big bush, much bigger than annual Cryptanthas, and had last year's inflorescence still present on the plant, shouting out that it was indeed a perennial. (I also found some perennial specimens of desert needle, Palafoxia arida var. arida, that puzzled me for a while since they weren't blooming. I didn't know this usually-annual species could also be perennial.)

I had some difficulty keying this out later. Due to FOUR problems in the floral description for C. racemosa, I originally rejected that determination, and ended up with no acceptable determination for this plant. Eventually I keyed it to C. micrantha, which I wasn't terribly happy about since I thought it was a perennial, and C. micrantha is an annual. Fortunately I had copied Mike Simpson on the determination since I had pictures of it for Mike's Cryptantha website, and he was doubtful about that id from my description of the nutlets.

Back at the determination drawing board, I had nearly given up on getting a good determination, when it accidentally fell into my lap when I was perusing the key in Abrams. He had a key element that described this plant exactly, and the nutlet and plant drawings fit precisely. All of those things were so unique and well-fitting that this had to be the determination, despite the problems.

I have no idea how the floras could have so many things wrong about this species. For the record, the problems in the floras are:

Determinations are rarely correct when they have this many problems.

Oftentimes, this many problems are caused by the lack of sufficient herbarium vouchers, but that isn't the case here. C. racemosa is a widely-distributed species, with many vouchers (174 retrieved at the Consortium).

Back in the wash, I was pretty disappointed to run into the end of the hiking line at a dry waterfall. I turned around, and then headed up the Road.

On the way back down the wash, I finally found Bill's Peucephyllum. It was a beautiful tree, about nipple-high to me, which is 49 inches (12.4 dm). The Jepson Manual says its maximum height is 30 dm, so somewhere there are even taller specimens.

I also found an isolated boulder which had a number of plants growing right out of the rock. When one sees plants growing out of rocky hillsides, one tends to assume they have pockets of moisture they are tapping in the hillsides. But there can't be any such pockets here; the arrow-leaf, Pleurocoronis pluriseta, and catclaw, Acacia greggii, are surviving on the moisture in their root system alone.

It was fun hiking the road. I'd been told the road was deeply rutted, and there is a sign warning people about the bad road, but the road is in great shape. It was easy hiking, even on the way down, and I never worried about my footing at all.

I found only two more species on the road, and another two species in another branch of Palm Wash at mile 1.4 on the road. Schad's slot canyon in that wash is indeed a beauty.

The road was nonetheless quite interesting to botanize. I was struck by how many hairy desert-sunflower, Geraea canescens, plants had germinated, some of which were growing in what looked like very dry places.

It was also interesting that the first eight specimens of silver cholla, Opuntia echinocarpa, fairly widely spaced on the road, were dead. This area is at the dry limit of its range; see its distribution. This species seems to be pulling back to yet wetter locations due to the drought in the last ten years.

On the way back, I found a species I had missed before on the use trail from the parking lot, little-flowered heliotrope phacelia, Phacelia crenulata var. minutiflora. The size of its flowers were in marked contrast with its sister, var. ambigua.

This solved a problem Wayne Armstrong and I had with the determination for specimens in the Cottonwood area of Joshua Tree National Park last week. They all had white throats, which supposedly only went with var. minutiflora according to the Jepson Manual, but everything else went with var. ambigua. The plants here clearly respectively fit the two varieties in all characteristics, except that the var. ambigua specimen also had a white throat seen in the plants at Joshua Tree.

Interestingly, every picture of var. ambigua that I could find clearly showed white throats, and Munz even says that var. crenulata, and by inference var. ambigua, have white throats.

I'm pretty sure the source of the discrepancy is fresh plants versus dried plants. Phacelia corollas fade within days, so dried specimens have completely different colors than fresh specimens. Floras are keys to dried specimens, and I bet that dried specimens do show a color difference for the throat.

 

26 February 2008: Anza Borrego State Park: Little Surprise Canyon (third hunt for Carlowrightia arizonica) and Smoke Tree Canyon (see Wayne's pictures, Flora of Little Surprise Canyon and Flora of Smoke Tree Canyon)

Wayne Armstrong and I met Chris Barber, a videographer for the San Diego Union-Tribune, at Little Surprise Canyon. Chris did his final filming for his paper's wildflower article on 1 March 2008. Lots of flowers had popped into bloom here, so Chris had lots to record.

Wayne and I then looked once again for the Carlowrightia arizonica, this time armed with a much more precise location from Mel Gabel. We were very sure we were extremely close to the exact location of that photo, but we couldn't exactly match it. This was quite frustrating, since it seems unlikely there has been much change in the plants or rocks in only four years. I took pictures from all the possible locations to try to pin it down further at home, and to see if Mel recognized any of the locations in the pictures.

We then did a quick survey of the species near the parking lot to resolve some of the species that could not be 100% identified in our previous survey. We also found several species not apparent last time, including ghost flower, Mohavea confertiflora.

We then drove to Smoke Tree Canyon, past the hills of the Borrego Badlands sickeningly green with the non-native Asian mustard, Brassica tournefortii, in full flower. Fortunately, although there was plenty of Brassica tournefortii in the canyon, it has not yet overwhelmed that area.

Although there were not many native annuals visible along S22 to the west, this canyon had a good sprinkling of beautiful blooms. We started calling it Phacelia crenulata Canyon, since the blooms of this taxon were the best we've seen for it, and they were abundant (see Wayne's picture of one plant).

"Phacelia crenulata Canyon" was just an alternate name, since we've never seen smoke trees as abundant as here. Furthermore, we found numerous baby smoke trees. I could hardly believe that the first specimens we saw, with broad leaves and no thorns, could be smoke trees, but slightly older specimens removed all doubt.

The wash also had abundant poppies, with all three major desert species represented. Small-flowered poppy, Eschscholzia minutiflora, and Parish's poppy, Eschscholzia parishii, were found near S22. A short distance later, those species essentially disappeared and desert golden poppy, Eschscholzia glyptosperma, appeared. After another short distance, the first two species reappeared.

I was delighted to see E. glyptosperma since this was the first time I had seen it in the Borrego Desert. I had seen it at Carey's Castle Wash in the Cottonwood Springs area of Joshua Tree National Park last week, but never before in the Borrego Desert. I was surprised when I got home and digitized my data to find that this species had never been recorded in San Diego County before! Somehow, I had the impression it was known to occur in several places in the San Diego County desert, but I can't find any evidence to support my impression. I'll return to voucher this species on my next trip.

The plant pleasures are too numerous to list them all, but some of the rest were seeing a very healthy about-to-bloom sticky fagonia, Fagonia pachyacantha, and perhaps the most beautiful Cooper's broom-rape, Orobanche cooperi, that I had ever seen (see Wayne's picture). We were stunned to see the O. cooperi on the way back, since we had stopped in the exact location of that plant and must have nearly stepped on it while examining a nearby desert thornapple, Datura discolor, in bloom.

There were two main highlights of the trip in the field. First, Wayne found a single plant of broad-leaf gilia, Gilia latifolia, with a single bloom on it. I was ecstatic to see this, since I've known about this species for some time, but never found it. We found only one other specimen of this species here.

Second, I finally resolved the identity of a baby rosette I had seen last week in Palm Wash. Those rosettes were fairly abundant in the wash there, as well as here, and they reminded me of pebble pincushion, Chaenactis carphoclinia, or meally white pincushion, Chaenactis artemisiifolia. But when Wayne found some clear rosettes of C. carphoclinia in its standard hillside habitat, it was clear that this wasn't the determination. Almost at the very end of the hike, as we were returning to the car, one plant some distance away somehow caught our eye. When we investigated, we saw it had pendant buds (no flowers yet), and very clear stalked glands. Wayne and I both realized it had to be white tackstem, Calycoseris wrightii, a species I had also been dying to see for some time.

It was another good day.

At home later, it kept getting better. In addition to discovering that we had found a new species for the San Diego County plant list, one of the comb-burs I had nabbed to key out turned out to be a species I had never seen before, broad-fruited combseed, Pectocarya platycarpa.

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Copyright © 2008 by Tom Chester.
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Updated 1 March 2008.