As mentioned in my previous post, I was holed up at Lake of the Woods for a week while waiting for the craziness of Memorial Day Weekend traffic to subside. I was getting older, and didn’t want to be behind the wheel of a 7+ ton vehicle when people are doing crazy things on the roads.
So I had time on my hands, and nearby wilderness to explore. I set out. The famed Pacific Crest Trail (PCT) passes through the area.
Perhaps my readers already know of the PCT. Briefly, it’s a famous hiking trail that goes all the way from Mexico to Canada along and near the top of the mountain ranges of Washington, Oregon (the Cascades) and California (the Sierra Nevada). I’ve been hiking on or near it since I was a little kid. I still remember that very first backpacking trip, to Horse Lake, where we crossed the PCT and my dad explained it. For some reason, for the next few years I half expected to meet some people on the trail speaking “Mexican!”
I have lots and lots of older posts in this Substack about the Pacific Crest Trail. Here's one and here's another one. It is special to me. So, it was a no-brainer for me to go hike a short piece of it that I’d never been on.
There were wildflowers I’d never seen before.
Including this one, which took me years to finally ID:
For years, I searched the wildflower guides in vain, trying to find out what these little blue flowers were. Then one day I was looking through caterpillars to ID one I’d photographed in Tennessee, and I saw a picture of this little guy (girl?) that was ID’d as a “Forget-Me-Not moth” caterpillar. There was my clue: these are Forget-Me-Nots.
Wildflowers are something you can learn for the rest of your life. You’ll never run out of new things to know. Here are some others:
And one I’ve known since I was a kid. The pure, almost sacred Trillium:
To close out the post, here’s some Oregon Grape that was growing right in camp:
Most pictures of this plant are of it with its berries, which are blue. These yellow orbs are the blossoms.
That’s it until the next post.