Getting Out: Don’t tell the guys, but I like wildflowers. I try
to make up for it by belching a little louder and wiping my mouth
with my shirt sleeve after a long pull on a craft-brewed draft. So
far, that seems to mollify the pack’s predatory urges
Don’t tell the guys, but I like wildflowers. I try to make up for it by belching a little louder and wiping my mouth with my shirt sleeve after a long pull on a craft-brewed draft. So far, that seems to mollify the pack’s predatory urges.
If my gender were more highly evolved, I would try to explain to them that if you like to walk through the hills in spring, you’re going to see flowers. It seems natural to me that, after a number of trips, one might wonder if all these little fellows have names, and what they are. After all, it only seems like good manners to speak to John Muir’s “flowery plant people” by their names.
Are you still with me or should we stop for a beer?
So, intermittently over the years, I have made an effort to learn their names – the first step to making friends. And as with anything, the closer you look, the more you see that interests an inquiring mind.
There are two things that are the Holy Grail for wildflower chasers. One is finding a truly rare flower somewhere it has never been seen. The other is to find a massive field densely packed with color. We’ve all seen an impressive patch of flowers here and there, but wouldn’t it be wonderful to see a blanket of flowers reaching acre after acre?
A couple of weeks ago, a friend called and invited me to join him and some friends on a trip to the Sierra foothills along the San Joaquin River. He had visited this spot before and said it was a stunner.
So, last Sunday we headed out before dawn intending to rendezvous with friends at Starbucks in Clovis, then head north on Highway 168 toward Shaver Lake. The road twists between a series of hills, whose tops appear to be cleanly slashed off. Soft sediments that once sat above the remaining hard layer of resistant sediment have washed away, leaving behind a group of hills with perfectly flat tops.
These hills climb gently until you approach the top, where a steep cliff formed by the resistant layer traces the hill’s perimeter in much the same way as buttes we think of in the desert. We climbed through a breach in the cliff and stepped onto a flat area large enough to accommodate a small city.
My first words were, “Oh, my God.”
Here, even the most vivid adjectives in the thesaurus are not up to the job. If you look at the photo that accompanies this column and imagine it life-size, you’ve got a start. Now, visualize turning 90 degrees to your right, and seeing the same display. Turn once more. Then, again. At each quarter turn one sees the same concentration of flowers as far as the flat hilltop reaches.
But this mental exercise does not reveal the variety of colors there that day. Dried vernal pools leave concentrations of Meadow Foam that are dazzling. Tidy Tips are everywhere. We saw Five Spots, an elegant white flower with a single large blue spot on each petal.
I am sworn to secrecy and cannot reveal the specific table top we visited, but take your pick. From our hilltop, I could see similar attractions on neighboring ones in the vicinity of Prather and Auberry on Highway 168. Some of this land is preserved by the Sierra Foothill Conservancy. Visit their Web site (www.sierrafoothill.org) to get a glimpse of the landscape.
It was an amazing sight and an amazing day, never to be forgotten. I have to remember that no high-tech wizardry or special effects were involved, just Ma Nature working alone – up there, out of sight.
Wildflowers are great. Just don’t tell the guys.
