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2003: A Season of California Wildflowers - Twin Lakes and Tioga Pass

© Gregg Pasterick

So many of my adventures in nature have been the result of being in the right place at the right time. Catching a fallout of warblers during spring migration up on Lake Erie was all about timing. If I had remained in North Carolina, or driven to California a week earlier or a week later, I would have missed a massive irruption of California Tortoiseshell butterflies. Had I still been living in Ohio in November 2001, I would have missed the Leonid meteor downpour. It's all in the timing ... and I guess a bit of luck as well, huh?

Well, my latest addition to this litany of well-timed nature encounters has been the 2003 season of wildflowers in California. I know I've gone on and on about it during this past month, and here we are, at the end of the year, and I'm still at it, but there is one more tale to tell; one more unexpected romp through botany. It came in July, during a week's vacation at Twin Lakes and the eastern side of Yosemite.

I'd seen during the spring, long after the winter moisture has soaked in and the dry season was well under way, I didn't expect much. Not in terms of wildflowers, anyway. Maybe a few things up the side of a mountain, but not too much. It was July. It was dry. And the peaks of these mountains were snow-capped. I was feeling pretty certain of how little I would see.

Boy, was I mistaken.

There were outbreaks of color here and there, along the dry, dusty roadsides and mountain trails. I found two new lupines - Kellogg's and Gray's Many-flowered - I finally got to see Showy milkweed and the western version of Blazing Star (it is nothing like what we call Blazing Star in our central prairies), as well as some familiar things, such as the gaudy California Fuschia. It wasn't Joseph's Coat of Many Colors, but it might have been his Socks of Sundry Hues, and each new species was such a treat.

We found this assortment of mid-summer bloomers all around the Twin Lakes area, and Mono Lake. More to the point, none of these were found in Yosemite. We didn't know what we would find there, if anything.

We drove in on Tioga Pass, which climbs to 9,000' by the time you reach the park entrance. Mountains towered all around us, rocky and, at the highest elevations, covered with snow. It didn't look like a place to find anything blooming, but the scenery was to die for.

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