More Dogs...

Here are the promised videos...

Dogs...

Now comes the important part of our trip: the dogs!  Racer and Miki had the time of their lives yesterday.  After the long drive from home to Mt. San Jacinto, they were visibly surprised to find that when they got out of the truck they were in a doggie wonderland.  Lots of space to run around in!  Lots of new smells!  Lots of things to play with – especially pine cones.  Racer has a thing for pine cones; they are by far his favorite toy.  Then there was the stream – oh what fun to run and splash in it!  After a couple of hours of running around like crazy, they crashed on the drive home, sleeping like logs...

Here are some photos from the day; videos will follow:

Streams...

Mt. San Jacinto is a very dry mountain, especially on the eastern flanks.  We spent the day on the north side, which isn't quite a desert environment but doesn't look so very far from it.  The soil is mainly decomposed granite and sand, with very little organic material – so the drainage is practically perfect.  The result is powder-dry soil, lots of dust, and almost no running water.  Except, that is, while the snow pack is still melting – and it was melting while we were there yesterday.  So we had some running water – little rivulets to small streams.  We found one very near the end of Black Mountain Road that was a delight both for us (visually) and for the dogs (much more viscerally).  Some scenes from that stream:

Snow Plant...

Here's one of the stranger members of the flora in the area: the snow plant (Sarcodes sanguinea), a parasitic plant.  My father and I saw lots of these in the Mt. Lassen area a few years ago, and I saw them many times when hiking around Mt. San Jacinto in the 1970s.  I haven't often seen them in the act of emerging, though...

Scenery...

All along Black Mountain Road, one is treated to beautiful vistas.  To the northwest, on a clear day (like yesterday), you can see Mt. Baldy some 65 miles away.  Just 20 miles to the north is San Gorgonio peak.  Both of these were snowcapped, as was the upper elevations of Mt. San Jacinto visible to our south.  We hit just a bit of snow, in shaded areas above about 7,500 feet.  Here are some of the scenes that caught our eye:

Indian Paintbrush...

Indian Paintbrush (Castilleja) wasn't very plentiful, but the few specimens we saw were beautiful – a deeper, purer red than we normally see around home...

Flowers...

Some minature wildflowers that occurred in the lower elevations in sandy flats along the road.  The purple patches were visible from a long distance, but the tiny, sparse little white blossoms were almost invisible until you were upon them...

Manzanita...

One of the delights all along Black Mountain Road are the manzanita.  With all the water this year, most of them are loaded with bloom.  Depending on our altitude (this varied quite a bit over the course of the day), we caught them anywhere from just beginning to bud to absolutely bursting with bloom.  The species found on Mt. San Jacinto are different than the ones we have, just 150 miles south (but much lower altitude).  The species I photographed all day long was my favorite, with bright red or pink flowers than any of our four species have.

Grasshopper...

I've no idea what kind of grasshopper this is, but it was abundant all along the lower reaches of Black Mountain Road...

A Mini-Vacation...

Yesterday Debbie and I took two of our dogs (Miki and Racer) on a one-day vacation: a trip to Mt. San Jacinto, about 150 miles north of our home.  We spent most of our time up there on a leisurely drive along Black Mountain Road, with frequent stops for short walks and explorations.  We finished our day with dinner at the Gastrognome in Idyllwild, long one of our favorite restaurants.

The next few posts contain photos from our trip...