Upcoming Bristlecone Chapter Events

Be sure to check our events page for the latest updates and more events.

March 6, Wednesday, 7:00pm: The impacts of climate change on plant communities in the White Mountains, White Mountain Research Center public lecture series

Speaker: CHRISTOPHER KOPP, PhD Student, UC San Diego. Chris Kopp has been investigating the impacts of recent and future climate change on alpine and sub-alpine plant communities in the White Mountains. This exploration took the form of a resurvey of work done by Harold Mooney back in 1961. In Dr. Mooney’s original survey, he and his associates described the distribution and abundance of several plant species that were recorded along line transects between 2,900 m (9,500’) and 3,950 m (13,000’) of elevation. In the summer of 2010, Chris set out to replicate this survey to find out if there had been shifts in species distributions and abundances in the past 49-years.

March 15, Friday: Registration Deadline for Golden Trout Wilderness Botanical Camp, Flora and Natural History of the Southern Sierra (July 7 - 14, 2013)

Come join us in the beautiful high Sierra of the Golden Trout Wilderness. Spend the week exploring alpine habitats of Cottonwood Lakes Basin and the John Muir Wilderness. Daily guided hikes and interpretive talks will be led by our experienced trip leaders. Lectures, slide shows and an opportunity to key plants with dissecting scopes will fill the evenings. We will see an abundance of wildflowers in alpine meadows and encounter endemic plant species while taking in the incredible Sierran vistas. Plant, animal and bird lists will be provided. Our instructors are professional botanists and naturalists with many years experience in the Golden Trout Wilderness area.

Cost: $525.00 (includes meals from Sunday dinner through Saturday lunch)
For information, brochure, and registration contact:
Susan D’Alcamo: dalcamo@mcn.org, Cell# (925)899-0719
Registration deadline: March 15, 2013

CANCELLED March 16, Saturday, 9:00am, CNPS Field Day: Mary Dedecker Native Plant Garden Spring Cleaning, Leaders: Sue Weis and Katie Quinlan

This is an annual spring cleaning for the garden. March is a great time to jump on any exotic weeds and get them out before they drop their seed as well as trim up anything that might need it. We’ll meet at the garden at the Eastern California Museum in Independence at 9:00 AM, bring garden gloves, trowels, hand pruners, and wear sturdy work clothes. For more information contact Sue Weis at 760 873-3485 or email at sueweis@aol.com.

March 20, Wednesday, 7pm, CNPS Program: News from Nature's Pharmacopeia: Medicinal Plants Today

A dash of history, a sprinkling of pharmacology, a serving of science: take a look at the most recent evidence-based research about the effectiveness, risks and promise of select medicinal plants. Read more above.

March 23, Sunday, 9-11am: Medicinal and Edible Plants of the Mojave Desert, Ash Meadows NWR

Did you know that Native Americans know how to make tea out of Indian Paintbrush leaves, the stalks of thistles can be eaten and the desert trumpet plant can be used for food, a pipe, whistle or childrens toy?

What to learn how to survive if you were stranded in the desert? Join educators at Ash Meadows NWR who will identify interesting, nutritional, and medicinal characteristics of wild plants from the Mojave Desert on Saturday, March 23 from 9:00 - 11:00 am. SPACE IS LIMITED SO CALL US TODAY TO REGISTER. 775-372-5435

March 24, Sunday, 9:00am, CNPS Field Day: Highway clean-up, Leader: Scott Hetzler

Meet at the intersection of Highway 395 and Pine Creek Rd., west of 395, at 9.00 AM. We will try to be done by 1:00 PM. For more information contact Scott at (760) 873-8392.

April 12-15, Friday & Saturday, 10 am – 7 pm, Sunday 10 am – 5 pm: Wildflower Show, Maturango Museum, Ridgecrest

Annual Wildflower Show at the Maturango Museum, 100 E. Las Flores, Ridgecrest, 760-375-6900. Come and see an extensive display of wildflowers collected locally by trained volunteers and identified by botanists. Extended hours for the Ridgecrest Desert Wildflower Festival on Friday and Saturday. Lecture on Sunday at 2:30 pm: Wildflowers of the High Desert.

April 15-22, California Native Plant Week

This year CNPS will celebrate the Second Annual California Native Plant Week, April 15 - April 22, 2013. For more information: http://cnps.org/cnps/conservation/nativeplantweek/

April 27, Saturday, 9am, CNPS Field Trip: Baker Creek, with Leader Steve Matson

Meet in Big Pine at the parking area next to campground at Junction of 395 and 168. We will drive 3 miles to Baker Creek, 1/2 mile of that on well-graded dirt road. We will hike off trail over open ground to top of the marble hill behind the Bernasconi Center. About 3 miles RT. I hope to find Astragalus inyoensis in its yellow-flowered version along with Coreopsis bigelovii in its northernmost population and much else.

Contact: Steve Matson 760-938-2862 or ssmat@sbcglobal.net.

May 31 through June 2, 2013, Return of the Sierra Spring Sojourn

Mark the dates! The Bristlecone Chapter will once again host the Sierra Spring Sojourn on May 31 through June 2, 2013 with field trips to view wildflowers from Paradise to Owens Lake along the Eastern Sierra. The gathering place for programs, field trips and accommodations for out-of-town participants will be at the Sierra Adventure Center at Bernasconi near Big Pine, 15 miles south of Bishop. Registration information and more details coming soon.

Field trip extravaganza! Potential trips so far (SUBJECT TO CHANGE, based on where the best blooms are the weekend of the Sojourn- keep checking back for updates as the date grows closer): Mazourka Canyon – Steve McLaughlin, Buttermilks – Jerry Zatorski, McMurry Meadows – Paul Satterthwaite, Eureka Dunes area – Michele Slaton, Owens Lake – Steve McLaughlin, Marble Canyon – Scott Hetzler, Joshua Flat & Lime Hill – Mark Bagley, Westgard Pass – Sue Weis.

As many members remember, the Bristlecone Chapter hosted these sojourns every two years but the last one was four years ago in 2009. We are working hard to assure that this sojourn will match the success of past years. We still need volunteers to help with planning, leading field trips, working on publicity and other tasks. Call Edie Trimmer at 801-597-2104 or email at edieann@xmission.com if you are interested in helping to make this work.

More information on registration, programs and field trips coming soon!

Check the Events page for more to come.

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Reports

Announcing the Mary DeDecker Grant Recipients for 2013

In 2001, the Bristlecone Chapter established a grants program as a fitting tribute to Mary DeDecker, a renowned local botanist and founding member of our chapter. Our goal is to facilitate research and projects that increase the understanding and appreciation of native plants and ecosystems in the Eastern Sierra.

Grant recipients receive up to$1,000 each for expenses and are asked to present their results to the Bristlecone Chapter either at a regular meeting or in the chapter newsletter. Recipients must submit a progress report at the end of the year.
Recepients of this year's grants as recommended by the Mary DeDecker Grant Commitee, all graduate students are:

Erika Gardner, Claremont Graduate University, “A vascular flora of the Kiavah Wilderness in the Scodie Mountains, southern Sierra Nevada, Kern County, California”

Elaine Chow, University of California, Davis, “Does invasive barbwire Russian thistle threaten the endangered Eureka Valley evening-primrose?”

Lara Kobelt, Northern Arizona University, “Populations of Abies concolor in three mountain ranges of the Mojave Desert”

Joy England, Claremont Graduate University, “Vascular flora of the Upper Rock Creek watershed, eastern Sierra Nevada, California” This is the second year Joy has received a grant from the Mary DeDecker Grants program. You are invited to help her with her research on a field trip she will lead in July (see Events page)

In the past, we have awarded grants to graduate students for research on various ecological, taxonomic and physiological aspects of our native flora. We have also helped to fund an education program on native plants for local schools, a mural project which included native plants, native plant gardens and invasive weed eradication projects.

These grants are supported by the annual native plant sale.

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Owens Lake: Update

The Owens Lake Planning Committee (OLPC) met on January 28, 2013. At the meeting, Martin Adams of LADWP shared a letter from LADWP to the Board of Water and Power which included a list of seven “must have” [quotes by LADWP] components in an Owens Lake Master Plan. These have been characterized as ultimatums to which environmental groups participating on the OLPC have acquiesced. I participated in that entire meeting, and I don’t recall anyone using the term “ultimatum” and I can report that no group, including CNPS, acquiesced to any demands that compromise their missions or policies.

One of the seven “must haves” is LADWP’s desire to reduce water used for dust control by 50%. The Habitat Work Group of the OLPC has been working with LADWP’s consultants on how to achieve that degree of water conservation, while continuing to control dust and maintain habitat values. There is a plan, also discussed at the January 28 meeting, that, when implemented over a 20-year period, might achieve that goal. It does so by replacing large expanses of shallow flooding with smaller ponds, more wetland vegetation, and waterless dust control. The plan is reasonable; its goals may or may not be achievable.

A more problematic “must have” is LADWP’s desire to pump groundwater from below the lakebed to replace aqueduct water currently used for dust control. Excess pumping could have many significant environmental impacts, particularly degradation or loss of existing wetlands along the perimeter of the lakebed, and creation of new emissive areas currently stabilized by this vegetation. This would be particularly problematic since LADWP, in its lawsuit against the Great Basin Air Pollution Control District, the EPA, the California Air Resources Board, the State Lands Commission, and the BLM, is claiming that they have no additional responsibility for dust control on areas of the lakebed above 3567 feet and below the historic shoreline at 3600 feet. That is, LADWP would like to engage in activities (groundwater extraction) that might create a dust problem while refusing to take any responsibility for that problem.

Far from acquiescing, I offered a simple solution to this problem in recommending that the OLPC consider eliminating groundwater development entirely from the Master Plan until LADWP’s lawsuit is resolved and responsibility for dust control from sites between 3567 feet and 3600 feet is determined.

Under the Master Plan, any groundwater development would be a project that would undergo CEQA review. LADWP has not proposed any specific groundwater project at this time, although some of the scenarios they are exploring would clearly have long-term impacts that neither CNPS nor the Bristlecone Chapter could support. I have pointed out the potential for these impacts to other OLPC members, including all of the regulatory agencies, and I will continue to do so.

The OLPC process is a negotiation. If LADWP proves to be intransigent in this negotiation then the process will likely fail. That would be a lost opportunity, both for habitat at Owens Lake and for LADWP.

—Steve McLaughlin

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Birch Creek Journal

Photo by Jo-Ann Ordano
© California Academy of Sciences

February 11, 2013 — After three days of wind and maximum temperatures in the low forties, it's hard to believe that last week we opened the sliding glass door during the day to invite some exterior warmth indoors. That brief spell of warm weather was enough to bring out rain beetles (Paracotalpa granicollis), those rust-colored insects about the size of a thumbnail that fly tirelessly about a foot or two above the ground. The warmth was also just enough to give a little push to spring in the riparian zone. Along Birch Creek leaf buds are swelling now on black cottonwoods (Populus trichocarpa) and streamside willows (Salix lasiolepis), and the first catkins are emerging on water birch (Betula occidentalis).

This is the time of year when a gout of golden resin hangs from the tip of every cottonwood bud. If you cut the bud open, you will find that the interior is awash in resin. Many plants in the Willow Family – not just cottonwoods – produce resin inside leaf buds. One hypothesis is that the resin repels leaf-eating insects; another is that the resinous coating on young leaves slows water loss through evapotranspiration. Both could be true, of course, and doubtless are. Curious to see what the resin tasted like, I bit into one of the golden droplets. I got the faintest taste of pine, then spent a couple of minutes removing resin from my teeth. I can report that if I were an insect, I would find something else to eat. Having no desire to coat my body in the stuff, I'm willing to take the water-loss hypothesis on faith.

Away from local creeks, the approach of spring is hard to find. In some years I have noticed tansy mustard (Descurainia pinnata) and filaree (Erodium cicutarium) blooming in the Poverty Hills as early as mid-February, but a quick walk along the usual trail tells me that this is not going to be one of those years. Our neighborhood got a good rain in October, a little more at the end of November, and not quite nine inches of snow during two storms in December. Call it 1.4 inches of rain for the winter to date, and that's a generous estimate. I know we live in a land of little rain, but this is ridiculous.

The Poverty Hills, a mounded mass about eight miles south of Big Pine, will live up to their name this year, I'm afraid. On walks through the Poverty Hills in 2008, my husband Steve and I kept a running list of plant species. It's a short list – just 123 kinds of native and exotic plants. About fifty percent of species on the list are native annuals, from breathtakingly lovely wildflowers like evening snow (Linanthus dichotomus) to inconspicuous green things that only a botanist could love, like brittle spineflower (Chorizanthe brevicornu). Most of them will be far and few between this spring. No doubt cheatgrass (Bromus tectorus), red brome (Bromus madritensis), and other exotic annuals will make some kind of showing as spring advances; otherwise, this year's flora will be impoverished indeed.

We compiled our list mostly during a good spring after a reasonably wet winter. I'm sure that it is not complete – we could add more species with more exploration – but I would be astounded if we could double it. During that good spring, Steve made 31 collections, thereby tripling the number of Poverty Hills specimens in the online database for the Consortium of California Herbaria. This small range, easily walked from end to end in half a day, is woefully under collected compared to Bishop Creek (1,588 specimens), Rock Creek (646 specimens), Big Pine Creek (626 specimens), or even the Alabama Hills (489 specimens). And it's no wonder. Few localities in the Eastern Sierra appear as unpromising for a botanical excursion. The Poverty Hills are brown, dry, and lumpy, rather like a basket of dehydrated buns.

Certainly no one would argue that the flora is rich or diverse. When we lived in Arizona, Steve and I examined species richness in twenty local floras as a function of topography and found that number of species increased with elevational range and habitat diversity. The Poverty Hills cannot offer much of either. The elevational range (the difference between the lowest and highest points in the study area) is slight, not even 800 feet, and habitat diversity is also minimal. Using a generous definition of habitat, you might come up with five or six: north-facing ravines, rocky slopes, more or less level benches, playas (there's only one), and dirt roads. The physical features that added diversity to Arizona floras –mainly springs and creeks– are absent in the Poverty Hills unless you include Tinemaha Creek, which we did not do.

And yet the flora of the Poverty Hills surprised us again and again. On one walk, Steve found a few scarlet milkvetch (Astragalus coccineus); on another, we stumbled across a small population of naked buckwheat (Eriogonum nudum). Once, whizzing along the east side of the Poverty Hills on Highway 395, we saw a flash of magenta that could only have been Colorado four o'clock (Mirabilis multiflora). A year or two later, when our neighbor Ros Gorham showed us her route to the top of the range, we discovered that Heermann's buckwheat (Eriogonum heermannii) was part of the flora. These four species and a few others seem to be present in the Poverty Hills as odd lots in odd places – never abundant, never widely distributed. One has the feeling that they landed here at random and persisted by sheer good fortune.

What little richness there is in the flora probably relates as much to variety of rock types as anything else. A small-scale geologic map shows that most of the Poverty Hills is granodiorite and metasedimentary rocks with smaller areas of basalt and sedimentary rocks. But when you walk around, you notice finer distinctions, and you notice considerable variability in soils, too. Plants respond to these differences on a small scale. Nevada indigobush (Psorothamnus polydenius) is common on level ground where sandy soil has accumulated; Mojave indigo bush (Psorothamnus arborescens) likes the rocky slopes. Four-wing saltbush (Atriplex canescens) is here, there, and everywhere; allscale (Atriplex polycarpa) likes the silty soils of the playa. A close analysis could doubtless tease out more examples.

The Poverty Hills were not named by a disappointed botanist, as appropriate as that would have been. The first use I have seen was in a mining claim made in 1890. A few other miners picked up on the name, then local newspapers began to use it when describing the location of certain mining operations. As late as 1902, newspaper editors sometimes put Poverty Hills in quotation marks, I suppose because the name was unfamiliar to many readers. The story about the hills being named by a local storekeeper who went broke is, I'm afraid, apocryphal, or at least highly speculative. Either way, it's a place name that reeks of disappointment, quite a burden for such a diminutive mountain.

My initial disenchantment with the small size of the flora eventually faded. Now the brevity of the list is a point of interest and a springboard for speculation. What effect have decades of grazing had on the flora? Has invasion by red brome and cheatgrass altered species composition? How does the Poverty Hills flora compare in richness and species composition to the floras of other hills and knolls in the vicinity – Fish Springs Hill, for example, or the rhyolite dome – and does distance from the mountain front have anything to do with the differences among them? There's plenty to think about and more collecting to do. Being a botanist, you see, means never having to say you're disappointed.

— Jan Bowers

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From the Editors

Introducing the new editors and membership chairs

We (Edie Trimmer and Thomas Brill) are the Bristlecone Chapter newsletter editors and membership chairs. We both worked for the State of Utah in land management and natural resource economics. We bought a house in Big Pine in 2008 and commuted between Salt Lake City and Big Pine before moving here full time in July 2012. While botanist is a title neither of us can aspire to, we are interested in Eastern Sierra flora.

We are also interested in hearing your ideas about the direction the newsletter should go. As amateurs, we want to bring along other inexperienced but enthusiastic plant-lovers into membership in the Bristlecone Chapter.

Next Newsletter Deadline: April 15, 2013

Send articles to: newsletter@bristleconecnps.org

If you still receive this newsletter via US Mail, please send your email address to the editor (email address above) so you can receive the electronic version. Please help the Bristlecone chapter save money, energy, and trees

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Membership

The California Native Plant Society is an organization of lay persons and professionals united by an interest in the plants of California. It is open to all. The society, working through its local chapters, seeks to increase the understanding of California's native flora and to preserve this rich resource for future generations. Varied interests are represented.

JOIN or RENEW ONLINE

Membership Application

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Bristlecone Chapter Directory

President: Yvonne Wood
Vice President: Holly Alpert (760) 709-2212
Treasurer: Rosanne Higley (760) 387-2803 - OPEN SOON - interested? Contact any board member!
Secretary: Rosemary Jarret 760-387-2782
Past President / Partnerships: Steve McLaughlin (760) 938-3140
Membership: Edie Trimmer/Thomas Brill 760-920-3702 membership@bristleconecnps.org
Newsletter Editors: Edie Trimmer/Thomas Brill 760-920-3702 newsletter@bristleconecnps.org
Conservation: Julie Anne Hopkins conservation@bristleconecnps.org
Adopt-A-Highway: Scott Hetzler (760) 873-8392
Programs: Holly Alpert (760) 709-2212
Field Trips: Sue Weis (760) 873-3485
DeDecker Native Plant Garden: OPEN - interested? Contact any board member!
DeDecker Grant Program: Jan Bowers (760) 938-3140
Publicity: Kristen Luetkemeier
Historian: Ann Fulton (760) 873-9261
Librarian: EvelynMae Nikolaus - (760) 878-2149
Rare Plant Committee Chair: Kathleen Nelson (760) 873-2400
Bishop Plant Sales: Katie Quinlan (760) 873-8023
Mammoth Plant Sales: Sherry Taylor (760) 934-2338
Book Sales: Sue Weis (760) 873-3485
Posters: Stephen Ingram (760) 387-2913
Creosote Ring Sub-Chapter Coordinator: Kathy LaShure (760) 377-4541
Webmaster: Maggie Wolfe Riley

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THE CALIFORNIA NATIVE PLANT SOCIETY (www.cnps.org) Bristlecone Chapter Newsletter comes out bimonthly. It is free to chapter members. To subscribe to this newsletter without joining CNPS, please send $5.00 per year to CNPS, P.O. Box 364, Bishop, CA 93515-0364. ATTN: subscriptions. Send newsletter articles (not memberships) to newsletter editor Daniel Pritchett at newsletter@bristleconecnps.org.

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