Mount Rainier contains the most luxuriant and the most extravagantly beautiful of all the alpine gardens I ever beheld in all my mountain-top wanderings. John Muir, 1889. Western anemone is a perennial herb with a tap-rooted, woody stem and base found in the subalpine and alpine zone of the western US and Canada. It stands erect […]
Western Anemone (Pulsatilla occidentalis) Read More »
Possessed of keen sight and scent, and strong limbs, he dwells secure amid the loftiest summits, leaping unscathed from crag to crag, up and down the fronts of giddy precipices, crossing foaming torrents and slopes of frozen snow, exposed to the wildest storms, yet maintaining a brave, warm life, and developing from generation to generation
Dall Sheep (Ovis dalli) Read More »
Tailed frogs are interesting from a number of perspectives. They are the only species within the family Ascaphidae, the males have a small “tail” that is actually a part of the cloaca (common opening for waste/sperm), they lack the ability to vocalize, they have a greater number of vertebrate than other frogs, and they have
Coastal Tailed Frog (Ascaphus truei) Read More »
“I’ve often thought there ought to be a manual to hand to little kids, telling them what kind of planet they’re on, why they don’t fall off it, how much time they’ve probably got here, how to avoid poison ivy, and so on. I tried to write one once. It was called Welcome to Earth. —Kurt
Poison Ivy (Rhus radicans)/Poison Oak (Rhus diversiloba) Read More »
Otherwise known as bull snake, this is a common snake of western deserts, shrub, and forests. In Washington it is found east of the Cascade Mountains. Its range extends from southern British Columbia to Indiana and south through western North America to northern Baja California, Sonora, Sinaloa, and Zacatecas in Mexico. Pituophis – pitys (Greek) meaning pine; ophis (Greek) meaning
Gopher Snake (Pituophis catenifer) Read More »