Key Reasons to Go: Go south toward Lake Winnemucca to see one of the best flower displays in the area. Be advised: this is a very popular area! Do not expect solitude.
Best Time to Go: June through August for flowers, into September for seasonal changes.
Start point: 8,574 feet; UTM 11 240164E 4286838N (NAD27).
From 8500 to 9500 feet, the trail is easy, the grade gentle, and the flowers amazing. Oh, and the views are pretty good too. You might scramble up Elephants Back, or at least make your way to the viewpoint southeast of Winnemucca to look out into Nevada. Here is your 75k PDF plant list with updated names to conform to the next Jepson.
Start at the Big Parking Lot
After parking in the main lot at the information cabin, it's nice to walk around for a minute to stretch your legs and appreciate the nearby monument that commemorates Snowshoe Thompson, a hero of the late 1800s who managed to cross the Sierra on 10-ft skis, going out to handle the mail for the miners in the California gold rush country [Read more... ]. The monument is a granite obelisk with an intentionally broken top to make it "enduring, but not perfect, as the man."
The trail from the cabin leads south toward Round Top, a most identifiable peak in a snowy range made up of both volcanic and metamorphic rock. Second to Round Top is Elephants Back, an oddly rounded hump of a mountain that is also volcanic in nature. While Round Top is a technical scramble, Elephants Back is an easy but breath-taking slog to the summit at just over 9500', the volcanic shards of rock making a musical ceramic clinking with every step.
Let's Head South
One of the most eye-opening flower displays in the Sierra (by many accounts, not just my opinion!) occurs through the summer along the way to Winnemucca Lake along the western flanks of Elephants Back. A number of factors contribute to this terrific garden: the combination of granitic and volcanic rock found here, the water held in volcanic soils providing moisture when the surrounding hillsides are baked by summer sun, and the fact that the Great Basin Desert starts so close to this eastern side of the range means a mixture of plants from different floristic provinces and soil types find a way to send at least one representative to grow in the area. Over the space of several weeks one might see as many as two hundred species of plants within just a few miles of easy hiking. Corn lilies and penstemon, giant larkspurs and celery-leafed lovage, the interesting little Elephant Head, and, if your timing is right and you know where to look, the pretty Sierra primrose.
Wait! What Kind of Birds are Those?
The area south of the pass is prime habitat for whitebark pines (Pinus albicaulis), and so it is also prime habitat for Clark's Nutcracker (Nucifraga columbiana).
These interesting birds are in the Corvid family and share the common characteristic of raspy calling, squawking or chattering as they dart about from tree to tree. These handsome gray and black birds have more than a passing interest in the whitebarks, and the whitebarks have, if I can use some poetic license, have more than a slight interest in the birds: each depends on the other.
The nutcrackers pry open the cones to harvest a supply of nuts, holding a good many at a time in a special pouch in their throat. They then fly off to bury this stash for later feeding in winter. Amazing as it sounds, they actually remember where these stashes are and can come back, even with snow on the ground, to find the nuts and have their meal.
Of course there are missed stashes, and these don't go to waste. Without the birds, the whitebark cones cannot distribute seeds efficiently. The forgotten stashes germinate and grow to become clusters of several whitebark pines. Look around and note that you won't see many (any?) solitary trees.
If you want to learn more about this specialized relationship, the book Made for Each Other is an interesting study.
A Typical Hike
Leaving the parking lot behind, head up the trail to Frog Lake. The trail winds easily through a forest of lodgepole pine, mountain white pine, and some massive junipers. Climbing soon brings one to mountain hemlocks with their distinctive drooping tops, wonderful blue-green starburst needle fascicles, and purplish new cones.
Around the edge of the trail will be yellow mule ear, penstemon, paint brush, mountain pride (a magenta penstemon), pink onion flowers, and the white blossoms of the serviceberry bushes. Watch for cream bush and pink spikes of skyrocket gilia. Maybe there will be some blue iris, or yellow senecio, and if you're lucky (and early enough) on the way to Frog Lake you might see the elusive steer's head, a tiny pink flower that appears briefly after snow melt. Tip: look around at the wet soils near any melting snow, and look carefully.
As you walk along you are accompanied by chattering dark-eyed juncos and amused by the squawking Clark's nutcrackers annoyed by your intrusion. Climbing the last rocky stretch before you cross the snowfield next to the rock wall, you may see saxifrage and oxalis, mountain pride, and maybe some pink fireweed will be starting to bloom.
Ahh, you're breathing harder now but more from anticipation than the climb. In a minute or two you will walk past a stand of big weathered pines,
admire their twisted trunks, and then crest a ridge that provides a view of Round Top; its dark, notched-yet-rounded crest is distinctive, and snow fields decorate its north-facing flanks for all the summer. It's a beauty.
Coming over the rise you are now on the slope of a volcanic hill, the trees left behind while you enjoy some montane and some Great Basin flora. Pale pink gilia, onions galore, wyethia, groundsel, even wild roses hiding in the low vegetation.
Dropping a bit, you come to the edge of Frog Lake. I have yet to see a frog at Frog Lake. Walk around the eastern side and look for more iris, step out onto the granite outcrops and view Red Lake and beyond that, Hope Valley about 1000' below. Here in the cracks of the rock you might find high elevation examples of desert plants, blown in by winds from the east.
In the next half-mile, either choose to go south on the PCT, veering to the left around Elephants Back, or stay to the right and take the trail to Winnemucca. This time we're headed for Winnemucca.
The trail ascends gradually. The volcanic Elephants Back on the left is obviously a huge pile of broken volcanic rock, brown in general but also showing patches of life. If you were to start up Elephants Back you would find bright green leaves of polemonium hiding in the wind shadow of weather-beaten serviceberry, surrounded by orange patches of lichen. Instead you concentrate on the increasing vegetation around you. The corn lily, the lupine, several members of the carrot family with their similar white flower heads, from lovage to ranger buttons. There's yellow potentilla, red and yellow columbine, giant mullein, white bistort and yampah, blue lupines and delphiniums, lungworts and iris. Probably there will be elephant heads and marsh marigolds blooming along the wettest areas. Shooting stars punctuate the fields.
The view opens considerably. Looking west, you can see Caples Lake in the distance. To the north is the seemingly barren hillside that you cross to go to the Meiss pond and down to the meadow where the mountain bluebirds live. What you see to the east is the mixed colors of iron-rich Red Lake Peak and a glimpse of the aspen forest down toward Hope Valley. On the sides of Elephants Back there are patches of weathered lodgepole pine snags that sometimes give a chance to spot bluebirds on this southern side. You are surrounded by one of the best gardens to be found in these mountains.
It's easy for a botanist-wannabe to spend a whole day within the quarter-mile stretch of path that is this garden, armed with only a hand lens and a sketch book, or maybe the hard core fan with a Jepson Manual: a 5-lb, 1200 page key to the flowering plants of California! There are several smaller books which will serve you well at Carson Pass; For excellent photos of most of the plants you will see, try Graf's Flora of Tahoe Basin. For a good basic key and great illustrations, look at Peterson Field Guide, or if you want to try your hand at keying, go with Sierra Nevada Flora.
There are several other options available on the Books page. No one book seems to satisfy every question. I photograph, make some drawings, and list the characteristics of anything new or in question, hoping to identify it later.
If you have an abiding interest in all the things you find outdoors, like birds, bugs, clouds, and animal scat, don't miss getting a copy of Law's Field Guide to the Sierra Nevada. It contains really wonderful illustrations and offers a chance to know a liitle something about nearly everything you will wonder about as you walk through the mountains!
One Negative Note:
The one irritating part of this great day out is seeing that many others have decided to lie down in the flowers for a snapshot taken by a friend. This is too bad because it tramples the vegetation for others. But this isn't a theme park with uniformed attendants to keep the crowd in line, so damage is done by the casual visitor who doesn't realize (or care?) that what they are doing is ruinous. Try to avoid weekends at Carson because it can be a zoo: chains of club members, identical walking sticks in hand, descend (ascend, actually) to tromple past the corn lilies and stand, arm in arm, for souvenir photos. I have seen days when Frog Lake looked like an exercise area for dogs, as multiple owners threw sticks for multiple pooches to fetch from the shallow waters. But this tiny area is special enough to be worth putting up with the multitude of other wanderers you will likely find.
Past the hillside display, you can choose a cross-country approach to the south end of the Elephant! The way up from the south is a steady climb up the slope of clastic rock. But first, it's a scramble across a field of huge granite boulders.
Leaving the trail behind, climb higher on the hillside, feet sinking into scree and gravel, then finally you stand on solid rocks. Jumping from one to another, climb higher, and higher. The rocks get bigger and soon you are hopping from one point to the next, pausing to look into the openings between the rocks to see the columbines and potentilla. Nearby, you now see pools of water that most hikers never notice. There may still be snow or ice on them. Lake Winnemucca is right in the shadow of Round Top and ice is almost sure to remain on the south side well into summer.
Start up Elephants Back now, and see the first glimpse of something blue. This is good news. The beautiful blue polomonium is blooming! This is a great example of the micro vista: scenes of Nature that are not more than two or three square feet of landscape, making a perfect picture just as you see it. The polemonium do this: sky blue, crisp green leaves, and growing here against a ground of rust-brown and deep gray lava, the rock covered with lime green and orange lichens, and to add the perfect accent, a weathered stick of serviceberry, bleached white, twists and curls to punctuate the micro vista. These patches occur every fifteen feet and every one ahead looks to be more nearly the perfect specimen for a photo.
The ascent (a rather grand word for a rock scramble) offers several flat places to stop for the view. You are getting high enough now to see over the shoulder of Round Top and look off to the south. The pinnacles of the Sierra near Yosemite are actually visible. The Minarets? Could be, but it's a ways away! The eastern side of this summit is a very severe drop-off, the valley about 700-ft below. The wind is strong as you move closer to the edge, and the cooling is welcome.
Reaching the top is terrific. It's so flat that you wonder where the true top is? Looking around, spot the cairn, ... a stack of rocks that marks the official summit. On your way to stand there, pass more alpine flowers like the purple astragalus, called "rattle weed" due to its inflated seed pods and the rattle that the seeds make when they dry. Also find the white flowers of ballhead gilia, (Ipomopsis congesta) with their fuzzy gray leaves. The fuzzy quality of alpine plants helps protect them from desiccating winds, and helps protect the plant against direct sun. Everything here is low to the ground. Krumholze is German for "crooked stick", and krumholzed serviceberry is everywhere.
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