San Bernardino National Forest

It may have just been all the high country pines, but one of my favorite spots in California was in the San Bernardino Mountains. We spent the day exploring the mountains around Big Bear with botanists from the San Bernardino National Forest and looking at fires, rare plants, mining, and the sets of old Clint Eastwood movies. Here are a few shots from the day.

Ashgray Paintbrush and Kennedy's Buckwheat

Inside the Big Bear Discovery Center

Sulphur Buckwheat and Jeffrey Pine regrow after the Butler Fire burned through in 2007.

Corn Lily

Emma Williams, a botany intern on the San Bernardino National Forest examines grass seeds in a wetland meadow. The meadow was once one of the largest in Southern California but is now mostly covered by Big Bear Lake.

Corn lilies and Indian paintbrush fill a small spring in the San Bernardino Mountains.

Lemon Lily

Wildflowers grow in a "pebble plain," a geologically unique upland meadow. This specific plain was the location for the  1969 Clint Eastwood/Lee Marvin gold-mining musical 'Paint Your Wagon.'

Elephant Rocks

I'm taking a (very) brief break from California photos to try and catch up on posting images from the rest of the summer. In July, I had a few days of work down in the Arcadia Valley of the Ozarks. On a free afternoon, we went to Elephant Rocks State Park for some hiking and bouldering on the 1.5 billion-year-old fields of pink granite. Since we were camping nearby, I was also able to get out the next morning for some sunrise shots. Enjoy.

Muir Woods

One of the first stops on my recent trip to California for the Center for Plant Conservation was a visit to Muir Woods, a forest of coastal redwoods just outside of San Francisco. It was just a brief stop in the morning before working our way down the coast, but for some who loves photography and forestry, it doesn't get much better than the redwoods.

Located within minutes of San Francisco, the main trails of Muir Woods are popular on a Saturday morning.

Just a few miles from the heart of Muir Woods, fog rolls onto the coast at Muir Beach.

Rainbow Basin

This is a quick teaser of what will be coming on the blog. I'm wrapping up my last day in California shooting for the Center for Plant Conservation. I'll be posting more photos in the coming days, but for now I just wanted share this picture from this morning.

Joshua Tree, Rainbow Basin, California.

Bat Blitz

After several months without regular internet access, I'm finally getting a chance to update the blog.  I just left an amazing week at the Southeastern Bat Diversity Network's Bat Blitz. For the 10th year in a row scientists and students from around the country gathered for four days of intensive bat counting. This year's blitz was in the Pisgah National Forest in the mountains of North Carolina. Enjoy.

Volunteers at the SBDN Bat Blitz remove a bat from a temporary net trap. The bats are measured and tagged before being released.

Sybill Amelon sets up a mist net for trapping bats.

A tag is attached to the wing of a captured bat.

Anna Zack measures a captured eastern red bat.

After being tagged and measured, a bat is held up for release.

Clarissa Starbuck and Sybill Amelon finish setting up a temporary net for trapping bats over a creek near the Blue Ridge Parkway.

A bat taking off after being tagged and measured.

The blog will be returning to non bat related material soon. I'll be filling in gaps from the summer over the next few days and weeks. Unfortunately for my photo editing, but fortunately for me, the next week is overflowing with photo work with the Center for Plant Conservation in California. Stay tuned for pictures from there and the rest of the summer.