Aspen Biologists Conduct 4-Day Backpacking Trip in the Mount San Jacinto State Park Wilderness
Scott White collecting botanical specimens
Aspen biologists Scott White and Justin Wood coordinated with the California Department of Parks and Recreation, California Botanic Garden, and volunteers to conduct a 4-day backpacking trip collecting botanical specimens in the Mount San Jacinto State Park Wilderness.
Scott worked with Mare Nazaire and Naomi Fraga of California Botanic Garden, and Ken Kietzer and Haddee Hammoud of California Department of Parks and Recreation to organize the “bio-blitz,”
to help fill in data gaps in Scott’s long-term project, a Flora of the San Jacinto and Santa Rosa Mountains. The Flora will catalogue and describe all the plants of the two mountain ranges, from the foothills in western Riverside County, to the pine forests around Idyllwild, across the high peaks and ridges, and down to the desert floor around Palm Springs.
Mount San Jacinto State Park is especially interesting because of the history of botanical documentation within the Park. Prominent California botanists Harvey Monroe Hall, Philip Munz, and Edmund Jaeger, among a few others, collected there in the decades between 1900 and 1930. But since then, collections in high elevations have been only few and far between. For many species, there has been little or no documentation of their occurrence in or around the Park since the 1920s or, at best, since the 1970s. We are especially curious about species of high-elevation wetland and snowmelt habitats, which are probably in greatest danger of local extinction due to climate change.
While Hall, Munz, and Jaeger relied on horses and pack animals to reach the Wilderness, this year’s team had the luxury of riding the Palm Springs Aerial Tramway to Mountain Station at 8,500 feet elevation. (Some Aspen employees may remember riding the older tramway for a company retreat years ago). From there the team hiked about 2½ miles to the Round Valley Campground at about 9000 feet. Scott hadn’t carried a full backpack in many years and quickly learned that hiking with the extra weight is a lot more demanding than with just a daypack. But his knees and spirits held up throughout the trip.
Prior to 2010, the meadow in Round Valley was suffering serious erosion due to historic grazing (pre 1930s), and the Department of Parks and Recreation carried out a large-scale meadow restoration project there to stabilize it and bring soil water back to the rooting zone. Ken Kietzer described the extensive planning and administration (including CEQA!) needed to make the restoration project become a reality, and the meadow is now in much better shape. Scott spent most of his botany time collecting in the meadow.
From the Round Valley base camp., other botanist teams took day hikes to Hidden Lake, Tamarack Valley, Wellman Divide, and San Jacinto Peak to collect as many plant species as possible, many of them not documented by formal collections since the days of Hall, Munz, and Jaeger. The final tally and species lists are still being compiled, but we’re confident we made close to 200 collections, probably representing well over 100 species.
Even after 4 long field days, the team was still enthusiastic by the next day. Talk has already begun for another trip next year.