Recently, it was announced that the California Department of Fish and Wildlife caught folks poaching Dudleya farinosa from coastal Mendocino and Humboldt counties. The tip came in from a Postmaster who noticed dirt spilling from a box being shipped to China. Conversations started, one post office talked to another, and they realized poachers were moving from post office to post office shipping boxes of the charismatic Dudleya farinosa. One of the postal workers then reported the suspicious activity on CalTip and this is now an active international poaching case.
This neatly wrapped Dudleya was confiscated by Game Wardens before it left Humboldt County on its way to Asia’s thriving succulent market. Fifty volunteers soon replanted them on the steep hillside cliffs they call home.
In 2012 I first visited the marine terraces of coastal Mendocino County and was captivated by what I learned. The blog and graphic I cooked up after that visit has been one of the more popular entries on this website. In fact, the United States Geological Survey recently published a document on the Marine Terraces of California that features:
How marine terraces form
Soils sequences of California’s terraces
Where to find marine terraces of California
The main graphic from my blog about Mendocino’s ecological staircases
Hot springs and tall trees, all hidden in a remote area of Mendocino County. This was the family destination for a pre-Thanksgiving celebration. Most or our time was spent at Orr Hotsprings but an day-hiking excursion treated us with a fabulous adventure in an isolated redwood grove at Montgomery Woods State Natural Reserve.
The hike was punctuated with firsts: my son’s first multi-mile hike and my my first albino redwood. The park previously held the tallest recorded redwood — at 367.5-foot it was once declared the world’s tallest. While the Montgomery tree is still alive, the new record is in Humboldt County. Other exciting finds in the park included an excellent expanse of giant chain ferns in a lowland basin along the trail. Read more about Montgomery Woods from Save the Redwoods League.
The pygmy manzanita (Arctostaphylos nummularia) is a species endemic to Mendocino County, California where it is known from its occurrence in the pygmy forests along the coastline. I think this might just be the perfect northern coastal California shrub for a native plant garden. It has a perfectly rounded form, beautiful small leaves, and subtly hairy stems.
Arctostaphylos nummularia subsp. mendocinoensis by Allison Poklemba
I have used various approaches which always involve careful map study, perusing the pages of hiking guides, and most importantly for me—studying field guides. As I get older, choosing a hiking destination is becoming more critical, with so much to see and even more to learn.
King Range hiking.
Over time, I have gone about choosing a hike based more as a destination for discovery before any other factor. I think I first caught the hiking-for-natural-discovery bug while selecting a backpacking route exclusively to see condors in the Sespe Wilderness of southern California. When I moved to Humboldt in 2002, I graduated from bird destinations to plant exploring as I began searching out rare and unusual conifer species in our local mountains. This regular wilderness sideline blossomed into a Master’s Degree from Humboldt State University when I published my first book Conifer Country: A natural history and hiking guide to the conifers of northwest California in 2012. For 10 years I hiked to find and understand trees. These trees, and the places they grow, helped me develop a deeper passion for place and an understanding of the unique natural history of northwest California.
