From Gold Bar to Leavenworth

May 12, 2012 8AM - 6PM UW Seattle - Gold Bar - Index Road - Money Creek Campground - Leavenworth - UW Seattle

Contrary to the weather forecast by local news networks predicting for an absolutely beautiful day, the day of Saturday, May 12, 2012 introduced a fair but not a gorgeous morning. Precisely, the sky had enough sunlight making it through the thin and scattered clouds to make a pair of sunglasses a worthwhile entity (a pair of sunglasses on a dark, cloudy day becomes a worthless object). At 8-o-clock in the morning the air is chilly to be walking outside with a t-shirt, unless if you were speed walking hurriedly to the designated meeting spot to catch the van like I was.

The van ride from UW Seattle Campus to Gold Bar was approximately an hour and ten minutes, so the time was 9:10AM when we arrived. The air was still below 60 degrees, I suppose, at Gold Bar and certainly fresh, even though I would not know if the air was truly fresh or if that was just my imagination after sitting in a crammed van for long.
With the car cruising past miles of land on freeways, it certainly gave me an inaccurate prejudice that the local ecosystem in Gold Bar must be quite different from that in Seattle. In fact the ecosystem was somewhat different, but the difference most likely originated due to Gold Bar being a floodplain. Trees were fairly scattered and allowed for ground stories to develop quite extensively once off the graveled main track, including pacific crabapples, japanese knotweeds, bracken ferns, and dogwood. Many trees exposed their roots in the floodplain regions to get nutrients. Almost everything was green, which is to say that not many colorful flowers appealed their presence. The presence of Japanese knotweed was particularly strong. This invasive species seemed to appear at the edges of grassline and thus making a strong impression on me. Only a knee to thigh tall with leaves the size of a person's hand, the Japanese knotweed for some reason has a curled and knotty look to it, even though nothing about it makes a knot in reality. The biggest question, though was whether I had ever seen a Japanese knotweed in Japan because I do not recall seeing such a knotted plant over there. Japan is a vertically long island, so it could very well may be that knotweeds exist higher up in the latitude than where Tokyo is. It would be interesting to go look the next time I return to Japan.

At the next stop at Index Road, the landscape introduced a denser tree pack. On many of the trees like western hemlock and big leaf maple, licorice fern were widespread - these ferns apparently have a reverse cycle of a regular deciduous tree, in which they flourished in winter when moisture is abundant. At ground level, the false lily of the valley covered extensively. False lily of the valley have a spade shape of a playing card suit, and when compared to common ivy they are a slightly taller and greener. Their extensive presence is a surprise because there seemed to be more trees than Gold Bar and hence less sunlight making it through to the ground and yet the understory was pretty extensive.

At Money Creek Campground, there were a lot more lichen to be found. One of them was Platysma glauca, a huge piece of lichen in one of the photos synced to this journal. With a light emerald green color on the front and black on the back, Platysma glauca are very pollution tolerant. Hence they can be found in the Seattle area, although not as big of a size as the ones found in clean environments. Another lichen I found was the Hypogymnia imshaugii, with a common name forked tube lichen. They are in fact a tube; there is air space that has white spore on the inside. Perhaps more lichen indicates that Money Creek gets more rainfall than does the two previous stops.

Finally at Leavenworth, there are species common to Eastern Washington that are not as common in the western counterpart, now that we passed the Cascades. The very first thing to note was that the trees turned coniferous from deciduous in the Cascade forests. Ponderosa pine now appeared right and left. At the understory level, repant oregon grape found its way to be recorded as the third oregon grape species in my field notebook. If dull oregon grape is shorter than tall oregon grape, than repant oregon grape was even shorter, having its own time near a ponderosa pine bark. The yellow flower and its overall shape reminded me of a dandelion. Also balsamroot seemed to be flourishing - their beautiful yellow flowers and scent seem to attract bees like a magnet. I saw at least five bees enjoying their time near a balsamroot, which is pretty peculiar unless there exists a bee hive nearby, which there were not. Bees were numerous, but so were wasps too. Family sphecidae were hovering near ground looking for preys - they were a number of them if you looked closely. These wasps were not big though, perhaps just slightly larger than a bumblebee. Since lizards were abundant in the area as well, I wonder if those wasps ever prey on lizards.

Species List

genus Malus - Crabapple
Fallopia japonica - Japanese knotweed
genus Pteridium - Bracken fern
genus Cornus - Dogwood
Tsuga heterophylla - Western hemlock
Acer macrophyllum - Big leaf maple
Polypodium glycyrrhiza - Licorice fern
Maianthemum dilatatum - False lily of the valley
Platysma glauca - Platysma glauca
Hypogymnia imshaugii - Hypogymnia imshaugii
Pinus ponderosa - Ponderosa pine
Mahonia repens - Repant (creeping) oregon grape
Mahonia nervosa - Dull oregon grape
Mahonia aquifollium - Tall oregon grape
genus Taraxacum - Dandelion
genus Balsamorhiza - Balsamroot
amily Sphecidae - Wasps
genus Bombus - Bumblebee
suborder Lacertilia - Lizards