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Go for the orchids, stay for the bear grass By David Smigelski of the Mail Tribune Jun 28, 2020 12:00 AM A A Three of us hiked high into the Siskiyou Mountains Saturday to search for a rare wildflower that lives in the land of fire. The California lady’s slipper, a type of orchid, is endemic to the mountains of Southern Oregon and far Northern California. My wife, Nancy McClain, and I stumbled across a patch of them about 10 years ago on a spring hike in the Siskiyous, and we’ve been going back to see them ever since. Nancy is a photographer — she especially loves shooting wildflowers — and it became a spring tradition for us to hike the Pacific Crest Trail along the edge of the Red Buttes Wilderness to visit that stand of orchids. The last time we saw them was 2017, about a month before a lightning storm that ignited one of the worst fire years in history. Numerous fires raged across the Siskiyou Crest where we’d seen those flowers, and from the Inciweb fire maps it appeared the flames were pulverizing that section of the crest. The summer of 2018 was just as bad, with megafires like the Klondike and Taylor Creek fires picking up where the Chetco Bar and Miller Complex fires ended, lighting up the mountains and choking the valleys with smoke. Last spring, the roads into the area were still closed to protect people from falling snags, so we didn’t hike the crest and had no idea whether the orchids had survived. Last weekend, we planned a summer solstice day hike with former Mail Tribune copy editor Steve Dieffenbacher, another wildflower bum who — like us — loves to bore his Facebook friends with pictures of leaves and petals in beautiful places. Steve said he had once hiked into the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument in search of a stand of California lady’s slippers rumored to be growing there, but he never found them. When he mentioned that story, we decided to head to the Red Buttes and look for the orchids we hadn’t seen since 2017. Our hike started at the Cook and Green trailhead, 10 miles above Applegate Lake. Trails fan out in numerous directions up there, heading to places such as Towhead Lake, Lilypad Lake, Lonesome Lake, the Boundary Trail and Sucker Gap. The trail in late spring and early summer is a wildflower wonderland, with stands of Siskiyou iris, splithair Indian paintbrush, azalea, phlox, Oregon anemone, larkspur, penstemon and dozens of others, including Siskiyou Lewisia, a native plant named after Meriwether Lewis of Lewis and Clark fame. After strapping on our packs and heading up the trail, it quickly became apparent we weren’t going to break any speed-hiking records that day, with Nancy and Steve stopping every few inches to photograph flowers. The lady’s slippers we sought were just a half-mile down the trail, but it took us almost an hour to get there because the wildflower bloom on the crest was magnificent and there was no way to rush the photographers. We were looking for a watercourse that tumbles down a steep, red rock slope. The crease cut by the water is packed with fragrant azaleas, maidenhair ferns and — if we were fortunate — elegant native orchids. We could smell the azaleas about the same time we heard the falling water, and when we reached the point where the water crossed the trail, there they were, a colony of three-foot-tall plants each bearing 10 to 20 brilliant white pouches suspended beneath golden wings. To say we felt fortunate would be a great understatement. The International Union for Conservation lists the California lady’s slipper as endangered, and we were cognizant of its fragility as we appreciated its beauty. As the photographers knelt down to slam their shutters and bracket their exposures and jiggle their F-stops and adjust their ISOs, I whipped out my camera phone and snapped off a few shots to post on Facebook. Then I glanced up at the slopes above our heads and beheld the largest bloom of bear grass I’ve ever seen. Bear grass is a type of lily, and the blooms put off a subtle scent. But when there are 1,000 — or 10,000 of them — there’s nothing subtle about it. The air was sweet enough to eat. Red rocks, white orchids, blooming azaleas and fields of bear grass. What a spot — and what a solstice — that was. Reach Mail Tribune features editor David Smigelski at [email protected] or 541-776-8784. Splithair Indian paintbrush Photo by Nancy McClain Siskiyou Lewisia was named after Meriwether Lewis. Photo by Nancy McClain