Gone to the dogs

View from our hike

Last Monday (4/19/2010) the family and I went over to Dog Valley for a stroll. Dog Valley is a great place to go because it's close to Reno and you can choose how intense you want your hike to be--you can stay in the valley floor or hike up the surrounding hillsides. I always tend to forget about Dog Valley, but I shouldn't because it's a great place to hike, bike, camp or just hang out for a picnic. Since there was still some snow and mud on the road, we decided to park in the parking area at the top rather than drive down to the valley floor. Once we parked we hiked down the road to the valley and explored from there.

Dan and the kids hiking down the road to the valley floor
Dog Valley

We started out hiking around the west side of the big meadow. We saw a ton of wildflowers, some I knew and some I didn't know. We saw Lomatiums, yellow bells, violets, phlox, blue-eyed Marys, plantain buttercups, green-leaf manzanita and then three species I didn't know.

Lomatium spp.
Yellow Bells (Fritillaria pudica)
Violets (Viola beckwithii)
Phlox (Phlox spp.)

Blue-Eyed Mary (Cossinsia parviflora)
Plantain Buttercup (Ranunculus alismifolius)
Green-Leaf Manzanita flowers (Arctostaphlos patula)

So, I'm currently at the ranch and I don't have all my plant books with me--I like to leave some in Reno so I can identify plants there too. I tried to find the flowers that I didn't know in my books here, but I couldn't find them. They all look familiar, so I'm pretty sure they must be in one of my plant books somewhere, but for now I still don't know who they are. Here are their pictures, if you know who they are please let me know, if not I'll try to figure out who they are and update this post.

I feel fairly certain I can easily find out who this is

This plant looks really familiar, I just don't know who it is
This one looks the least familiar to me, I hope I can figure out who it is

We did a lot more than just identify plants on this adventure. The meadow was still quite wet, so we had a lot of fun figuring out trails that would keep our feet as dry as possible. We hiked up into the hills where we found some dead, felled trees to be silly on. The dogs got excited about some squirrels, but were never close enough to make an attempt at a real chase.

Dan taking pictures

Shadow fun on old, felled trees

The day was beautiful and sunny. We only saw one other person down in the valley floor. We saw a group up where we parked but only one while we were out hiking, sweet!!! Oh, and we heard mountain chickadees throughout our hike and on the way back to the car one came right up to me, which was extremely cool, but I couldn't get my camera ready until it was a bit further away, oh well.

Dan enjoying the valley floor
Mountain Chickadee from a distance (Poecile gambeli)