Tiffany Mountain on Thursday

How many of my posts start with ‘The dogs and I’? Well here is another one.

On Thursday, the dogs and I hiked to the top of Tiffany Mountain. It’s a favorite hike I do most years. This is early in the season and I’ll do it again, maybe next month when the wildflowers are in bloom. Well, when most of the wildflowers are in bloom. Some were blooming on Thursday but the snow has only recently melted leaving behind last years brown grasses and the starts of some flowers. Even the larch are not fully leafed out.

On the rocky mountaintop there was some extra color from Ladybugs! Technically, I think they are Lady beetles but whatever you call them, there were thousands, probably millions of them. As I understand it, they migrate up in the fall and hibernate under the big rocks and emerge when the weather starts to warm up. It wasn’t really warm in my opinion. 52 degrees at the car when I started and colder still on top with a stiff breeze. The sun came out as I went down and it was warm enough to lose the jacket before I returned to the trailhead.

Along the road to the trailhead, scarlet gilia, various penstemons and lupine were blooming

Roger Lake from the trail

Roger Lake in the distance

Spring beauty

Clark’s Nutcracker. These birds have excellent spatial memory, which enables them to cache up to 33,000 seeds in the fall, and then locate a large percentage of those during the winter. Information from http://www.birdweb.org

Looking back down the trail

A good rock for a break. About halfway up and it has a nice depression that collects water

Sky wonders if we are really going to the mountain top. Or maybe she is watching Luna.

Someone named this rock. I think they call it Troll Rock.

Buttercups

Sweet yellow flower growing out of a crack in a lichen-covered rock

The top is over 8000′ elevation and there it is.

Sky waits while I catch my breath

Hmmm, another one I need to learn.

Clark’s Nutcrackers cache seeds from whitebark pine trees and here under a rock outcrop, there were two whitebark pines growing. I wonder if the nutcracker planted the pine nuts and forgot them.