the sun was shining and we went to Dalles Mt. Ranch in Washington.
map
This 3200 acre former ranch is now a state park and preserve. There is a display of old farm machinery including this old grader. You drive a few miles up a primitive road to get to the park, and if you care about the paint job on your citified car, you may not want to drive up this road. Oh, and there are ticks and rattlesnakes here, too, but the views are worth the risk!
Driving up toward the preserve, you pass rocky canyons filled with desert parsley and rushing water.
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| Mr. Thornsby admires Mt. Hood |
Balsam root is common here in the open grassland habitat and was used as a medicinal plant in the past.
Because there are some very rare plants here,
there are a lot of restrictions in the use of the upper part of the park. Of course, Mr. Thornsby reminds us that he is neither a horse nor a pet.
We did not see any of the rare plants, but we did not look too hard. We did see some colorful lichens on the rocks (basalt).
Bare-stem desert parsley is abundant here. The young leaves taste like celery and were/are used as food by native people in the area according to
Plants of the Pacific Northwest Coast by Pojar and MacKinnon (known as Pojar to us naturalists).
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| Your lives or your lupines! |
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| An entire field of death camas which we did not eat |
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| We went back to White Salmon for lunch |
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| I had a burger almost as good as homemade at Everybody's Brewpub |
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