May Gray on the Old Stagecoach Road

 

LA's most romantic hiking trail, The Old Stagecoach Road through Santa Susana Pass. Wagon-wheel ruts preserved in the road. The Butterfield Overland Stage. Bandits. Head 'em off at the Pass. Western movie crews. Ever since stagecoach days, the native plants have been holding out against a stubborn posse of invasives arriving from east and west. Still, it remains one of most authentically wild and evocative landscapes in Southern California. Here are our local woodland, meadow, chaparral, and riparian habitats at their most picturesque.

For more history, see my visit here last June: https://cloudcuckooland22.blogspot.com/2023/06/june-gloom-superbloom-on-old-stagecoach.html

At the start, sagebrush, poison oak, wild cucumber vines,  phacelias and monkey flowers drape out decadent displays on the canyon wall.

Orange monkey flowers, Diplacus auriantiacus

Phacelia ramosissima, "branching phacelia.'

'You'll come a-branching phacelia with me."

Poison oak as an ornamental?

Soon black sage, deer weed, sagebrush and sumac take over...

A splash or two of dodder, Cuscuta californica, adds the finishing brushstrokes to any view of chaparral.

Mustard photobombs my pics, but when it behaves itself, it has its charms.

Chaparral mallow peeks through the sumac

A stream left from the rains crosses the road as a puddle, which proved to be full of tadpoles. The mud was crawling with teeny-tiny California tree frogs. 

Purple clarkia, purple owl's clover, purple four o'clocks:

Clarkia purperea

Castileja exserta, purple owl's clover

Mirabilis laevis, aka "wishbone bush", kin to the Four-o'clocks gang.

California sun-cups, Cammissionopsis bistorta

Buckwheat -- Eriogonum fasciculatum, in the SFV's most gracile variety.

Blue-dicks - Dicholostemma, or Dipterostermon, capitatum, meet deerweed.

Greenspot nightshade, Solanum douglasii. The leaves are toxic, while the fruit is edible.

Encelia californica, the ubiquitous but always welcome California brittlebush. 

Golden yarrow, Eriophyllum confertiflorum

Antirrhinum coulterianum, the ravishing climber Coulter's snapdragon. 

A perfect specimen of Datura wrightii, the sacred datura of the toloache cult