A cool, partially cloudy day, many different wildflowers, and great people made the joint Shasta Environmental Alliance–Shasta Chapter CNPS Dye Creek Preserve field trip a great success. We had 16 people attend, a few for their first time, of varying degrees of physical fitness and interest in plants, which made for a lot of fun, but it also made for a stretched-out group over about a mile of trail on the return trip. We saw many wildflowers and shrubs in bloom. Perhaps most interesting were the canyon liveforevers (Dudleya cymosa) found in profusion on many rock outcrops.
Dye Creek is a deep canyon of ancient volcanic mudflows that have lithified over the last few million years. The creek has slowly eroded this deep, wide canyon, leaving steep cliffs on each side and a mesa in the middle. We walked upstream on a trail about 2.5 miles to a large, wide cave at the base of the mesa where we ate lunch. Inside this cave grew many monkeyflowers. ~David Ledger
