Valley high: a California forest harbors cobra plants and other treats for plant lovers willing to get their feet wet

Natural History, July-August, 2003 by Robert H. Mohlenbrock

When I first read about Butterfly Valley in an issue of Fremontia, the journal of the California Native Plant Society, I knew I had to see it. The valley's boggy areas, seeps, and ponderosa-pine forests are home to more than 500 kinds of plants. Among them are large concentrations of the insect-eating cobra plant (whose hoodlike leaf bears what looks like a forked tongue); four other species of insectivorous plants (two sundews and two bladderworts); and twelve kinds of wild orchids. Butterfly Valley, through which runs Butterfly Creek, lies in the northern Sierra Nevada mountains and is named for its overall shape, discernible when viewed from mountain heights. A 500-acre portion of the valley, part of California's Plumas National Forest, is designated a Botanical Area, which protects it from wildflower picking and commercial logging.

On a pleasant morning in August my wife Beverly and I set out on California Highway 70, which crosses east-west through the national forest. Roughly midway, near the community of Keddie, we found the un-posted turnoff onto County Road 417, a narrow asphalt road that turns to gravel after about a mile and a half. Continuing another mile on the gravel we took a left turn onto a Forest Service road that led southward through the botanical area. At first all we saw were woods dominated by ponderosa and sugar pines. Then we sighted our first cobra plants, growing in standing water along with sedges, rushes, and other wetland plants. This boggy habitat, best termed a fen because it is fed by water seepage from the bottom of the adjacent hillside, parallels the road for a hundred feet or so.

Less than a quarter-mile farther down the road, we came to Sweetwater Marsh, ten acres of open land surrounded by a narrow border of alders. The continuous cover of vegetation obscures a very wet terrain, which I deemed it best not to enter.

A short distance past Sweetwater Marsh we came to Pond Reservoir, the deepest body of water in the botanical area, thanks to a dam constructed there around the turn of the twentieth century. This pond and its muddy borders support additional communities of plants. I noticed that most of the aquatic species I could identify are also familiar in the Midwest and eastern United States. As a matter of fact, aquatic plants generally do have broad geographical ranges, which botanists attribute to the relative uniformity of their watery environment, compared with the variability of soil and other conditions on dry land.

Proceeding along the road to the south end of the botanical area, we came upon a moist, heavily shaded area known as Fern Glen. True to its name, it was home to an assortment of gorgeous ferns, which grew amidst numerous wildflowers. Exploring on foot, we also found a small zone dominated by bear grass, a huge plant with long, narrow, grasslike leaves that is actually a member of the lily family. It produces a large spike of white flowers in August.

From there we continued south and east, and the road eventually turned into the paved Blackhawk Creek Road and connected directly with California Highway 70 (the Forest Service prefers visitors to enter as well as leave the botanical area using this route). On the way the road crosses Big Blackhawk Creek and parallels Little Blackhawk Creek, which like Butterfly Creek are lined with dense thickets of willows, alders, and red osier dogwoods. The waters of all three eventually travel southward down the Feather River, all the way to San Francisco.

HABITATS

Mixed conifer forest Ponderosa pine, locally often called yellow pine, grows with other tall conifers--sugar pine, white fir, Douglas fir, and incense cedar. Deciduous trees, such as California black oak, Pacific dogwood, and big-leaf maple, are much less common. The most plentiful shrubs are green-leaf manzanita (with thick, leathery leaves and a red trunk) and white-leaf manzanita (with its pale leaves). Two wildflowers that are striking because of their white-striped leaves are giant rattlesnake plantain and white-veined wintergreen. Other species include purple fritillary, Sierra iris, crimson columbine, slim larkspur, two kinds of lupines, mosquito-bills, and woolly mule ears.

Cobra plant fen The cobra plant (Darlingtonia californica, also known as California pitcher plant) lives mostly among sedges and rushes. There are also round-leaved sundews, some shrubs of Labrador tea and bog bilberry, and various colorful wildflowers, including four members of the lily family--bog asphodel, western tofieldia, beavertail grass, and Hastingsia alba. Some other wildflowers are white-flowered bog orchid, California grass-of-Parnassus, Sierra gentian, Plumas alpine aster, western sneezeweed, and the highly toxic western water hemlock.

Marsh The vegetation in Sweetwater Marsh is made up mainly of grasses, sedges, and rushes, but here also grow cobra plants, two sundews, including the round-leaved one common in the fen, and various wildflowers--among them wild hyacinth, bog saxifrage, yellow monkey flower, Parish's yampah, sheep parsnip, and a species of Saint-John's-wort.