01 - Foothill Park
The Committee walks a portion of the park featuring several Heritage Oaks (on right).
The Committee walks a portion of the park featuring several Heritage Oaks (on right).
I want to go back and spend some time with this tree. It is one of the most beautiful of its kind I've found in the entire watershed.
It's not hard to see why this is one of the most heavily utilized parks in the District. Where natural resources are concerned it is also one of the most challenged. Heavy human use and degraded natural resources almost always go hand in hand.
Feeding wildlife is always a bad idea, but invariably the more utilized the park the more "domesticated" the wildlife becomes. These were not tame as some I've seen elsewhere and at no time did they threaten to mug us for bread.
I just noticed that this signage says nothing about refraining from feeding the wildlife. Maybe that is an area where we (the committee) should focus some attention?
Still at Summercrest and discussing the approach THPRD is taking (and has taken in the past) towards determining vegetation schemes. The dialogue was stimulated by the presence of Ponderosa pine, a tree that not everyone here in the Valley is particularly fond of.
You have to look very hard, even when you are standing there in the flesh, to see the large and living beaver hutch that serves as home for the beaver family that has made this stretch of the park a pretty wonderful place.
This time of the year native roses are in bloom. They are everywhere at Summercrest.
This was taken with a standard 50mm lens and is not much of an enlargement - all of which indicates that these particular ducks are very used to being fed. The ducklings were almost totally unafraid. As nice as it may seem to be able to get this close to the wildlife, it isn't right.
This is a hard place to find on your own, but well worth the effort. It is a work in progress, but it has great merit already and even more potential.
About six acres of this 22 acre park are grasslands transitioning to woodlands right now. There are many small trees planted in this area but it will be quite some time before they create a significant canopy.
Matthew waded out into the wet grass and pulled this nasty out of the ground by the roots. Other invasive plants are plentiful including Herb Robert and black berry. The Herb robert is particularly abundant.
Simon, Bruce's ten year old served as our botanist on this tour and properly identified this as Rubus Ursinus or trailing blackberry. It is also called dew berry. The fruit is small and the habit somewhat delicate. They are yummy butit takes a good number to do more than whet your whistle.
This plant is abundant on the site and when I first saw the foliage I thought it was a kind of lupine. My more knowledgable friends were very excited to encounter this plant, particularly in such abundance, because it is listed as "threatened."
This flower has not quite fully opened. What a dainty little thing and the foliage is quite attractive.
AS is often the case this THPRD property supports a small stream. This one is in very good shape overall, so far as channel stability is concerned, and it is heavily shaded for virtually its entire run on the property. I haven't worked out its head waters feed at this pint, but is is a tributary of Johnson Creek. There are at least three Johnson Creeks in this area that I know of, which makes properly identifying them a bit if a task from time to time. This particular one flows north down Cooper Mountain to Beaverton Creek.
