Hiked Cañada Bonita Trail to find biggest spruce tree in Los Alamos county. Hiking buddy says her friend that volunteers at PEEC calls them "potato chip" trees because of the appearance of the peeling, gray scales on the tree bark. That's what we called them the whole day.
First we measured an aspen but she forgot to take its portrait which will mean another trip back but it's possible she'll go alone or the PEEC friend may accompany her.
Truthfully, I was ready to give the whole thing up because measuring the trunk circumference, the tree height and the branch spread (she has newly added that data point) seems so inexact and that upsets me. I didn't outright say "I quit!" but when I gently groused about the inexactness, she reassured me that we didn't have to be exact but the idea was just to get a grip on which tree species was the biggest we found. If the state big tree program wants to, she said, they will then come out and do precise measurements. I still don't want to do the big tree measurements but I was more laissez faire after that. Also, I let her do the business to "measure" the tree height - felt loads better not having to do that!
Then we wandered into the woods along the fence line that marks the boundary between the Santa Fe National Forest and the Valles Caldera National Preserve. Lots of huge stumps in that area! We went uphill and I would have liked to continue uphill along the fence line area as it was fairly easy to walk, having been cleared for a fireline. Instead, we headed downhill to find the spruces that another volunteer had given her the UTM's for.
The spruces were impressive and we did our "measurements". Part of our determining if we need to measure a tree is that we both "hug" it tightly from opposite sides to see how much our hands overlap - imagine seeing two old ladies in the woods, hugging a tree for all they are worth!
We started hearing thunder rumbling so we headed back but made a major boo boo in following the XC ski trail that tortuously wanders back to the main trail. Then it started to rain but not too hard and not too bad on the thunder. We eventually took a short cut trail to the main trail. Back at my car, we donned plastic grocery bags on our feet to keep mud off the rugs and headed back to town. We ate our lunch in the car on the drive down - Ginger Snap Lara Bars.
Notable: The purple Mariposa lilies were still putting on an amazing display. There were so many of them. Fritillary butterflies were also in abundance on their beloved sneezeweed flowers.