Okay, back from this.
After setting up, I cheked Maps and saw that Tahoe was only about a half hour away, so I headed up to the nude beach there (People who know me well will not be surprised at that). Obviously no pictures from the beach itself, but the trail to and from took me through Sierra pine forest where I was able to observe this beautiful White Fir – my third Abies species on iNat.
I tend to think of the environment in Nevada as desert, but technially it is considered “shrub steppe,” thus putting it in the steppe or grassland biome. Most of my life has been spent in woodland biomes; and so the steppe feels disconerting to say the least. I remember one book about the Great Basin referred to it as “the sagebrush ocean,” which is fitting, because like the ocean, it has great expanses of relative uniformity in which one an feel cast adrift. On the other hand – also like the ocean – there is more than at first meets the eye. At first, it looks like all Big Sagebrush; but between the sagebrush bushes, the ground is actually pretty well covered by a diversity of grasses and forbs, including Poverty Weed and Sand Ricegrass.
Surprisingly, Big Sagebrush was not my first observation on arrival. As I was preparing to photograph the sagebrush, this grasshopper appeared – I think a Groove-headed grasshopper. The lights on the restroom building showed me a sampling of the insets of the steppe. Some were very surprising to me, challenging my assumptions. For example, this bird-dropping mimic moth. Somehow, I had assumed that would be a phenomenon specific to broadleaf forest, due to the ready availability of broad leaf surfaces onto which bird droppings can fall. In the steppe, I dunno, I guess I just figured bird droppings would end up on the ground and not be a viable mimicry option. Shows how little I understand this biome.
Even my mental categories of the flora don’t fit well in the steppe. For example, although some plants are easy to place in families – Alkali Heliotrope is familiar to me from the Caribbean and Hawaii and easily reognized as Boraginaceae – others are not: Annual Tiquilia looks so different from anything I’ve ever seen, I would not have guessed that it is also Boraginaeae. (I was also startled to learn that Alkali Heliotrope is found from Canada to Argentina; I was accustomed to thinking of it as a tropical beach plant.) Even more exotic to me is Greasewood, which I couldn’t place in a family because it didn’t seem to have any defining characteristics, yet it is really common in some sections. I find on the taxon page: “Traditionally, [Greasewood] has been treated in the family Chenopodiaceae, but the APG III system of 2009 recognizes it as the sole genus in the family Sarcobataceae.” So here we have an entire family endemic to the North American steppe of all places.
The two lakes, Washoe and Pyramid, are completely different – “islands” in the “sagebrush ocean.” Washoe Lake is so turbid that you can’t see more than a couple inches beneath the surface; but its dune system has created wetland pools where I got a regional first: Fragile Stonewort, a green macroalgae; zooming out, I find that there are no other observations for hundreds of miles around. By contrast, Pyramid Lake is clear and popular for swimming, but these underwater mud formations are like nothing I’ve ever seen before. They are shaped like the cracked mud you see in dried-up places, and are slippery like raw clay.
All in all, the steppe seems like a really exotic place for a woodland person like me; in some ways, even more exotic than tropical places.
I don’t know about getting oriented. I went there the last day, and it is completely different: a lush gallery forest along the Truckee River; densly leafy, green, and shady, like the habitats to which I am accustomed. It is a specialized habitat within the steppe biome, and as such, atypical. The American Robin is an “everywhere” bird, meaning it is seen pretty much everywhere that has any tree cover at all, but at Oxbow is the first place I have ever been close enough to one to get a good quality shot.
Finally, I went up the Hunter Creek Trail to Hunter Falls. The higher I went, the less like the Great Basin and the more like the Sierra it looked: pines, firs, incense-cedars, and mountain wildflowers like Penstemon, Lupines, and Grand Collomia. The highlight was this Snow Plant. Up there, I felt my anxiety at the blinding sun and relentless dry heat dissipate, and I dare say that reaching the falls gave me the clearest feeling of well-being I’d had. The Great Basin steppe is full of botanical curiosities, but the Sierra foothills resonate more with my spirit.