As promised, I went looking for Ephedra californica up off the Maricopa Highway north of Ojai. My first stop was the Chorro Grande trailhead. This is a trail I’ve completed several times in the past and takes the hiker from the highway up to the Reyes Peak campground at just over 7,000 feet. Getting up the trail wasn’t on the schedule but I did check the first quarter mile or so and didn’t find any ephedra.
Next, I searched the area next to the highway that was specifically indicated on Calscape map. No luck here either though my search was limited to right along the highway due to private property signs warning the public off. This is not the first time I’ve found access to the Sespe River drainage frustrating. There are surprisingly few places where a person can pull off the road and just start wandering. For a national forest, much of this valley is surprising inaccessible.
I decided to take the Pine Mountain turnoff and see if I could find this apparently elusive plant along the first couple miles of the road. Again no luck. But it wasn’t a complete loss because the wet winter had everything in a state of exuberant bloom.
Thinking about where to search next, I now had to consider driving out along the Cuyama River drainage towards the Carrizo Plain. The area around Ventucopa was shown as covered with ephedra on both sides of the highway on the Calscape map. It would add another couple hours to the trip, but I had gas and plenty of daylight so Ventucopa it is.
Once I was out of the Pine Ridge Mountains and onto the flats, I managed to get a decent cell signal. Because I’d failed to find any ephedra in a location where it was clearly indicated to be, it did occur to me that my mental image of the plant might be wrong. I pulled over, paged through some photographs, and realized ephedra could in fact get quite large. Some of the specimens shown online were downright tree-like with thick, gnarly-ass branches. I’d previously only looked at the first couple of photographs and they just happened to be small, shrublike specimens. And being small with faded green coloring is a feature shared by countless other chaparral plants so ephedra could be easy to confuse for a noob like me. With a fresh set of mental images, I pressed on.
After a couple of false starts, somewhere between Ventucopa and the Songdog Ranch turnoff I saw a large plant that looked almost identical to one of the pictures on Calscape. I pulled off onto a nearby dirt road and approached…
This was a big sprawling plant and well outside the range of what I’d originally expected to find. I inspected the foliage, took in the general physiognomy, colors, and it all checked out – this was ephedra. I reflected on the fact that I’d driven this highway maybe a hundred times, passed loads of ephedra, and had totally missed it. In my brain I’d classified it as some combination of Chamise, Big Sagebrush, and Rabbitbrush.
I broke off a few twigs, crushed them in my hands and a grassy, piney smell filled my nose. Despite the plant looking half dead, the scent came across as fresh and medicinal. I could see how people might think it had curative properties. I located a few other specimens nearby and took in the variety of colors and physiognomic presentations. I collected a couple fresh twigs for the Heisenberg Tea experiment and started the long drive back.
Now that I had a feel for what the plant looked like in real life, I tried to find the specimen growing closest to Ojai. I’d of course driven past hundreds of them starting on the flats. As I wound back up through the Pine Ridge Mountains, the density of ephedra diminished and the individual plants got smaller. But it was still abundant and on my way down into the Sespe River drainage, I found it growing in the very spot indicated on the Calscape map where I’d failed to see it just a few hours earlier! Crazy. It was marvelous to observe how quickly my neurons had been “trained” to see ephedra in such a short time.
Take that AI.
Next up: Heisenberg Tea