Category Archives: History

A History of Plant Collecting in the Bodie Hills

Posted on August 28, 2023 | Leave a comment

Back in March 2023, I did a presentation for the Nevada Native Plant Society on plants of the Bodie Hills. One small part of that presentation was a review of the history of botanical collecting, and more recently, iNaturalist observations of plants, in the Bodie Hills. It was an interesting topic to research, so what follows is an expanded summary of my findings, along with some charts and maps.

Collections of Plant Specimens in Herbaria

I compiled a list of all plant collections in the Bodie Hills using search tools of the Consortium of California Herbaria (CCH). Their CCH2 portal serves data from all specimens (vascular and nonvascular, in California and beyond) housed in all 55 CCH member herbaria. These data portals allow anyone to search digitized records of herbarium specimens in a variety of ways. Because about a third of the Bodie Hills is in Nevada, and CCH2 data are not restricted to California, I used the CCH2 portal to find and download records of 4,268 plant collections throughout the Bodie Hills from 1866 through 2021.

Here, then, is a timeline (below), summarizing the number of herbarium specimens collected over various periods of time. Below each of the green bars are the names of botanists who collected the most during those periods.

The timeline above may appear too small to read on your screen, so below I’ve divided the same thing into three larger sections.

The earliest collections listed were of Ericameria nauseosa and Sphaeralcea ambigua by Henry Bolander in 1866. The locations were recorded as simply “near Bridgeport,” so these may not have been exactly in the Bodie Hills. Bolander was an energetic collector while he was California State Botanist, 1864–1873 (and later, State Superintendent of Public Instruction, then San Francisco Superintendent of Schools).

Thirty-two years later, in 1898, Joseph Congdon collected Atriplex canescens, Opuntia polyacantha, and probably also Artemisia nova along a what he called the “Mono to Bodie (Desert Road)” and a “side-road between Goat Ranch and Bridgeport.” I believe these were along what is now Coyote Springs Road in Bridgeport Canyon. This was for many years the main route from Mono Basin to Bridgeport, before roads were established over Conway Summit. Congdon was a lawyer who lived in Mariposa, 1882–1905, and contributed significantly to early botanical exploration, particularly in the Yosemite region.

Harvey Monroe Hall made at least 7 collections in the hills between Mono Basin and Bridgeport in 1918, 1921, and 1925. Hall at that time worked at the Carnegie Institution Division of Plant Sciences at Stanford University; throughout his life he collected over 200,000 specimens. Philip A. Munz made a few collections in the same area in 1928. Munz was then a young professor of botany at Pomona College. Decades later, Munz and David Keck authored A California Flora (UC Press 1959), which became a standard reference for identifying California plants for more than 30 years.

Botanical collecting took a leap forward and across the state line in 1929, when “Mrs. John D. Wright” collected at least 29 specimens around Aurora. Ysabel Galban Wright, born in Cuba in 1885, married John Dutton Wright (founder of the Wright Oral School for the Deaf in New York City, where Helen Keller was an early student) in 1912. The couple relocated to Santa Barbara about 1919, where Ysabel became an avid gardener with a special interest in cacti and California native plants. She visited Aurora during a botanical collecting trip that also included Mono and Tuolumne counties in 1929.

During the 1930s several botanists collected in the area, notably Carl B. Wolf (Botanist at Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden 1930–1945), and G. A. Graham and T. M. Hendrix (both collecting and documenting vegetation in 1937 for what was then Mono National Forest).

In the 1940s, additional names familiar to California botanists appear in the list, including Annie Alexander & Louise Kellogg, Ira Wiggins & Reed Rollins, Roxanna Ferris & Laura Lorraine, and again, Philip Munz (who took a particular interest in the flora at Travertine Hot Springs). It was in the summer of 1945 that Wiggins & Rollins collected type specimens of both Streptanthus oliganthus (Masonic Mountain jewelflower) and Boechera bodiensis (Bodie Hills rock-cress). Also in the summer of ’45, Alexander & Kellogg collected type specimens of Cusickiella quadricostata (Bodie Hills Cusickiella) and Phacelia monoensis (Mono County Phacelia). Others collecting here during the ’40s included C. Leo Hitchcock, Robert F. Hoover, Beecher Crampton, and Malcolm A. Nobs & S. Galen Smith.

During the 1950s, Philip Munz visited the Chemung Mine area. Thomas C. Fuller (Plant Taxonomist for the California Department of Food and Agriculture) collected along the west side of the Bodie Hills. Clare B. Hardham collected along the Bodie-Masonic Road near Potato Peak.

In the 1960s, Jack Reveal (forest ranger) and his son James L. Reveal (renowned Eriogonum taxonomist and professor) collected in the area. Clare Hardham again visited the Rough Creek/Potato Peak area, and Masonic Mountain. Darley F. Howe collected near Bodie.

During the 1970s, Dean Taylor collected extensively throughout the Mono Basin and surrounding areas. Other collectors included Dennis Breedlove, Glenn Clifton, Ken Genz, and George K. Helmkamp (chemistry professor at UC Riverside). A spike in collecting occurred in 1979, because that’s when I arrived on the scene, collecting for my MA thesis (a local flora of the Bodie Hills) at Humboldt State University. I continued collecting for that project in 1980-81.

During the early 1980s, Matt Lavin, then a graduate student at UNR, collected extensively in the northern Bodie Hills for his floristic study of the upper Walker River watershed. Others active in the ’80s included Arn o ld (Jerry) Tiehm (Herbarium Curator at University of Nevada Reno) and Jan Nachlinger (plant ecologist), Dennis Breedlove, Glenn Clifton, Mary DeDecker, Barbara Ertter, and Hugh Mozingo (author of Shrubs of the Great Basin: A Natural History).

During the 1990s and 2000s there was less collecting in the Bodie Hills, though Tom Schewich and others were quite active in and around the Mono Basin.

In the 2010s Ann Howald started collecting intensively throughout Mono County, including the Bodie Hills. Jerry Tiehm and Jan Nachlinger made more visits to the Nevada side of the range. In recent years, Ann Howald (preparing a Flora of Mono County) and James André (of the Granite Mountains Desert Research Center) have been the most active collectors in the Bodie Hills.

In summary, my search produced a list of about 4,268 specimens from the Bodie Hills, collected from 1866 to 2021. I say “about”, because a few were probably collected outside the area but their locations were mis-mapped or misinterpreted as being within the Bodie Hills (erring on the side of too many specimens). On the other hand, some specimens probably exist that have not been digitized and georeferenced, or reside in herbaria that are outside the scope of CCH2 (erring on the side of too few specimens). Also, the search area boundary is a bit arbitrary in some areas and can be adjusted to include more or fewer collections.

Much more interesting than the exact number, though, is to see the names of people who have collected there, if only briefly, over the decades. Many of them became well known for their contributions to western American botany.

You can generate an updated search, and change the boundaries or other search criteria if you wish, HERE.

Observations of Plants on iNaturalist

Several years ago an ambitious citizen science project called iNaturalist came on the scene, providing me and many others with a different way to document biodiversity—by uploading photographs of identifiable species, along with location, date/time, and sometimes other metadata for each observation. There are many caveats to consider in assessing the quality and value of any particular set of iNaturalist data, but on the whole, it’s an effective way for anyone from casual, curious non-specialists to seasoned professional biologists to quickly share observations, get feedback, and learn from what others have posted. Physical specimens enable types of research that cannot be done from photographs alone, but I think iNaturalist provides a useful compliment to traditional herbarium-based collections.

The timeline below shows plant observations in the Bodie Hills posted to iNaturalist, by year, from 2012 through 2022. In the background, for comparison, are the numbers of herbarium specimens from the charts above. The number of observations is growing rapidly. Many of these observations are mine, but certainly not all, and some very noteworthy observations (documenting species neither collected nor observed previously in the Bodie Hills) have been posted by others.

You can generate an updated search in iNaturalist, and revise the search criteria if you wish, HERE.

Locations of Collections and Observations

The maps below show you that both collections and observations have been concentrated along (1) roads that provide relatively easy access and (2) other popular areas to visit in the Bodie Hills.

Little or no collecting or observing has occurred in some other areas. These are among the more remote and difficult-to-access corners of the Bodie Hills. Such areas include:
• Mount Hicks and Spring Peak
• Aurora Crater
• Bald Peak
• Southeast perimeter of the Bodie Hills
• Atastra Creek and the middle reaches of Rough Creek
• Masonic Gulch north of Masonic Lower Town
• Aspen groves south of upper Aurora Canyon
• Big Alkali

Treks into these remote areas could be rewarded with interesting discoveries!

Townsendia scapigera

Plants Described from the Bodie Hills

Posted on April 8, 2019 | 2 comments

Masonic Mountain from the north. Three plant species were described from here.

Four plant species have been described from the Bodie Hills. Some kind of synchronicity must have been in effect, because all four were collected in the summer of 1945. Three of them are mustards (Brassicaceae), and all of those were described by Reed C. Rollins (a professor at Harvard University, and a renowned expert in the taxonomy of the mustard family). Two of the type specimens were collected by Annie Alexander and Louise Kellogg (ambitious collectors of the California flora from 1939 to 1949); the other two were collected — on the same day in the same location, perhaps only minutes apart — by Ira Wiggins (a professor at Stanford and author of several floras) together with Reed Rollins. All four of these plants have a similar, very limited distribution in northern Mono, southern Lyon, and western Mineral counties, with the majority of known occurrences being in the Bodie Hills.

Published descriptions of these and all other plant species reference a type specimen and a type locality. A type specimen is an individual specimen (or a group of specimens) to which a scientific name is formally attached. For vascular plants, this is usually an 11.5 x 16.5-inch sheet of herbarium paper with a pressed specimen and one or more printed labels glued onto it. The collector’s collection number and the herbarium’s accession number are on the sheet so the exact same specimen can be found and examined again later. A type locality is the geographical location where the type specimen was originally found.

Here are the four plants with type localities in the Bodie Hills:

Boechera bodiensis (Bodie Hills rock-cress) was described by Reed Rollins (in Contributions of the Gray Herbarium 212:113, 1982) from material originally identified (in 1945) as a hybrid of Arabis sparsiflora and A. fernaldiana. Additional specimens collected over the next 4 decades provided the basis for its recognition as a new species in 1982. In the early 2000s, molecular studies showed that Arabis actually consisted of two distantly related clades, with morphological similarities attributed to evolutionary convergence. All the species in the Bodie Hills previously treated as Arabis now belong in Boechera. Boechera species are notoriously difficult to define, key, and identify. The Flora of North America notes that “a rare confluence of hybridization, apomixis, and polyploidy makes this one of the most difficult genera in the North American flora.” Perhaps it’s still an actively evolving group. Boechera bodiensis is still regarded as being of hybrid origin, but with B. falcifructa as one of the parents.

Boechera bodiensis with sagebrush (Photo © James D. Morefield via Natureserve)

The type specimen is Ira L. Wiggins and Reed C. Rollins #536, collected on August 3, 1945 (UC727326) northwest of Masonic Peak, perhaps between Chemung Mine and Lakeview Spring. Habitats of Bodie Hills rock-cress include dry, open, rocky, high or north-facing slopes, exposed rocky ridges and summits, moisture-accumulating microsites in sagebrush, under shrubs, and disturbed soils of prospector’s diggings.

Boechera bodiensis has been found mostly on and around Masonic Mountain in the Bodie Hills and Glass Mountain, southeast of Mono Lake. A few additional collections are from the Wassuk Range and the southern White Mountains.

Boechera bodiensis in flower (Photo © James D. Morefield)

Streptanthus oliganthus (Masonic Mountain jewelflower) was described by Reed Rollins (in Contributions of the Dudley Herbarium 3(11):372-373, 1946) from another collection by Wiggins and Rollins on the same day (maybe even the same time and location) as the type specimen for Boechera bodiensis. The type specimen is Ira L. Wiggins and Reed C. Rollins #535, collected on August 3, 1945 (UC727392) (see the specimen here).

Streptanthus oliganthus (Photo © Janel Johnson via iNaturalist, CC BY-NC 4.0)

Streptanthus oliganthus grows in dry, open pinyon pine woodland and sagebrush scrub habitat. Most collections have been around Masonic Mountain and the east side of the Sweetwater Mountains. Collections near Sonora Pass, in the White Mountains near Westgard Pass, and in the Copper Mountain area southwest of Conway Summit have been attributed to S. oliganthus, but may be S. cordatus. Streptanthus cordatus is similar in size and habitat, but is is more prevalent in the eastern Sierra Nevada and Great Basin ranges. The two are distinguished as follows:

Streptanthus key

Cusickiella quadricostata (Bodie Hills Cusickiella) was described by Reed Rollins (in Contributions of the Dudley Herbarium 3:366, 1946) as Draba quadricostata. Cusickiella (named for W.C. Cusick, an Oregon plant collector, 1842–1922) is a small group of only two species now segregated from Draba. Cusickiella differs from Draba most noticablely in the shape of the fruits. The fruits of Cusickiella have rounded or keeled valves, whereas in Draba the valves are typically cylindric or flat. Also, the fruits of Cusickiella contain only 1–4 ovules or seeds, whereas Draba has 10 or more.

Cusickiella quadricostata (Photo © Tim Messick)

The type specimen of Cusickiella quadricostata is Annie Alexander & Louise Kellogg #4543 (UC694166), collected on July 28, 1945. The type locality is “on the road to Bodie, 2 miles southwest of Masonic Spring, southeast flank of Masonic Mountain, altitude 8600 feet.” They encountered this plant earlier the same day at New York Hill (#4540), and might have found it around the north side of Masonic Mountain too, had they stopped in the right place. This specimen (#4543) appears to be the very last collection the team of Alexander and Kellogg ever made in the Bodie Hills. They collected elsewhere in Mono County in 1946, including in Bridgeport Meadows, but they did not return to the Bodie Hills.

Cusickiella quadricostata is known from quite a few locations in the Bodie Hills, with additional locations in the Sweetwater Mountains, Pine Grove Hills, and southern Wassuk Range of Mono, Mineral, and Lyon counties. Its habitat is usually gravelly slopes, ridges, and flats, associated with scattered low sagebrush or cushion plants. The other species of Cusickiella, C. douglasii, is also found in the Bodie Hills, but it has a much wider range, extending to Nevada, Washington, Idaho, and Utah. They differ as follows:

Cusickiella key

Phacelia monoensis (Mono County phacelia) was described by Richard Halse, of Oregon State University in Corvallis (Madroño 28:124, 1981) from material previously identified as Miltitsia lutea. Miltitzia is a group of yellow-flowered annuals now treated as a section of Phacelia, in the part of Boraginaceae previously treated as Hydrophyllaceae. The type specimen is Annie Alexander & Louise Kellogg #4346 (UC736041), collected on June 30 1945.

Phacelia monoensis (Photo © Tim Messick)

The type locality, quoted from the specimen label, is “Altitude 7375 feet; in scraped ground of red, caked adobe above road and meadow, Mormon Ranch, 8.5 miles south-west of Bodie.” The label also notes that the plants were “associated with Nemacladus rigidus.” Topographic maps of this area from 1911 to 1958 place “Mormon Ranch” near the east end of Mormon Meadow, about where Clearwater Creek crosses today’s State Route 270. The nearest and most extensive area of clayey red soil is on the low hills on the south side of Mormon Meadow, just east of today’s Coyote Springs Road. Unfortunately, much of this area has been heavily trampled for several decades by sheep concentrated around a sheep herder’s camp.

Phacelia monoensis is known from several other locations in the Bodie Hills, Sweetwater Mountains, Pine Grove Hills, and far-northern White Mountains in Mono, Mineral, Lyon, and perhaps Esmeralda counties. The “monoensis” epithet is apt, because a majority of the known populations are still to be found in Mono County. It favors dark red or red-brown clayey soils that are loosened by natural shrink-swell processes or by the occasional passing of vehicles along unpaved roads.

Bonus: a Mineral, Bodieite
Minerals have type specimens and type localities too. The recently-described mineral Bodieite has one of its two co-type localities in the Bodie Hills near Masonic Mountain.

Bodieite (photos here) is a soft, colorless to yellow or green, crystalline mineral. It is unique in being both a tellurate and a sulfate of bismuth [Bi₂(TeO₃)₂(SO₄)]. Bodieite was “named for the Bodie Hills volcanic field, in which the Pittsburg-Liberty mine is located, and for the town of Bodie, California, which is about 19 km SSE of the Pittsburg-Liberty mine.”

Bodieite has two rather widely separated co-type localities: (1) the Pittsburg-Liberty Mine, at New York Hill in the Masonic District of the northern Bodie Hills, and (2) tailings of the North Star Mine (Star Consolidated Mine), on the south side of Mammoth Peak, near Mammoth (but not the Mammoth in Mono County), in the East Tintic Mountains of Juab County, Utah (southwest of Provo and Utah Lake).

Thanks to Jim Morefield and Janel Johnson for their photos of the Boechera and the Streptanthus!

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Posted in Bodie Hills, Botany, History, Plant Identification

Tagged Bodie Hills, Bodieite, Boechera, Botany, Cusickiella, Masonic Mountain, Native Plants, Phacelia, Streptanthus, Type Localities, Type Specimens

Does Dune Horsebrush Occur in the Bodie Hills?

Posted on October 21, 2017 | 6 comments

Tetradymia tetrameres isn’t normally a hill-dwelling plant. As the common name suggests, it’s found most often in deep sands and old, stabilized sand dunes (foreground and center, in the photo above). Deep sand and old dunes usually occur in valleys and basins, not hills, though sometimes deep sandy soils can be found in canyons or ravines that penetrate hilly uplands.

Dune horsebrush near the mouth of a canyon entering Adobe Valley.

In California this plant found in the north and northeastern Mono Basin, in Adobe Valley (southeast of Mono Basin), and perhaps in Deep Springs Valley (south of the White Mountains). The CNPS Inventory of Rare and Endangered Plants ranks it as “fairly endangered in California, common elsewhere” but globally it’s “apparently secure, considering populations outside California”.

Outside of California, the “global” range of dune horsebrush encompasses just a handfull of counties in northwest and central Nevada — again, mostly in “sand dunes,” “sandy desert,” “dunes of compacted sand,” “sand in and around small, rather stable dunes,” etc.

Persistent phyllaries and lingering papus bristles give dune horsebrush
a bright appearance during September and October.

But does it occur in the Bodie Hills? Well, there’s an unnumbered collection by the Mariposa-based lawyer/botanist Joseph Whipple Congdon dated Aug 17, 1898. The location is given as “Bodie. Desert road.” Berkeley Mapper places the collection site near Bodie, which is logical based on the label information, but unlikely because there are no deep sands or dunes near Bodie. Having not seen this ancient specimen (DS1815), I thought it might be misidentified, but the specimen bears no annotation labels changing the determination, and Congdon had previously collected Tetradymia canescens, again without subsequent corrections.

His other collection locations on August 17 (“Mono Lake,” and “Desert Road”) shed no further light on the location of the Tetradymia. But on the 13th he was at Mono Pass and Bloody Canyon. On the 14th he was at Walker Lake. On the 15th and 16th he was at “Walker Lake to Mono Lake,” “Below Walker Lake,” and “Near Mono Lake.” So this was the smaller Walker Lake east of Mono Pass, not the larger Walker Lake near Hawthorne in Nevada. I think he may have spent a night or two at Goat Ranch on the south edge of the Bodie Hills, because he collected there on the 18th, then on the 19th he was on his way to Bridgeport. I doubt he even went to Bodie on this trip.

So where did Congdon collect his Tetradymia tetrameres, and was it “in the Bodie Hills”? I think he encountered it in the stabilized dunes he would have passed through if he had traveled the road from the DeChambeau Creek area, past DeChambeau Ranch (on today’s Cemetery Road) to Goat Ranch. Today, these dunes are also crossed by Highway 167, and the practiced eye will easily recognize dune horsebrush there on both sides of the highway north of Black Point. But this is clearly in the Mono Basin, not in the Bodie Hills, and some 9 to 11 air miles from the town of Bodie.

Part of the 1911 USGS 1:125,000 Bridgeport quadrangle, showing
the many roads between Black Point and Goat Ranch.

Dune horsebrush along Highway 167, north of Black Point.

There are, however, at least a few individuals of T. tetrameres actually in the Bodie Hills, just barely, along Cottonwood Canyon Road, near the mouth of Cottonwood Canyon, in sandy soil, but uncharacteristically in pinyon pine woodland. Having also seen dune horsebrush on sandy flats and slopes in a canyon of the southern Adobe Hills, at the northwest end of Adobe Valley, I would not be surprised to see more of it along the southeast edge of the Bodie Hills, where sandy deposits of the northeastern Mono Basin climb into some of the little valleys and canyons west and northeast of Cedar Hill.

Dune horsebrush in marginal habitat at the edge of the Bodie Hills.

Dune horsebrush has a very limited range in California. It has a wider range in Nevada, but is still endemic to the western and central Great Basin. It is easily overlooked and partial to remote, dry, dusty places, so I think a lot more of it could be found with some deliberate searching.

• • •

Speaking of “horsebrushes,” what other Tetradymia species occur in the Bodie Hills? Tetradymia canescens, “gray horsebrush,” is common (but rarely if ever abundant) on dry slopes among sagebrush through much of the range. Tetradymia glabrata, “little leaf horsebrush,” was collected somewhere on Rough Creek by Clare Hardham in 1969, and near lower Cottonwood Canyon by Frank Vasek in 1975. I’ve seen it on a low ridge at the west end of Fletcher Valley. Tetradymia spinosa, the (visiously) “spiny horsebrush,” is found in the northern and eastern foothills of the Bodie Hills. Tetradymia axillaris, the longer-spined “cotton-thorn” or “longspine horsebrush” has been collected in northern Owens Valley (Mono Co.), north of Yerington (Lyon Co.), and north of Luning (Mineral Co.), but probably isn’t in the Bodie Hills.

Tetradymia canescens

Tetradymia spinosa

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Posted in Bodie Hills, Botany, History

Tagged Asteraceae, Bodie Hills, Botany, California, Horsebrush, Mono County, Native Plants, Tetradymia

Category Archives: History

A History of Plant Collecting in the Bodie Hills

Plants Described from the Bodie Hills

Does Dune Horsebrush Occur in the Bodie Hills?

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