ONAPA WV Field Trip: Part 3, Forest Roadside Botanizing

After lunch on the second day of our ONAPA (Ohio Natural Areas and Preserves Assocation) field trip our group, in a lengthy caravan of cars, began roadside botanizing. But first, a photo of the participants, courtesy of Guy Denny and tweaked by yours truly.

Our guides had earlier scouted prime floral locations for us, all on forest roads in the Monongahela National Forest. Soon after leaving our lunch spot, the Cranberry Mountain Nature Center, we dove off Route 150 (part of the Highland Scenic Highway) and into the woods.

At each stop we piled out to investigate the flowers.

One of our first finds was the large purple-fringed orchid.

A closer look with the camera's flash turned on produced an interesting effect.

Most of the time we parked on the side of the road, and fortunately never met a vehicle coming the other way. Twice there was a more generous pullout.

A flying insect was investigating the buds on this poke milkweed.

At one point the navigators in the lead car realized that we had taken a wrong turn, and we were forced turn our vehicles around one-by-one on the narrow forest road, making the last car the new first car. In this map, purple marks the main route, red the errant leg, and blue the way north that Joan and I took at the end of the excursion (everyone else continued on the purple route). Click on the image to enlarge.

More roadside botany,

including this purple-flowering raspberry,

and this wood mint, probably a hairy wood mint ("flowers whitish or pale lavender, with purple spots"), or possibly a downy wood mint ("flowers pale blue, lavender, or whitish, with purple spots").

For many the star of the show, at our final stop,

was a patch of canada lilies,

but there were also pretty monarda tucked among the mints.

A few minutes after the caravan departed to head home, wherever that might be, Joan and I parted with it, taking the "blue route" to our B&B for the night, the Morning Glory Inn.

For dinner we drove up to the Snowshoe Mountain Ski Resort, where several of the restaurants were open even in late June. We reviewed our maps for tomorrow's add-on adventure, not part of the ONAPA field trip, to the Green Bank Observatory.