Recently it was reported by RT Hawke that an area along the 138 or Pearblossom Highway on the back side of the San Gabriel Mountains was in spectacular bloom, and this led me, in conjunction with a number of other people, to investigate. Tom Chester, Keir Morse, and others made an initial survey of several locations, then I went out on my own to a number of those same localities. I returned with Tom, Kate Harper, Adrienne Ballwey and Walt Fiddler, on which occasion we stopped at several places along the 138, the 18, and Black Butte Basin Road. I can hardly express the level of excitement we felt on traipsing around this area with its tremendous bloom and fantastic diversity that must have been the result of some very localized but substantial rainfall just at the right time to trigger it. It was like Christmas, with a new present around every corner. And our excitement and enjoyment of the spectacle was all the greater because of the three dry years we have endured. We ended the day at Bob's Gap but didn't have time for a complete investigation, so a few days later, we returned to the Pearblossom area, finished up our work there, and spent most of the day at Bob's Gap which contained many different species and an almost equally good bloom. We photographed so many things there that those pictures have been displayed in a separate
photo gallery. The pictures in this gallery were taken 4/1/14, 4/3/14 and 4/7/14, and it is a long one, mainly because it includes photos taken on three trips and contains 100 taxa. The symbol ^ next to the common name indicates a taxon that was new to me when I photographed it on this field trip, and an asterisk is for a non-native species. Thanks to Hartmut Wisch for the bug id's.
