Kitty, I am rotating pictures, so the same ones aren't always up. You are welcome to right click and save any you want. Don't delete yours!
Xer, bristlecone pines grow incredibly slow- an inch of wood will have more than a hundred annual rings compacted into it. The climate up there is extremely harsh, and soil frozen most of the year. Hurricane force winds carry granite sand that blasts the bark and wood right off, so in a very old tree, only a thin living strip of bark hides on the lee side of a scoured and blasted trunk, supporting a few living branches, among a bunch of tortured dead ones.
I not only have seen both redwoods, coast and Sierra, but visited and photographed the largest and tallest of them. Before they were protected (one of Lincoln's greatest acts!) at least four, larger than the reigning champions General Sherman and General Grant, were felled. Not for wood, but for circus side shows, pieces shipped around for disbelieving people. Pieces - because a whole stump was too big to haul. Biggest of all was the Dowd Tree, in the Calaveras grove. I have a sequoia in our garden, and it is the fastest growing tree here. It was planted in 1995, as a one gallon size tree, about a foot tall, with a "trunk" a little more than pencil thick. Now it is 30 feet tall, and the trunk is twenty inches in diameter.
The butterfly was a female. Females are always larger than males.
I have tried to cultivate the lilies, no success. Those growing in "harm's way" near a trail, I dug and moved to locations on the "other side" of boulders, and in places where people are unlikely to go. One small meadow has a nice, successful lily colony growing now. I could get in trouble for doing that, by the environmentalists, because I didn't ask their permission, or anyone else's. Fact is, on that trail, my work probably kept the lilies from becoming extinct in that little alpine valley.
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