Deschutes Falls State Park
It is just a short drive from Clearwood to Deschutes Falls State park. The Deschutes River is small, but there is a steep drop forming an impressive waterfall. The park is maintained by an on site caretaker. There is a large road beyond the parking lot used as a trail to the falls, abuot a four minute walk down hill. A treeless grassy plain forms most of the park on the way to the river. Along the way I shot a Scots Broom, no flowers of course, and most of the ones I saw were also denuded of leaves, just green angular shoots in clumps. When the trees appear, they start with a common Hawthorn, leafless but still hanging onto fruit in small bunches. Dark red, like little cherries with an opening on the far end from the stem. Lichens, mostly Usnea hung from its branches and trunk, so much so that the tree appears pale white from a distance. A few mushrooms, one bunch of gray mycenoid caps and a type of LBM scattered among moss. The software offered a few identifications, for the moss too, but I'll let that go until I have studied them a bit more. Some witche's butter, I thnk and finally a group of Licorice Ferns on a tree. This was more like a test run to judge my new method of geotagging photos. It is a bit cumbersome , My smart phone keeps track of where I am on the clock, then using geotagging software to transfer the track acquired by the phone software onto the timing of the photos, and that means uploading all of it into my desktop. But obviously a lot faster than entering and searching for a location for each ID. It was a short but fun day. And very accurate, right down to a near footprint. GPS and Glonass. The phone is new and doesn't have a SIM yet, so this was satellite location only.
