Doug's Mountain Journal
A Chronicle of Natural History on San Bruno Mountain

Doug Allshouse has been writing his seasonal Mountain Journal for many years. We are very pleased to share his reflections on the natural history of the Mountain. Together with David Nelson, he is writing San Bruno Mountain: A Guide to the Flora and Fauna. The book will be published by Heyday Books in November 2022.

Summer 2022

“Non dirmelo'' That's Italian for “Don’t tell me.” Don’t tell me it’s September already? The sun is moving south and the autumn plants are beginning to assert themselves while a few summer blooms hang on. Sticky monkey flower (Diplacus aurantiacus) is still in bloom. The cow parsnip (Heracleum maximum) has gone to seed. Our native horseweed (Erigeron canadensis) has broken ground, lining the Bog Trail like obedient soldiers standing in attention. They are getting ready to flower and seed and become food for our overwintering birds.

California aster (Symphyotrichum chilense) is blooming. For the first time in recent memory the false lily-of-the-valley (Maianthemum dilatatum) failed to flower. It never has been a prodigious flowering plant and has never produced a fruit; a fact mentioned in the 1990 flora. The Golden-crowned and Fox Sparrows are due any day now. It’s transition time!

We began our new rain season on July 1 and the totals for 2021-2022 were 21.42 inches of precipitation over 147 days. That total includes 94 days of fog totaling 1.80 inches of precipitation. Last year’s totals were 5.13 inches short of what we got from July 1, 2019 to June 30, 2021! Through the end of August this year we have accumulated 0.84 inches of precipitation with a measly 0.01 inches from a south-to-north storm system that mostly bypassed the northern Peninsula.

Dune tansy (Tanacetum bipinnatum) has an interesting story. It was originally on Radio Road near Summer Seep, a wet area that supports a few species of ferns and rushes. It became extirpated from its original location sometime between the publishing of the 1968 flora and the 1990 flora. Cuttings from the original plant were taken to the East Bay Regional Parks Botanical Garden and the plants were reintroduced to another location on Radio Road and a more accessible location between the trailheads of the Bog and Old Guadalupe trails. They stopped flowering many years ago but have otherwise held on. A small native plant demonstration garden was planted on this sloping piece of pie-shaped ground. A new fence was erected to discourage short-cutting through the garden. My co-author, David Nelson, built a make-shift frame from pieces of branches around the plant and I have been weeding it. Around March or April I noticed a second plant sprouting from the ground about 4 feet away. It had grown to about 6 inches tall but met its demise at the hands of a string trimmer in late June. The fact that the other one had a frame around it saved it. On September 3rd I noticed that the other tansy had sprouted again and this time there will be a better effort to protect it.

We all suffer from stretches in time where we have trouble remembering something that was lucid in our minds just a day or week ago. We also have no problem recalling a specific moment in time, even something from our childhood. One of my favorite recalls happened on my annual winter CNPS field trip on January 19, 2013. That was the day I met my co-author, David Nelson. I was discussing the pros and cons of several restoration projects that took place on the Saddle and Bog trails when someone asked me a profound question, “What defines a successful restoration project?” Without hesitation I replied, “Never walking away from it.” In too many instances a lot of time, labor, and money are spent on preparing and planting a plot of land with follow-up weeding sessions for a certain amount of time. Everything looks great, and then we move on to another project, and in a frighteningly short amount of time, Mother Nature undoes all the good things we have accomplished.

On a recent morning walk in the park—where I get 95% of the material I write about in my Mountain Journal— I took a photo of a small portion of the Bog Trail. There is nothing really special about this piece of trail other than I remember how it used to look when I first traversed the lower bog trail that was added a couple of years after the state and county park opened in 1985. There was an open grassy area with a Himalayan blackberry patch hugging a wall of Monterey cypress trees and I used to pick blackberries there. Fifteen black and white photos were included in the 1990 Flora of the San Bruno Mountains by Elizabeth McClintock, Paul Reeberg, and Walter Knight. One of the photos showed Peter Rubtzoff and Irja Knight standing in that grassy area with the blackberry patch and cypress in the background. Needless to say, Mother Nature had her way and thirty-five years later the space is littered with Arroyo willows (Salix lasiolepis). About five or six years ago David, Mark Sustarich, and I decided to replicate the same fifteen photos in the previous flora to illustrate the changes that occurred since its publication. When we got to the spot where the Rubtzoff-Knight photo was taken and I mentioned that it was indeed the same spot, David was aghast at how much it had changed.

There was a small wildfire on the mountain several months ago. It was reported around 4:00 AM on a foggy wet-drizzly morning. It started at the top and burned down the hill above Preservation Parcel in South San Francisco. There is an old communications building just north of the burn area between the Parcel and Firth Canyon in Brisbane. Word has it that there is no electrical power to the building and the nature of the blaze would suggest that an old downed power line would have ignited it. It was too foggy and miserable to comprehend some person crazy enough to hike up the very steep and wet hill in the dark and start a fire. The firefighters were amazed that the grass and brush were even burning in the extremely wet conditions. Commute traffic was tied up along Bayshore Boulevard heading to the onramp of southbound 101 around 7:00 AM. No cause, that I’m aware of, has been found.

FYI: Radio Road is open…with some restrictions. Check the sign by the gate at the bottom of Radio Road in the auxiliary parking lot for details. And please obey the 15 mph speed limit. You may also walk or bicycle to the summit on Radio Road, and walking it may astound you from season to season. There is a lot to see on either side of the road that is easily missed while biking or driving. Check it out!

See you on the Mountain…