Spring flowers abound.  

The Good

Fairyslippers, chocolate lilies, larkspur, arnica, spring beauties, and many more grace our hikes.    Late spring is our best season for wildlfowers:

The Bad

The death camas looks like a wild onion in its early stages, but once it flowers, it is yellow and has a dsitinctive plume.   All parts of the death camas are poisonous and many deaths have been a result of mistaking the bulb for an onion.   The corm, though, is blackish and scaly and does not smell like an onion.   I was walking through a field of wildflowers in early June and interspersed among the larkspur were thousands of death camas.    This is one flowering plant to learn and memorize.

The Ugly

While hiking in the Stake Lake area, I bushwacked and came across a hillside of false morels.   They fit the ugly category very well.  

They are also toxic.   Mistaken for morels, mushroom pickers have eaten gyromitra and have fallen sick and some have died.    Gyromitra is both bad and ugly, but fascinating to see and photograph nonetheless.