Date: April 12th, 2018
Location: Carson Falls Latitude: 37°57’49.17″N, Longitude: 122°37’29.68″W, Elevation: 1,042 feet
Site description: Carson Falls is located in Marin County just north of Mount Tam. The terrain is rugged, with many serpentine soil. Carson Falls is a popular location, due to its beautiful waterfall, but also provides habitat for many unusual plants.
The divericate phacelia, also known as phacelia divercata in the boraginaceae family, is an annual plant growing 9-40 cm. The stem is decumbent to erect, simple to branched at base, and puberulent to short-hairy. The leaves are elliptic to narrowly ovate, entire to irregularly loved at the base, with a blade generally greater than petiole. The flowers are laceolate to obovate, puberulent, with stiff-ciliate. The shape of the flowers are funnel to widely bell-shaped, with a lavender to violet color.
Narrative: We left campus at around 1:00PM and it took about an hour to get to Carson falls. The weather was sunny, but also windy. It had been a long time since I’ve seen such an active waterfall that I was happy we got to see Carson Falls. However, my ankles seem to not like walking in tall grass areas, as I fell a total of 4 times, all in the grass. Luckily, I did not slip into any mud or water. On the way back, I was scared to jump across a stream as I have short legs, and Prof Paul came back and said I could use my foot as a stepping stone. I refused because I would have felt bad squashing his foot, so I opted for a hand instead.