Dunes! (original post 6/26/12)

This week marks the beginning of my true summer vacation, unhampered in any way by soul-sucking Common Core professional development sessions of doom, which were the theme of last week.  I kicked it off with JB, who is now on summer vacation indefinitely, that bastard, by going on a jaunt to the Indiana Dunes.  It was an ominously beautiful day--low 70s, fresh breeze, piercing blue sky.  Ominous, because one could imagine that being the last day under 90 degrees until October.  We hit up the Cowles Bog Trail at the National Lakeshore first--a loop through a sandy black oak dune/savanna, also passing by the Cowles Bog, which is not technically a bog but rather a fen.  Skunk cabbages abounded.  We will not hold this misnomer against it.  Here is where the trail headed down to the beach after a precipitous drop over the rear dune:

Anyway, it was a lovely rolling hike with an unusual assortment of species.  I've spent days of my life tromping through the black oak dunes at IL Beach, but the cast of characters here was completely different.  My god, the blueberries!  Vaccinium pallidum, or late low blueberry (and possibly its associate, Vaccinium angustifolium, early low blueberry; I made the fatal error of not bringing Swink & Wilhelm with me out on the trail) formed the ground cover in the majority of the loop:

Also seen--lots of sassafras, witch hazel, spicebush, butterfly weed, wild lupine, blackberry, and summer grape, Vitis aestivalis, with its groovy leaves:

I found a couple of species that I thought were one thing, but upon looking them up later in S&W, could probably be something else.  Sister species of the sand savanna, who are distinguished by silly things like length of achenes and number of stigmas, which I sadly cannot tell from my photos.  For example, I thought this little guy was Panicum latifolium (broad-leaved panic grass), but by looking at the associate lists, it's more likely to be its neighbor in the dichotomous key, Panicum clandestinum (deer-tongue grass [love that name]):

And this one, who I thought was Galium circaezans hypomalacum (wild licorice), but is more likely Galium pilosum (hairy bedstraw), who likes to hang out with species like butterfly weed, woodland sunflower, bracken fern, black oak, and spiderwort, all of which were abundant:

And for those of you who don't give a crap about botanical nit-picking about drab little wallflowers, here are some lovelies for your viewing pleasure...Phlox pilosa, downy phlox:

Campanula rotundifolia, harebell (which, incidentally, I've only ever seen in National Parks...here, Voyageurs, and Glacier):

And one of the Sparganiums, a bur-reed, with its snappy little pom-pom flowers:

We then hit up the state park area, and the loose sand trails that go up and down and up and down and around and around the dune complex.  On a hotter day, it would have been hellish and unthinkable.  Under the ominously lovely conditions, however, it was just mildly funny that that sand was so deep and so shifty it took us, young people in reasonably good physical shape, about 15 minutes to climb a 162-foot dune.  Note:  my Tevas were indispensable on this hike.  The botany was not as notable at this site; it was a bit degraded, with a lot of bittersweet invasion.  The topography made up for it.

Where to next?