Wildflower Season Opens on the Mattole

The week begins on Saint Patrick's Day, which the county has marked in its customary fashion: a bluegrass party at Humboldt Brews and a general unwillingness to discuss the weather. The weather, for its part, has produced something approaching unprecedented cooperation — mostly sunny skies through Thursday, highs climbing to sixty-eight degrees in what Lady Humboldt can only describe as an audition for summer. The fog, conspicuously absent, has not been reached for comment.

Inland, temperatures may touch eighty degrees — a figure that causes coastal residents to squint suspiciously at their thermometers and inland residents to behave as though they have always lived in the tropics. The gray whales are heading north with their calves, holding close to shore off Trinidad Head. Twelve California condors were counted near Orick on Wednesday, which is either a conservation triumph or the early stages of a committee. Six wildflower species have opened for business in the redwood understory, and the negative tides this weekend will reveal coastline that prefers to remain private. There is much to attend to.

Saturday at 1 PM. The Grove of Titans — home to the largest coast redwoods on Earth — is recruiting volunteer trail stewards to protect these residents from the consequences of their own fame. The Titaneers maintain the rebuilt trail with the sort of devotion Lady Humboldt considers appropriate when one's charges are two thousand years old and cannot relocate.

The California condor — Gymnogyps californianus — continues to treat the Bald Hills as a personal conference venue, with twelve birds counted near Orick and additional delegations observed at Dolason Prairie and along Lyons Ranch Trail. A species once reduced to twenty-two wild individuals now fields enough representatives in a single county to outnumber most city council meetings. Lady Humboldt finds this arithmetically satisfying.

Elsewhere, a Black-and-white Warbler has taken up semipermanent residence at the Arcata Marsh's Brackish Pond — an eastern species whose continued presence in the far northwest suggests either strong convictions or poor navigation. Twelve Pacific Golden-Plovers have assembled at Loleta Bottoms, the Barrow's Goldeneye remains on the Eel at Fernbridge, and a Blue-gray Gnatcatcher was noted along Mad River Road. One hundred bird species were recorded countywide this week. Six wildflower species are in bloom in the redwood understory, the trillium and the fairy slipper orchid chief among them.

On this week in 1860, a late-winter storm of considerable ambition battered the North Coast, flooding every river of consequence, destroying what passed for trails, and isolating Humboldt County's scattered settlements from one another for weeks. The railroad would not reach Eureka for another fifty-four years. Lady Humboldt observes that the county's relationship with isolation has evolved rather than resolved — as anyone who has lost cell service on the Mattole Road can confirm.

Tuesday — Saint Patrick's Day — brings Magoo and Free Limitless Energy to Humboldt Brews at 8:30 PM. The band describes itself as progressive bluegrass redefining the genre with fearless creativity, which Lady Humboldt reads as an invitation to expect the unexpected from a string quartet on a holiday that requires no further encouragement.

Mid-March on the North Coast carries a particular quality of anticipation — the condors circling the Bald Hills in numbers that would have seemed fictional a generation ago, the whales heading north with their calves, six species of wildflower blooming where no one planted them, and the tides pulling back far enough to reveal what the ocean ordinarily keeps to itself. The equinox arrives Thursday. Lady Humboldt considers this a sufficient argument for stepping outside.

Until next week — Lady Humboldt