Dog Mountain hike 4/9/2025

[serafaery]

Tyler and I climbed Dog Mountain on Wednesday together. It took us 4.5 hrs, due to my foot injury - this used to take me 3 hours. sigh. I really had no business being up there. I did 13 miles with 800' of elevation gain with Cynthia on bikes in the morning, and then Tyler and I did this hike in the afternoon. My legs are killing me. BUT. My foot is kind of okay-ish. In that, it doesn't hurt much worse than it usually does.

It's too early for the big balsamroot show but here are a few early flowers and shrooms - the purple kittentails near the summit are a highly sought-after wildflower, it is rare and only grows in a few conditions and it is a vivid purple that the camera never quite captures.


bird's nest fungus




checker or chocolate lily, depending on who you ask


lil cups of some sort of fungus


calypso orchid aka fairy slipper


helvella mushroom aka elfin saddle


kittentails!








some sort of mushroom hanging out with trillium


pink prairie stars and maybe oregon sunshine?


white prairie star


hello from the summit


trillium


white polypore mushroom of some sort

...

(I'm still not depressed and it still feels weird.)
(one month and one week until my 50th.)

Comments

[michaelboy]

Lovely colors and lovely you soon to be birthday gal! ❤️

[serafaery]

Thank yoooooooooou! It was an uplifting day for sure. It's been several months since I've been up to the top of my favorite mountain and I was worried I wouldn't be able to do it at all.

[littleoldliv]

I love fungus, and I've never seen Bird's Nest fungus before! I love all your pics - where do you host, I'm finding it hard to decide where to host pics that I want to use here. Flickr is an obvious choice, but then I'm not wanting to only post my own pics on here, but screencaps of stuff etc and Flickr doesn't allow for that.

[serafaery]

It's cute right! There are a few different types, some actually have little "eggs" in them, they're very tiny, smaller than a pinkie nail.

I have a blogger set up for three of my gmail addresses, which allows me a ton of free html photo hosting, so one of those pages I literally just use as a photo hosting page: https://serafaery.blogspot.com

google offers this with any gmail account, pretty nifty work-around. They upload videos too but if it's any longer than few seconds I just use youtube for that (I also have a personal account there separate from my business account)

Hope that's helpful! I used to use flickr back in the day but since I can do a handful of super basic OG HTML scripts I find this more straight-forward.

[littleoldliv]

Oh thank you! I hadn't thought of using a google - you mean using a google drive, with permissions set to "anyone can view"?
And I have an old blogspot somewhere. I bet I could dump stuff there. Thanks again. I'm off to google some more fungi!

[serafaery]

Google drive with an "anyone" link seemed too cumbersome for me, I think I tried that for a minute but the code was too long for me to copy/paste accurately? The blogger pages offer just direct image upload, not through Drive, and then I just go back to the page and grab the jpg url that it creates to share the photos :)

[decemberthirty]

I love wildflowers and fungi, and it's really cool to see what's growing in a different part of the world! Some things are similar to what we're seeing here in Pennsylvania, but mostly pretty different. Wild orchids are my fav--would love to have a chance to find a fairy slipper someday.