I just got a link to a great resource for identifying plants, fossils, animals, and many other things. The site is CalPhotos. It’s ran by Cal State Berkeley. It contains thousands of photos of plants, animals, fossils, fungi, habitats, and much more. By far the biggest collection is the plants and animals collection. There are over 70,000 images in the plants-annuals/perennial collection itself. The whole collection can be searched using an advanced search that let’s you define your search in many different ways.

I was looking for my unidentified flower from the last post on there. I now know that the flower is a violet. So I chose plants-annuals/perennial for the type of photo and then chose viola for the scientific name and 544 images came up. I went through the first 12 pages or so and came up with two possibilities for the flower. I will go through the more picture later and see if anything else looks close.

Thanks to John Wall on the CalPhoto Group for pointing me to this site.

Took a drive yesterday up and over Ebbetts Pass and then down to Dorington to check out and shoot the Dogwoods I had heard were blooming there. They were blooming and they were beautiful. I think I missed the peak of the bloom by a couple days though. Many of the flowers had been eaten in places and had brown spots on them. I was able to find a couple of trees that looked real nice though. Spent most of my time photographing those couple of trees.

I did a lot of driving around the area. I like it. The forest in there is very nice. Lots of big Sugar Pines and Cedars. It’s always interesting walking beneath Sugar Pines. I worry that one of the huge cones will fall from two hundred feet up and knock me in the head. Those cones could do some major damage to your knoggin. :)

The only problem I see living in that area is fire. If a fire comes through there you are going to loose everything. There’s no way to save your home. The houses set in the middle of the forest and they will be toast if there’s a fire. It would be cool to live in the forest like that though. At least I’d like it.

Driving across Ebbetts Pass is fun. I’d say it’s the wildest of the major passes in the Sierra. Most of the road is very narrow. They don’t even bother with a center line, the road isn’t wide enough. It sure is pretty up there. There are some amazing Junipers growing near the pass. Old, gnarled warriors that stand up against the Sierra’s fiercest storms. I want to go back there this summer and get some pictures of them. It’s a good thing I had the road to myself yesterday. Because I was constantly distracted by the Junipers.

There’s still quite a bit of snow above 8000 feet. The two lakes you drive past still had ice on them.

All in all I had a pretty good day. Got some good pictures and most importantly I got away from the house and up into the mountains for the day.

I’m going to post a little more detailed post on CalNaturePhoto later on today. I will include some pictures from the trip too.

The excitement of the morning is gone now. I found out how it all happened though. Someone liked the story and used the **Share This** link that I have at the bottom of every post and submitted the story to StumbleUpon. Cool. The hits didn’t last all day though. They lasted for about an hour at the high rate and then dropped the next hour and dropped again the next hour and then everything was back to normal.

It was pretty awesome though. I couldn’t believe it when I saw all of those hits this morning. It brought a lot of new people to the site, and hopefully some of them will come back.

Just so you guys know, if you enjoy a post on CalNaturePhoto and you want to share it with the world, you can click on the **Share This** link and submit the story to many different sites. Also on the bottom of the side bar, under Blog Directories there is a link to FeedBurner. If you click on that link you cast a vote for CalNaturePhoto and it helps to bring more people in. If I get enough votes I get put on the front page of FeedBurner.

You may be wondering why I don’t have all of these new toys on SierraVisions. It’s because SierraVisions is very out of date and can’t handle these toys. The web has changes so much in the last few years that our little site has become an antique. I know, many of you like it that way. I do too. But, changes are in the wind. I’m currently working on the new version of SierraVisions that will bring it up to date. Now don’t worry, the look and feel will be as it’s been for years. There will be some layout changes, but mostly the site will stay as is.
The biggest changes will be invisible to the public. It’s the back end of the site that will change most. And that will help to draw more people into the site. As the site is now, Google doesn’t even scan the home page anymore. It’s in Google’s database, but they don’t stop by and see what’s new. That’s because of the old code that creates the site. So once the new version is up and running, Google will stop by again and bring more visitors with them.

I’m not sure when I’ll have everything ready. It’s not real high on my priority list at the moment. I’m working on it when I have spare time. It will most likely be in a month or two. I wasn’t going to tell you guys yet, but I figure now is as good a time as any. :)

Beavertail Cactus, Eastern Sierra, Ca