Lote tmeAsU ss BIOeNe *BeUe Lb Lb Beli-N 3 
Westward, Ho! Continued 
By Mrs. AMY BALDWIN 
I'OR THE SECOND half of my Western trip (see the September, 1952 Audubon 
Bulletin) I spent two weeks at the Audubon Camp of California, from June 
14th to 28th, at the 7,000 foot elevation of Donner Summit in the Sierra 
Nevada Mountains. 
Leaving Los Angeles on the Southern Pacific Railroad, I had a fifteen- 
hour journey during the night to Sacramento. Enroute we went through a 
two-mile tunnel in the mountains which possibly was the very one damaged 
by the earthquake three to four weeks later. Awakening at day-break, I 
enjoyed country entirely new to me. Two large, unusual fields attracted my 
attention while in the diner for breakfast. Inquiring what they could be, 
I was told they were rice paddies. I saw an American Egret fly up as our 
train sped by. I had seen rice before, growing along a stream in the north 
woods of Michigan, but) there an Indian with his squaw was harvesting the 
rice into a boat as she paddled along. 
From Sacramento I took a Greyhound Bus to Soda Springs, where the 
station wagon took us up to the camp at Sugar Bowl Valley. The scenery 
was beautiful — mountainous country with much snow still on the slopes, 
although it was the middle of June. The weather was delightful and the air 
was dry, so we didn’t mind the cold as we do here in Chicago where we 
have so much moisture. 
There was no rain for the two weeks until the last two days in camp. 
That seemed like a record, but even ‘so we longed for nice weather, there 
was so much to do those last two days. We saw snow and rain, and on our 
last trip had quite a hail storm. Our first day or two was spent rather 
quietly around camp, getting acquainted and becoming acclimated to the 
altitude. Pussy-willows were blooming, and as soon as the snow melted 
vegetation began springing up. 
We had five instructors, with studies in birds, plants, invertebrates, 
other vertebrates, land forms and nature activities. On our field trips we 
all assembled as a group and each instructor talked on his particular sub- 
ject. Then each one took his group to cover the field as much as possible 
up to a certain time, when we all assembled again and each group gave a 
report on what they had seen and learned. 
Mountains, woods and glacier meadows were studied. The meadows were 
full of different kinds of flowers, stonecrop, pussy paws, caterpillar plant, 
self-heal, wild bleeding heart, penstemons and Indian paint-brush, and 
there were many flowering plants growing out of the rocks. I was glad to 
find a Mariposa lily growing, and close by I saw a rock wren. 
There were many small flowers, but one was most intriguing, a tiny 
plant in bloom; it was found growing close to the ground in pine needles. 
It looked like a tiny bleeding heart, but the instructor told us it was called 
a steer’s-heart. A saprophyte of beauty was the snow plant, one of those 
with no chlorophyll. Bright red, it was an interesting plant, growing gen- 
erally along the edge of a melting snow bank. The flowers are % to *%4 inch 
