Keiths Dome, El Dorado County
Key Reason to Go: If your timing is right, Truckee lewisia (Lewisia longipetala). If your timing is off, a wonderful array of other alpine plants that make this a really pretty spot from which to view Lake Tahoe.
Best Time to Go: As always with high elevations, the snow will decide this. If everything goes on schedule, you can access the trails and find your way to Keiths Dome in late July or early August to look for these little plants.
Another Unusual Lewisia
Keiths Dome is one of a very few places you can find this long-lost lewisia (see back story, below). The trailhead, as such, is actually a boat ramp at Echo Lake. Many people prefer to take the boat from the ramp to the other side of the lake, saving several miles of walking along the trail that connects the many vacation cabins along the north shore. A few miles along the shoreline will get you to a fork in the trail with the trail to Triangle Lake being the correct direction to go. Take your map with you because you will sort of need to find your own “best route” once you get closer. Of course it would be ideal to use a GPS with a waypoint to the summit of Keiths Dome (10S 751169m E, 4304975m N; 8642 ft.) so that you can always know what direction you should be headed.
Walk or ride, but get to the trail to Haypress Meadow and then find the junction to head up to Keiths Dome.
The back story: This lewisia was originally discovered near Truckee, northwest of Lake Tahoe, in 1875 by John Gill Lemmon (1832-1908), an amateur botanist from Michigan and a Civil War veteran who had come west after the war. He and his wife Sara Allen Plummer-Lemmon hiked along the Pacific coast investigating and writing about plant life.
The species was so localized that the location of L. longipetala was lost and remained unseen again until it was rediscovered in 1967, when Dr. G. Ledyard Stebbins (1906-2000) stumbled upon some sites in the Crystal Range.
“As we were crossing some bare granite slabs, l noticed, peering out from the cracks through which were trickling rivulets of water from the melting snow drifts above us, the delicate pale pink flowers of a Lewisia that I did not recognize. Its location and altitude of 8600 feet, as well as the position of its peduncular bracts, were right for the high Sierran species L. pygmaea and L. nevadensis, but the flowers of the specimen I noticed were much larger than is typical for the two species named, which we had seen already several times that day. I took specimens and that evening identified them as Lewisia pygmaea subsp. longipetala, of which the range given in Munz’s California Flora is ‘Sierra Nevada, s.w. of Truckee.’”
As it happens, Keiths Dome is very near the Mt. Price location mentioned by Stebbins, so this special plant is really confined to a small area. It was particularly rewarding to climb the dome and find the plants in bloom.
As always, remember that these directions to unusual plants are offered with the expectation that you are an honorable plant observer and understand that these plants are not to be collected! Enjoy seeing them, take pictures, have lunch while staring at them, but leave them be. If you like them and want to grow some, here is a Google list of places that offer them for sale at as little as $5.
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