Illinois River Hike and Waldo Takilma Botanical Area Clean-up

KS Wild Board President Joe Flaherty helping hike participants to identify plants

This is a quick recap of our recent Illinois River Wildflower Hike and Waldo Takilma Botanical Area Clean Up. First of all, we want to say - our KS supporters are awesome and it's great to meet such cool people that live in the valley. Both events were well attended while being very productive and educational. That makes us super excited for future events!  

We had 18 people total on our Wildflower Hike. Folks came from all over the Valley - Ashland, Medford, Eugene, Selma, Williams, Merlin, Talent, and Grants Pass. Thanks to KS Wild Board President Joseph Flaherty, who was very helpful and brought his wildflower book for reference. Howard Erbe is a fantastic botanist and helped everyone identify and enjoy the wildflowers, they were beautiful that time of year! We loved the diverse and unique mix of individuals this hike brought out, we hope to keep up with some of those connections.

The Waldo-Takilma Area of Critical Environmental Concern Botanical Area Clean Up had 27 people total. This is our 3rd Annual clean up at this location. Romain Cooper and Christie Nelson contributed a lot to the day. Romain and Christie incorporated more of a cultural and botanical aspect to the day for the students.  We learned that there is an ancient burial ground for both the earliest settlers in the area and also the Chinese miners who lost their lives here while far away from home.

Clean up participants and the trash they removed from the Waldo Takilma  ACEC

After the clean up and archaeological cultural history tour, we had lunch and then went on a botanical tour. Lots of monkey flower was blooming along with rock cress. The botanist from the BLM, Stacey, mentioned there is a rare wildflower that blooms here that has yet to be named!  It's a small, dark purple flower. We didn't find any that day but she said they should be blooming any day now.  

Beautiful trees and wildflowers as far as the eye can see

It was so great to incorporate local school kids, science teachers and their classes to provide such amazing experiences in the education of our future leaders! We hope to partner again in the Fall to revisit the site for another phase of the project and a 'native planting day',  to reintroduce the Area of Critical Environmental Concern to native plant species.

Please join us for one of our future events