Hiking Tip #582 - don't touch stinging nettle
Or, if you're gonna touch stinging nettle... make sure there's a doc around!
So yesterday my friend Sonya and I went hiking up the South Fork Trail in the San Gorgonio Wilderness. It was a beautiful day, lots of water in the creeks, and an abundance of wildflowers We hiked about 4 miles up to South Fork Meadows and the mossiest and greenest of the creeks and there we ate our lunch and sat for a spell. Sonya was asking me what all the flowers and plants were but there were a few I didn't recognize, immediately anyway. One she sat next to had greenish inconspicuous flowers and I looked at the flowers but they didn't ring a bell.
A while later down the trail came Allen who is a wilderness volunteer and attended my LNT trainer course in March. He's also an ER doctor. He has a stigma, though, wherever he goes accidents seem to happen. Well, not much was going on at that point, we were just sitting there talking. But then stupid me brushed up against that plant that Sonya had asked me about earlier. Oooops, stinging nettle! Yep, I recognized in about 2 seconds when a part of my arm started to get red and blistered and yes, stung like crazy! I had just never seen it in bloom before and was so concentrated on the flowers I didn't really look at the rest of the plant. But thank goodness for Allen who whipped out his big first aid kit and fixed me up with some Benadryl spray and a tablet in case I have a stronger reaction.
Poor Allen. He can't go anywhere without having to treat someone :p
Talk about good timing, though. After that I saw stinging nettle all over the place and could've accidentally ran into it anywhere for the entire 7 hours we were out...
Anyway, Allen's treatment worked right away, and overall the hike was very enjoyable. Lots of wildflowers up there - we saw Lemon Lillies, Ranger's Buttons, Indian Paintbrush, Richardson's Geraniums, Yarrow, Snowplant, Sulfur Buckwheat, Fireweed, Sneezeweed, Monkeyflowers, Bridge's Penstemon, Showy Penstemon, Dogbane, etc. We also saw a young buck near Horse Meadow, lots of insects including bees with huge pollen sacks, and of course the obligatory squirrels and chipmunks and little birds.
One other interesting aspect of the hike were the up-close sightings of this huge noisy bird... it flew back and forth many times. Later on I found out it was sucking up water out of Jenk's Lake to drop on a fire up on Anderson Peak.
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