![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
camping last weekend
I decided on Friday to camp out for the weekend, on a hike I'd looked at in Old Growth Forest Hikes, in a hanging valley just east of Lake Kachess (near Easton, east of the divide). The trail is 1315. Late Friday night I put the pack together and made a midnight groceries run for dry food -- instant oatmeal, noodle soup.
Photos:
On Saturday morning, stopped by Impinj to photocopy this hike out of the book. Then to REI for firestarter and stuff (and, inevitably, more stuff).
After some dithering, pulled over on the shoulder of I-90 to take pictures of Keechelus Lake. Dithered too long to get the shots I actually wanted, but that'll teach me.
Some wrong turns. If you're using the 2002 Green Trails map, there's a road that's not on it that you should be using -- pass by the crummy road under the power lines, and take the unnamed road signed "to 1315 and 1212". Two other cars in the trailhead pulloff.
The trail starts out climbing. Some mountain bikers coming down. Chartreuse lichen!
Downslope, a space full of Doug-fir(?) trunks and branches. Question to ask myself: what do I know that I don't know I know?
I finished the first climbing part, past the waterfall, up into the hanging valley. From this time I was usually within earshot of Silver Creek. Firs and mountain hemlock, largely, and patchy wet meadows. A big poplar here and there, leaves yellow and falling. More than you see the tree itself you see the leaves, hung as ornaments on conifers. Lichen as the first tinsel.
Two big corvids talking with each other. Ravens?
From a distance I thought this was horsetails over the ground, but it's not. Low brush, branchy green twigs, no leaves. Baby red huckleberry?
I'm wondering how far in I can get, and if I should stop whenever I see a good site. On the stream would be good -- could safely build a fire on a pebblebank, and do want access to water. The maps differ but suggest the stream will not be far away. Well, I'll head up out of the head of this level of the valley, aiming for the meadow.
Met aanother mountain biker coming down, "from the service road". She'd had some trouble finding this trail. [Not sure from the map where she'd have been coming from.] I was heading in as far as I could get in the light. You should be fine, it's still light. Stay warm.
I came out into patchy meadow, and passed the side trail, 1308.1. Marked it on either side with loose sticks of bleached wood. I'd like to do the loop, across 1308.1 and down 1308, along the ridgeline. I'm not up for it, though, not carrying this much gear.
At the place where the trail hits the stream at the bottom of the meadow, I walked upstream and looked for a site. Found a pebbly strand in a seasonal stream, but then found an old fire ring, and a decent flat place nearby. Laid my gear down, and went looking for firewood. Couldn't resist going up the stony mound on the northeast side -- sunset over my valley! Deep red staining the top of West Peak. Up the valley further I saw a dramatic fang of stone, vertical on one side.
Hung a rope over a branch of an old snag, for hoisting food. I set up my tent in the fading light, and the stove by flashlight -- water for soup. "Thai Kitchen" noodle soup packet is not half-bad. Better than ramen, and about a hundredth the fat. I bit off pieces of Vella half-dry jack and dropped them in. Must work out the knack of unscrewing the isobutane/propane tank, somehow so as not to get freezing i-bu/pr dripping onto my fingers.
It's cold. Lit a small fire, with my new fire goo taking the place of tinder. Still you do need to sequence wood properly. Much of this wood was damp through, but some pieces were dry and punky. I was so hurried tending the fire that I hardly warmed my hands. Fading fire on a half-burnt log -- quick-rolling blue mercury, lodging in a preferred spot, a cup of red sparks -- zip along channels, playing over and over, shifting in pattern -- a stick face of blue flame on the black log.
Maybe tomorrow I could scramble up West Peak. Or go to that stone fang. I should have time to do anything I want.
The sky is dark. The Milky Way. A shooting star, bright and long -- three arm's-length hands.
Now a star on the hill to the east. Things rise in the east. Lying in that red-huck(?) brush, shivering.
Up in the night to pee. The moon had not before been not risen. Now the moon. And the Pleiades have risen over the north shoulder of West Peak.
My feet are ice. Every other part is okay. In the middle of the night I warm my feet with my hands and put a second pair of wool socks on. In the morning my feet are absolute ice.
I decided that I would not check the time all day. I got up when I woke up, went by the sun, and all was fine.
Up in the morning, before breakfast, wandering across the stream. Grass meadow with grassless stripes from decayed logs. Seeps, and found a small tub pool. [Camera has tagged this photo as 8:41 am.] Scrabbled up the stony mound again -- tough going without breakfast -- to try to watch the sunrise crawl down the west side of the valley, but clouds got in the way. Further up, to the north end of the ridge -- unapproachable crumbly outcropping, and I almost quit, but found one route. Over the ridge-top is nothingness! It falls off on that side, to a basin of forest. It all has the same skewed profile that the fang has. You can see Rainier from up here! What's it doing in that direction? [The valley is NW-SE, not N-S.] In the basin, spots of yellow -- poplars, some of them clearly -- mark along roads, and along water, I think. I worked my way up the ridge, southwards, to the edge of West Peak. A root touching the surface -- from what tree? None for a ways to either side. The cubic-crumbly rock here has -- look, they're petrified snails! -- no, bubbles, pebbles -- eggs, thin shells over coarse crystalline material, you can see when they're broken. West Peak is inaccessible from this direction, up sheer crags. I traversed further, to where the firs come up the side of the peak, thinking it would be easier to go down in a forest, where something holds the ground down. It mostly was, I think.
Already a humming of bees.
Took the food down, and heated water. Scarfed down a granola bar while it heated. A velvet ant crawled on the ground. I made coffee and oatmeal.
Hung the tent fly over a stout little fir, and left it and the tent to dry out. Packed a light pack, just water and emergency-type gear, and headed upvalley, where the trail should pass through a saddle between that fang and the nib to its right, looking down into French Cabin Basin. This it very soon did. A chopper passed, one way and the other. I went up the rise to the base of the fang, and looked down on the basin, and on the valley. On the hillside across the basin, a rayed pattern of clear paths, and an expanse of logs in the center, and in the sky a line of slashes of cloud, pointing to it. Two white trucks moving on the road there. Ate the last sandwich-piece.
Is all of this brushy "red huckleberry" maybe actually fool's-huckleberry? Some of the bigger older brush has capsules that look like that. And I think those are the same brushy stuff as has the purple buds all over.
Back to camp, and packed everything up to head down. Small yet life-altering discoveries available from reading the docs: my self-inflating sleeping pad wants not just to self-inflate, but to be augmented by mouth.
A larger bird harassed by two smaller, hawk and crows? In dodging, the hawk made a barrel roll, I do think.
Gak, what is S+J+R's baby's name? [Elizabeth. I think maybe my brain had a problem with that Hollie's and Bridget's are too.]
Two very young men in orange vests, with guns across their backs, heading in. Not much later they passed me photographing, heading out.
Trying to do a walking meditation through the senses in turn.
Feeling of air moving against me. An ideal cool temperature.
A picture of a reticulate stone in a stream, where the reflection of sky turned out to want to come into play, to form a crown of white flame. It seemed a sublime picture in the tiny LCD, in the half a second before the camera moves on. Many pictures do. I haven't looked at the full image yet. I write it down here anyway. [It is not, in its full form, actually worth looking at.] It turned out, by the way, when I turned back a few steps down the trail and came back to shoot some more with flash, that I couldn't get the reticulate stone to line up with the reflection -- I hadn't been shooting it at all, but another stone.
Up the spur trail to Kachess Ridge, 1315.3. Despite what the 2002 Green Trails says, the fork is excellently signed. The trail isn't bad either. It's been maintained to the extent of cutting notches for footholds into trunks that fall across. I left my pack at the bottom, and just took water, map, compass, food. Met a woman coming down who said she'd never expected to meet anyone on this trail, and that there was a hairy woodpecker up there, and a view of the lake. There's a lookout tower up there, and the noise from the freeway. An informal trail a bit north to where you can see Kachess Lake. It looks low. Winding channels in the sand, as bright as sun.
The lookout tower still had its ladder on the side, and even a ladder up from the ground -- this on the inside of the door, which was swung open, in the base. So I went up. Up at the platform -- how do you get up onto the thing? Do you have to climb over the top of the ladder, through the side, and come up through the hole in the middle of the platform? Or rear way back and around the edge of the platform, pulling yourself up somehow? Oh -- this side of the platform is a trapdoor, hinging up. Stood up on the platform, shaking, and not trusting the wooden floorboards. I stayed to stepping where they were directly on the steel girders. Sat on the platform and finished the trail mix and the cheese, and this water. Since the water bottle was
awkward jammed in my pocket, I tossed it down. It turned 180 to arrow spout-mechanism-first into the ground (should have given it spin), but, when I had gotten down, was fine.
Again the dense downslope forest of tree trunks and their horizontal branches, chevaux-de-frise, peloric fish-skeletons. A small yellow-leaved tree bright inside this huge deep dim trunk-drawn branch-barred space.
A squirrel ran into a tree. I waited, and it poked its head out. Came out, in fits and starts, onto a branch above me. You are a brave one, I said, and at that it chirred in alarm and scooted around back. Poked out the other side, one branch higher. This time it was my shifting my hands on my pack straps at which it chirred and scooted away. Flitted to the next tree over, came to the ground, and dashed away.
I walked back to the car at 6, just when i would have planned to.
Hit rain around Hyak. Go go gadget rainshadow. NWS says Seattle got drizzle and rain off and on most of today. Hee.
Things thought about while walking: Distribution of intervals between photographs. I expect it would not be a neat power law -- would be clumpy at scales "repeated photos of same subject" and "someplace with camera and with photography in mind". Crystallization of spelling.
Mnemonic scene: an infant, laughing, crowned with white flame, on a sleeping pad set in a side path between markers, guarded by a bold squirrel. Above, a hawk, dodging crows, executes a barrel roll, clockwise. Where the trees begin, young hunters, turning back.
Re wondering why mnemonics has an esoteric history -- note that the squirrel's "guarding" is purely connective, as more memorable than just being, and I chose that rather than, for example, attacking rabidly (though that would be memorable too). Speculation: part of what goes on with mnemonics is that an important part of your experience is your own choices inhabiting your head, reechoing, reflecting back on you.
Theme of the weekend: "It will be okay". Everything, that is.
Made a burger. Did laundry. Wrote.
"It will be okay" notes: I meant to turn on the front right burner, under the pan, but I did rear right instead. When I caught this, the rear burner hadn't heated up, since it's the one that doesn't.
Looking at the pictures -- it's funny how I took some of the same ones up and down, without remembering.
I don't know one fir from another. There are at least two kinds up in the valley. There's one with straight needles that don't radiate below horizontal, and one with upward-curving needles radiating in all directions. (I believe they're both firs because they both have firry bark.
Funny alpine/subalpine creepy-crawlies:
hairy white thing
a low conifer
good luck from this picture
some kind of Vaccinium maybe?
Fungi:
Hericium, probably abietis
fl0t0ring bra1n
Sparassis crispa
That's not baaaby salal:
that's not baaaby salal
Photos:
On Saturday morning, stopped by Impinj to photocopy this hike out of the book. Then to REI for firestarter and stuff (and, inevitably, more stuff).
After some dithering, pulled over on the shoulder of I-90 to take pictures of Keechelus Lake. Dithered too long to get the shots I actually wanted, but that'll teach me.
Some wrong turns. If you're using the 2002 Green Trails map, there's a road that's not on it that you should be using -- pass by the crummy road under the power lines, and take the unnamed road signed "to 1315 and 1212". Two other cars in the trailhead pulloff.
The trail starts out climbing. Some mountain bikers coming down. Chartreuse lichen!
Downslope, a space full of Doug-fir(?) trunks and branches. Question to ask myself: what do I know that I don't know I know?
I finished the first climbing part, past the waterfall, up into the hanging valley. From this time I was usually within earshot of Silver Creek. Firs and mountain hemlock, largely, and patchy wet meadows. A big poplar here and there, leaves yellow and falling. More than you see the tree itself you see the leaves, hung as ornaments on conifers. Lichen as the first tinsel.
Two big corvids talking with each other. Ravens?
From a distance I thought this was horsetails over the ground, but it's not. Low brush, branchy green twigs, no leaves. Baby red huckleberry?
I'm wondering how far in I can get, and if I should stop whenever I see a good site. On the stream would be good -- could safely build a fire on a pebblebank, and do want access to water. The maps differ but suggest the stream will not be far away. Well, I'll head up out of the head of this level of the valley, aiming for the meadow.
Met aanother mountain biker coming down, "from the service road". She'd had some trouble finding this trail. [Not sure from the map where she'd have been coming from.] I was heading in as far as I could get in the light. You should be fine, it's still light. Stay warm.
I came out into patchy meadow, and passed the side trail, 1308.1. Marked it on either side with loose sticks of bleached wood. I'd like to do the loop, across 1308.1 and down 1308, along the ridgeline. I'm not up for it, though, not carrying this much gear.
At the place where the trail hits the stream at the bottom of the meadow, I walked upstream and looked for a site. Found a pebbly strand in a seasonal stream, but then found an old fire ring, and a decent flat place nearby. Laid my gear down, and went looking for firewood. Couldn't resist going up the stony mound on the northeast side -- sunset over my valley! Deep red staining the top of West Peak. Up the valley further I saw a dramatic fang of stone, vertical on one side.
Hung a rope over a branch of an old snag, for hoisting food. I set up my tent in the fading light, and the stove by flashlight -- water for soup. "Thai Kitchen" noodle soup packet is not half-bad. Better than ramen, and about a hundredth the fat. I bit off pieces of Vella half-dry jack and dropped them in. Must work out the knack of unscrewing the isobutane/propane tank, somehow so as not to get freezing i-bu/pr dripping onto my fingers.
It's cold. Lit a small fire, with my new fire goo taking the place of tinder. Still you do need to sequence wood properly. Much of this wood was damp through, but some pieces were dry and punky. I was so hurried tending the fire that I hardly warmed my hands. Fading fire on a half-burnt log -- quick-rolling blue mercury, lodging in a preferred spot, a cup of red sparks -- zip along channels, playing over and over, shifting in pattern -- a stick face of blue flame on the black log.
Maybe tomorrow I could scramble up West Peak. Or go to that stone fang. I should have time to do anything I want.
The sky is dark. The Milky Way. A shooting star, bright and long -- three arm's-length hands.
Now a star on the hill to the east. Things rise in the east. Lying in that red-huck(?) brush, shivering.
Up in the night to pee. The moon had not before been not risen. Now the moon. And the Pleiades have risen over the north shoulder of West Peak.
My feet are ice. Every other part is okay. In the middle of the night I warm my feet with my hands and put a second pair of wool socks on. In the morning my feet are absolute ice.
I decided that I would not check the time all day. I got up when I woke up, went by the sun, and all was fine.
Up in the morning, before breakfast, wandering across the stream. Grass meadow with grassless stripes from decayed logs. Seeps, and found a small tub pool. [Camera has tagged this photo as 8:41 am.] Scrabbled up the stony mound again -- tough going without breakfast -- to try to watch the sunrise crawl down the west side of the valley, but clouds got in the way. Further up, to the north end of the ridge -- unapproachable crumbly outcropping, and I almost quit, but found one route. Over the ridge-top is nothingness! It falls off on that side, to a basin of forest. It all has the same skewed profile that the fang has. You can see Rainier from up here! What's it doing in that direction? [The valley is NW-SE, not N-S.] In the basin, spots of yellow -- poplars, some of them clearly -- mark along roads, and along water, I think. I worked my way up the ridge, southwards, to the edge of West Peak. A root touching the surface -- from what tree? None for a ways to either side. The cubic-crumbly rock here has -- look, they're petrified snails! -- no, bubbles, pebbles -- eggs, thin shells over coarse crystalline material, you can see when they're broken. West Peak is inaccessible from this direction, up sheer crags. I traversed further, to where the firs come up the side of the peak, thinking it would be easier to go down in a forest, where something holds the ground down. It mostly was, I think.
Already a humming of bees.
Took the food down, and heated water. Scarfed down a granola bar while it heated. A velvet ant crawled on the ground. I made coffee and oatmeal.
Hung the tent fly over a stout little fir, and left it and the tent to dry out. Packed a light pack, just water and emergency-type gear, and headed upvalley, where the trail should pass through a saddle between that fang and the nib to its right, looking down into French Cabin Basin. This it very soon did. A chopper passed, one way and the other. I went up the rise to the base of the fang, and looked down on the basin, and on the valley. On the hillside across the basin, a rayed pattern of clear paths, and an expanse of logs in the center, and in the sky a line of slashes of cloud, pointing to it. Two white trucks moving on the road there. Ate the last sandwich-piece.
Is all of this brushy "red huckleberry" maybe actually fool's-huckleberry? Some of the bigger older brush has capsules that look like that. And I think those are the same brushy stuff as has the purple buds all over.
Back to camp, and packed everything up to head down. Small yet life-altering discoveries available from reading the docs: my self-inflating sleeping pad wants not just to self-inflate, but to be augmented by mouth.
A larger bird harassed by two smaller, hawk and crows? In dodging, the hawk made a barrel roll, I do think.
Gak, what is S+J+R's baby's name? [Elizabeth. I think maybe my brain had a problem with that Hollie's and Bridget's are too.]
Two very young men in orange vests, with guns across their backs, heading in. Not much later they passed me photographing, heading out.
Trying to do a walking meditation through the senses in turn.
Feeling of air moving against me. An ideal cool temperature.
A picture of a reticulate stone in a stream, where the reflection of sky turned out to want to come into play, to form a crown of white flame. It seemed a sublime picture in the tiny LCD, in the half a second before the camera moves on. Many pictures do. I haven't looked at the full image yet. I write it down here anyway. [It is not, in its full form, actually worth looking at.] It turned out, by the way, when I turned back a few steps down the trail and came back to shoot some more with flash, that I couldn't get the reticulate stone to line up with the reflection -- I hadn't been shooting it at all, but another stone.
Up the spur trail to Kachess Ridge, 1315.3. Despite what the 2002 Green Trails says, the fork is excellently signed. The trail isn't bad either. It's been maintained to the extent of cutting notches for footholds into trunks that fall across. I left my pack at the bottom, and just took water, map, compass, food. Met a woman coming down who said she'd never expected to meet anyone on this trail, and that there was a hairy woodpecker up there, and a view of the lake. There's a lookout tower up there, and the noise from the freeway. An informal trail a bit north to where you can see Kachess Lake. It looks low. Winding channels in the sand, as bright as sun.
The lookout tower still had its ladder on the side, and even a ladder up from the ground -- this on the inside of the door, which was swung open, in the base. So I went up. Up at the platform -- how do you get up onto the thing? Do you have to climb over the top of the ladder, through the side, and come up through the hole in the middle of the platform? Or rear way back and around the edge of the platform, pulling yourself up somehow? Oh -- this side of the platform is a trapdoor, hinging up. Stood up on the platform, shaking, and not trusting the wooden floorboards. I stayed to stepping where they were directly on the steel girders. Sat on the platform and finished the trail mix and the cheese, and this water. Since the water bottle was
awkward jammed in my pocket, I tossed it down. It turned 180 to arrow spout-mechanism-first into the ground (should have given it spin), but, when I had gotten down, was fine.
Again the dense downslope forest of tree trunks and their horizontal branches, chevaux-de-frise, peloric fish-skeletons. A small yellow-leaved tree bright inside this huge deep dim trunk-drawn branch-barred space.
A squirrel ran into a tree. I waited, and it poked its head out. Came out, in fits and starts, onto a branch above me. You are a brave one, I said, and at that it chirred in alarm and scooted around back. Poked out the other side, one branch higher. This time it was my shifting my hands on my pack straps at which it chirred and scooted away. Flitted to the next tree over, came to the ground, and dashed away.
I walked back to the car at 6, just when i would have planned to.
Hit rain around Hyak. Go go gadget rainshadow. NWS says Seattle got drizzle and rain off and on most of today. Hee.
Things thought about while walking: Distribution of intervals between photographs. I expect it would not be a neat power law -- would be clumpy at scales "repeated photos of same subject" and "someplace with camera and with photography in mind". Crystallization of spelling.
Mnemonic scene: an infant, laughing, crowned with white flame, on a sleeping pad set in a side path between markers, guarded by a bold squirrel. Above, a hawk, dodging crows, executes a barrel roll, clockwise. Where the trees begin, young hunters, turning back.
Re wondering why mnemonics has an esoteric history -- note that the squirrel's "guarding" is purely connective, as more memorable than just being, and I chose that rather than, for example, attacking rabidly (though that would be memorable too). Speculation: part of what goes on with mnemonics is that an important part of your experience is your own choices inhabiting your head, reechoing, reflecting back on you.
Theme of the weekend: "It will be okay". Everything, that is.
Made a burger. Did laundry. Wrote.
"It will be okay" notes: I meant to turn on the front right burner, under the pan, but I did rear right instead. When I caught this, the rear burner hadn't heated up, since it's the one that doesn't.
Looking at the pictures -- it's funny how I took some of the same ones up and down, without remembering.
I don't know one fir from another. There are at least two kinds up in the valley. There's one with straight needles that don't radiate below horizontal, and one with upward-curving needles radiating in all directions. (I believe they're both firs because they both have firry bark.
Funny alpine/subalpine creepy-crawlies:
hairy white thing
a low conifer
good luck from this picture
some kind of Vaccinium maybe?
Fungi:
Hericium, probably abietis
fl0t0ring bra1n
Sparassis crispa
That's not baaaby salal:
that's not baaaby salal
no subject
hairy white thing
a low conifer
good luck from this picture
some kind of Vaccinium maybe?
Ooo, oo, lemme try these:
1) I wanna tell you this is an eriogonum, maybe E. ovalifolium, but that's probably wishful thinking.
2) I have no idea. What *is* that?
3) Cinquefoil? Where was it growing and in what form? If a shrub a different guess is needed.
4) An Arctostaphylos -- like a manzanita. I dunno what grows up there, but I've seen a lot of kinnickinnick hereabouts. So A. uva-ursi, or A. nevadensis maybe.
Dang, that was useless. C.f. jinian for real information.
What was the scene mnemonizing?
no subject
2) I wonder.
3) It grew sort of like a plantain, on same dry alpine ridge.
4) Ah!
Mnemonizing: oh, this whole saga.
no subject
hairy white thing
a low conifer
good luck from this picture
some kind of Vaccinium maybe?
1) i think beaq's guess is pretty good.
2) definitely no idea.
3) gee thanks for that picture. :) viburnum? naw, too hairy.
4) yeah, manzanita was my immediate guess as well, but it doesn't quite look like kinnikinnick (which grows in our yard). did it have lots of red berries? kinnikinnick does, now. nevadensis is the dwarf mountain one, isn't it? that would be my next guess.
what great fungi!
the last link goes also to the fl0t0ring bra1n pic, did you mean it that way.
no subject
No fruits visible. Season could be over at this altitude.
Fixed link, thanks.
no subject
no subject
no subject
Pretty sure it's not kinnikinnik, thought of manzanita. Check out that range.
Where is Pojar/ MacKinnon in all this? Do you need the second edition, perhaps?
no subject
Probably. What's in this second edition?
(As you know, Snape-Bob, P/M'K can be tricky to search when you don't have access to the keyed-on features, since the pictures don't always show habit or sometimes even foliage. If I guess the wrong family, it's entirely the doom.)
no subject
no subject
no subject
I want your first fir to be a spruce, because that needle pattern looks awfully sprucey to me. But I admit I know nothing about what the bark is supposed to look like.
Actually, something is coming back to me: what you really need for identification is pictures of the cones. I think they are quite distinctive between fir, spruce and pine. I even have some memory of hanging cones vs cones that sit on top of the branch.
no subject
The cones would be very helpful. I think firs all have them on top, while spruce cones dangle. I didn't see any on these young trees, though. (P/M'K notes that "Cones are rare on north-coastal subalpine fir, where populations are maintains mostly by layering" -- it is fun to see a fir dribbled down a hillside.)
My twig-tip pictures don't show, but I think I'd have picked up on the pegs that spruce mounts its needles on. I didn't look for them, though, and I know that Sitka spruce messes with my easterner spruce-gestalt recognition, and a spruce here would be Engelmann, which I've never seen.
no subject
The one that's not baby salal looks a little like a Garrya to me.
no subject
Hm, P/M'K says that grand and subalpine firs can also be notched. Do you concur? I wish I'd gotten some more views of the branches -- they show amabilis needles having a very characteristic way of being sleeked down the middle of the branch. "needles from the branch bottom and sides spread horizontally" -- that does fit, and the only other one with that isn't notched. Okay, #1 is amabilis.
And then on lasiocarpa, "all tending to turn upward" -- that fits #2. I know there was lots of what I think of as looking like lasiocarpa around -- mature tree a very neat narrow pointy cone.
Drat, P/M'K is no good on Garryae, has just a two-sentence blurb (about a coastal species) tacked onto a Ceanothus.
Do all of them have these impressive tassels that I see on googling? My unknowns had withered-up vertical flowerstalks -- you can see one at the top -- that don't look like they fit with the tassels.