yellow iris

Today I spent the day out with the nature conservancy in North Creek, hunting for this guy:

Yellow iris, or Iris pseudacorus. It's really a beautiful looking plant, but quite invasive and obnoxious. It really takes over the areas where it gets established and crowds out the native vegetation. Apparently this yellow iris has been spreading about the adirondacks, and Stephen, the terrestrial invasive plant guy for the conservancy had suspected that the "nursery" source was near this old, now defunct garnet mine, given the path that it has spread. Low and behold he was right. As I approached this wetland area which is basically right at the head waters of the Sacandaga River there were literally hundreds of these yellow flowers. So we went around and sprayed the flowers with roundup, hopefully preventing them from seeding. The wetland where we were is an outlet to what is known as The Vly, which is another gorgeous wetland area. It has been so dry lately we were able to walk right down in the stream beds leading out to the Vly. We suspected that rain would have carried seeds down through the area out. There was no trail, and I just kind of scrambled behind Stephen, who was plowing his way through, jumping from rock to rock, walking through over hanging branches and climbing over fallen logs. I would think, from an outsider's view, I probably looked pretty rediculous, but I kept up and I didn't fall (he fell twice for the record). It was quite an empowering experience to hike through this area, and a bit of an exercise in trust. Here I was out in the middle of nowhere relying competely on this man with a bowsaw that I just met this morning. No compass, no trail, no nothing. We reached The Vly and unfortunately there were a few patches of the yellow iris, and nothing we could abait today because they were actually rooted in the water, and because we were now hiking in a forest preserve area rather than private land we couldn't use the roundup spray. This will be a job for some waders next week.