Lake Gregory Self-Guided Walking Tour
Ponderosa vs. Jeffrey — The Sniff Test
Two big yellow pines grow side by side around the lake — the Ponderosa and the Jeffrey — with bark so alike you'll need your nose to tell them apart. A warm Jeffrey smells of vanilla and butterscotch; a Ponderosa is fainter and more like turpentine. Press your face to the bark and take a sniff.
Crestline, California
Lake Gregory Self-Guided Walking Tour
The Cattail Marsh — A Working Wetland
The scruffy stands of cattail and tule at the lake's shallow edges are doing serious work — a wildlife nursery, a natural water filter, and a flood sponge all at once.
Crestline, California
Lake Gregory Self-Guided Walking Tour
The Black Oak & the Acorn Larder
A broad-crowned California black oak that the Serrano people treated as a grocery store — its acorns leached, pounded, and cooked into a staple porridge. It still feeds the forest, dropping thousands of acorns in a good year for deer, pigeons, woodpeckers, and squirrels.
Crestline, California
Lake Gregory Self-Guided Walking Tour
The Lake's Wildlife
Scan the water for ducks, geese, herons and wing-drying cormorants, turtles basking on logs, and even one of Lake Gregory's two resident bald eagles — then watch the pines for crested Steller's jays and bushy-tailed western gray squirrels.
Crestline, California
Lake Gregory Self-Guided Walking Tour
Native Pines, Drought & the Bark Beetle
The towering Ponderosa Pines, Jeffrey Pines, and reddish-barked Incense Cedars overhead survived a brutal 2002–2004 drought that left millions of weakened pines to the native bark beetle, feeding the 2003 Old Fire that threatened Crestline.
Crestline, California
