This is what I first saw from the car: an inviting meadow beyond the trees. I was driving along Sherman Pass Road July 20, 2008 looking for butterflies. Usually these kinds of photos aren't on this site, but I thought it would be nice to provide some sense of the setting, at least for an hour or so of the trip.

The Sherman Pass has many fantastic meadows at relatively high elevations. This one was at about 8200 feet and had lots of little streams running through it. The ground was wet but not so soggy that your feet sunk in. Good footing and lots of blooming flowers make for a beautiful meadow worth exploring. I can't think of many places I'd rather be than a high mountain meadow in midsummer.

Meadows are great for butterfly photography. The backdrop of nearly any photo will be a rich green and many will have flowers as well to add blurry splashes of color.

On this day I found many recently-emerged Mormon Fritillaries, a Sierra Nevada Arctic Blue (a real prized find), Boisduval's Blues, and many Greenish Blues that are subspecies aehaja, which I had hoped to see. Most of southern California has subspecies hilda, which I've photographed a few times, most memorably in Bluff Meadow south of Big Bear Lake. Their caterpillars eat clover, which was abundant in this meadow; the reddish streak of flowers in the middle of this photo is a patch of clover.

Lupines were also common. They are the host of Boisduval's Blues, a few of which were out and about as I explored.

These orange Mormon Fritillaries weren 't hard to find. See how they pop out against the greenery. They were lazy on this warm but cloudy day and easily photographed. These are the things I dream about - literally - in the depths of winter: glimpsing an orange flash in a green meadow on a warm day high in the mountains. I turn and focus and there it is....