Lichen on the north side of everything
A slow day on purpose. I walked the oak loop with a hand lens and no plan beyond looking at lichen, which I have walked past for years without really seeing.
In the fog the lace lichen hanging from the oaks looks like grey-green netting, and it is soaking wet: it pulls water straight out of the air. It's the state lichen here, which I didn't know until this week, and once you start looking, it's on every other branch.
North side, mostly
On the trunks, the crusty and leafy lichens crowd onto the north and west faces, where the bark stays damp longest. The south faces are nearly bare. There is an old idea that you can navigate by this, and on this ridge it would work.
Under the lens: tiny cups on one of the crusty kinds, the reproductive bodies, like miniature orange saucers. I sketched three species badly and will try to identify them properly from the drawings.
The woodpeckers didn't care
The acorn woodpecker colony at the trailhead snag was in full noisy session, as always. That snag is drilled with hundreds of neat holes, each holding an acorn. They spent the whole morning rearranging the stock, moving acorns from hole to hole for reasons I've never understood.