[The Angry Hiker]

Well, I don't have very many plant allergies, but just being in the vicinity of those things gets my eyes burning. They're blooming like crazy around the Green River right now. Someone went along and uprooted a ton of it and tossed it all on the ground. That seems a little pointless, unless they have a problem with mistaking it for parsnip and eating it.

[Mike Collins]

Cow parsnip, poison hemlock, and water hemlock are all in the carrot family, Apiaceae. This family all have their white flowers on umbels (like umbrellas). Some of the members are edible and others like poison and water hemlock are deadly poisonous. Confusion between them has caused death before  http://journals.lww.com/transplantjournal/Abstract/2003/09150/Successful_transplantation_of_donor_organs_from_a.26.aspx and http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1306130/pdf/westjmed00177-0043.pdf  Without education and scrutiny tragedies will happen again. I have seen patches of cow parsnips and poison hemlock growing together so someone who isn't paying attention to each plant would end up dead. Prompt emergency response can avoid the anticipated death by respiratory paralysis from poison hemlock. http://journals.lww.com/pec-online/Abstract/2009/11000/Poison_Hemlock_Induced_Respiratory_Failure_in_a.11.aspx

King County recommends eradication of poison hemlock but does not require it on their noxious weeds list; http://www.kingcounty.gov/environment/animalsAndPlants/noxious-weeds/laws/non-designated.aspx
I do not know why King County has included the deadly poison hemlock on the same list as the ox-eye daisy but that is government for you.

[tigermn]

Ok that just gives me another reason to remain a carnivore... 

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My flickr photo site.

[puzzlr]

I've been doing some invasive weed picking at the Dingford trailhead, mostly for Herb Robert. But I'd like to also learn what native plants like to grow out into the open sunny area there. Here are three of them that I'd like help identifying. It will be easier next spring when they are flowering, but can anyone help now? I'm impatient.

Dingford trailhead plant

Dingford trailhead plant

Salmonberry at the Dingford trailhead

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Mid Fork Rocks • flickr

[Brockton]

I don't know about the first one.  Kinnikinnick?

The second one looks like plantain from the look of the leaves and the flower/seed stalk.  I believe that's a non-native weed.

The third one is definitely not thimbleberry, which has simple palmate leaves, like a maple leaf.  It looks like it could be salmonberry, with the two lower leaflets making the shape of butterfly wings.  (That's something I heard about identifying salmonberry.)

[hatchetation]

Found these conifer-ish creeping vine things on the trail up to Pratt balcony. There was no woody stem like a young sapling. Just a vine coming out of the ground. Very soft. Weird habit - never seen anything like em.

My best guesses are probably terrible - polytrichum? Cryptomeria japonica?

[Wastral]

[Wastral]

[gb]

[brewermd]

There is an app called inaturalist that would help with these ids.  The way it works is that you take a picture and upload into inaturalist and it ids it from a large data bank of pictures that has been accumulating over several years. Works quite with plants and insects but lacks a little in mushrooms.  The North Cascades Park people promote the app during their bioblitz activities.

[robertjoy]

from your link:  conium maculatum.   google search shows foliage as VERY different from the leaf pattern in question.  commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Conium_maculatum_2.jpg

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Mosquitoes refuse to bite me,
purely out of respect.

[hatchetation]

[gb]

[Sculpin]

[nordique]

Thank you, Sculpin!

MANY decades ago, my high school football team was named the Sculpins.  And 'Myoxocephalus octodecemspinosus' won me several college biology fieldtrip quizzes!