This Snow Plant was captured during a stroll along the Pacific Crest Trail north of Yosemite last week at an altitude of 2500 meters. It's about 15-20 cm tall, has no odor, and is edible, too. So dig in - Be my guest! But don't get caught: It's a protected species in California. As long as you're here, be sure to look at the full-sized images, which are really quite unbelievable. Here's what John Muir wrote about it in 1912: "The snow plant (Sarcodes sanguinea) is more admired by tourists than any other in California. It is red, fleshy and watery and looks like a gigantic asparagus shoot. Soon after the snow is off the ground it rises through the dead needles and humus in the pine and fir woods like a bright glowing pillar of fire. In a week or so it grows to a height of eight or twelve inches with a diameter of an inch and a half or two inches; then its long fringed bracts curl aside, allowing the twenty- or thirty-five-lobed, bell-shaped flowers to open and look straight out from the axis. It is said to grow up through the snow; on the contrary, it always waits until the ground is warm, though with other early flowers it is occasionally buried or half-buried for a day or two by spring storms. The entire plant - flowers, bracts, stem, scales, and roots - is fiery red. Its color could appeal to one's blood. Nevertheless, it is a singularly cold and unsympathetic plant. Everybody admires it as a wonderful curiosity, but nobody loves it as lilies, violets, roses, daisies are loved. Without fragrance, it stands beneath the pines and firs lonely and silent, as if unacquainted with any other plant in the world; never moving in the wildest storms; rigid as if lifeless, though covered with beautiful rosy flowers."