Beautiful, I could have spend all day staring at those rocks.
It varies a lot, some lichens are more sensitive than others. There are species you won't find in areas with poor air quality but some species will thrive in the the same conditions. I have even read about lichens growing in areas polluted by toxic slag.
9ft would usually be accumulative over the course of a winter, it snows for 5 or 6 months in northern BC, but we did get 6ft in 2 days once and that was a shit show. I would give the Letharia dye another try, the last time I did it I don't think I used a mordant but you could use alum or something. I would skip the pressure cooker and just do a hot water bath, then you don't felt your wool socks down into little baby boots.
These guys are edible, you could definitely candy them but I would be hardpressed to find enough to make it worth the effort. No flavour to them but a fancy little mid-hike snack.
I did end up eating a few of these, they tasted like water but the texture was surprisingly pleasant.
Definitely magical and exciting to come across all sorts of fungi, take them home and learn about them. I often take friends and family out to find edible mushrooms and I end up picking the least amount of the edibles in the group because I like to fill my basket with mushrooms I have never seen.
We typically get a lot of snow, sometimes 9ft in a single winter or more but the last few years have been pitiful. This was at a slightly higher elevation (I am at about 500 metres). I often see people in washington and oregon find this mushroom throughout the winter, I thought it would be later for my area but not the beginning of June.
Haha, completely over my head
Taken with a pixel 9, I run Graphene but I believe this was taken in the google camera app.
Looks to be in the family Parmeliaceae, which is pretty large. I'm really just beginning to learn how to ID but I might start at a genus like Xanthoparmelia or similar.
Awesome thanks so much for the specs!
I should have put soralia/soredia. Soredia are the microscopic propagules, soralia are the round/bumpy structures on the ridges (at least in this photo) that produce and disperse the soredia.