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Rant: I used to walk right past lichen on rocks until a trip to Point Reyes changed my mind
Hiked the Earthquake Trail out at Point Reyes two weekends ago and kept noticing these crusty green and orange patches covering the sandstone, which I always shrugged off as just moss or rock stains. A volunteer naturalist pointed out that what I was looking at was actually a lichen, a partnership between a fungus and an alga, and that some of those slow-growing patches on the stones there could be decades or even a century old. Now I can't stop crouching down on every walk to stare at them, so what's the best way to actually learn to tell the different lichen types apart without a microscope?
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