Annual with spreading branches, 10–50 cm, glaucous-green or grey-purple, densely glandular- and nonglandular-hairy.

Stems paniculately branched; herbage green, pubescent (spreading-viscid and short-glandular-pilose) with long soft white hairs.

Leaves of main stem alternate, deeply divided into 3 linear to thread-like segments, 20–40 mm; of the branches entire, few and remote.

[1][2][3][4][5] This plant is endemic to its range, an area stretching from central Washington, to the western edge of Montana, to the Warner Mountains of north-eastern California.

It lives in open upland slopes and flats, within lower montane yellow pine forests and Great Basin juniper scrub, in dry, gravelly basaltic soil.