This was quite a beauty. If I remember correctly, Ken Davenport said this was different that the sierra subspecies and has not been formally named yet. I could be wrong!

because I'm never sure what to do with them. Some authors ignore most of them, and others recognize every little local colony as distinct, and everyone seems to dissagree on what is "real" and what is not. A high percentage seem too narrowly divided to me, but that's just my (often poorly informed) opinion. I use Jonathan Pelham's catalog as a fall-back position, and try to follow it unless I have a strong reason not to. In this case the name Euphydryas irelandi was described by Gunder in 1929 from a “trail near Alta Peak, Sequoia Nat. Park, Calif.” [Tulare County]. Your specimen is from not far away, and I would think would be the same thing, so I think your use of the name was probably fine. The name "sierra" is just from the "Sierra Nevada Mountains", which is fairly nebulous, and could just as easily be from nearby as from a hundred miles away. However, Jonathan Pelham lists the names as synonyms in his catalog, and when I look at specimens, it seems to me that the orange ones from the Sierra Nevada all are similar enough to one another to call one subspecies (althought they vary a lot individually regardless of location).

For now, I'm am just following Jonathan's catalog. The photos of "sierra" on Butterflies of America include several that look rather similar to yours. Could be that there really are more than one "subspecies" involved (but it seems unlikely to me).