In the mountainous western part of the U.S., plants are in the winter condition for most of the spring semester. Therefore, students will need to encounter, collect, and identify plants in the dried winter condition to meet course learning goals. However, this is particularly challenging for beginning students because they encounter specimens in nature with parts that are shriveled and dried, bleached by the sun, shredded by the wind, broken, or shed by the plant altogether. Leaves, flowers, fruits, or seeds may or may not be displayed, which makes a traditional dichotomous key difficult to construct and frustrating for students to use. To overcome this challenge, I developed a simple three-step process that includes an observation checklist, which leads to a multiple access visual key, which in turn, leads to a plant profile page where students can confirm their identification. Each of the 185 plants featured in the key can be accessed through at least two different characters. For example, common cattail can be identified by following the key through plant height (tall), fruits-seed dispersal (fluffy plumose), or inflorescence type (spike-like) features. The instructional approach started with modeling the entire identification process for students. Next, students individually worked through the observation step to identify distinct features of several unknown plants. Finally, they were challenged with six unknown plants to identify. Once familiar with the 3-step process, my 40 students identified an unknown winter plant in an average time of 5-7 minutes. Students reported that the identification process using these tools was effective, efficient, and enjoyable.