botanizing

Little Bald Mountain Stroll

We stepped into a sea.  It was brilliantly blue in the morning sun and reflected sharp yellow dots.  Patches of white broke the blue.  We walked across this sea and went uphill.  The bright blue came Myosotis alpestre, an alpine forget-me-not; the yellow from Geum rossii, the alpine aven; the white from assorted flowers, such as bistorts and sandworts.  The lush alpine meadow of Little Bald Mountain, in the Bighorn Mountains, was like a walk through water.

We were there to look for Mertensia oreophila, the mountain bluebell, which is known only from the Bighorn Mountains.  It was named several decades ago from collections made on Little Bald Mountain, which makes it the type locality.  When we try to understand the concepts that earlier botanists had of the plants they named, it can be important not only to examine herbarium specimens gathered from various locations but also to the explore the diversity of the population in the type locality.  One or perhaps a few specimens collected in a single gathering at one location serve as the “type” on which a plant’s scientific name is based.  That gathering represented by the type may or may not represent well the variation characteristic of the population at the type locality.  We walked across the alpine meadow of Little Bald Mountain, a type locality, to survey, albeit informally, the diversity of mountain bluebell.

The air was so calm when we began to walk that the bistorts, despite their long, spindly inflorescence stalks, stood still.  It was cool, too, and I wore my anorak as we walked up the slope.  The rut of an old track ran up the mountain slope.  It was mentioned in an ecological study of this area conducted a couple of decades ago.  That ecological study also noted a population of mountain bluebells near a rock outcrop on the flank of the mountain, and that landmark directed my steps.

The slope of the mountain was so gentle that we stopped only twice to rest and catch extra breaths.  Around the rock outcrop, the meadow was disrupted and patches of exposed soil could be seen around the stones.  The soil of the outcrop, displaying the effects of weathering of the rocks, was more reddish than that on the rest of the slope.  It was in the patches of exposed soil that we found the mountain bluebell.  I kneeled to examine them and then crawled around the meadow to make photographs.

We continued upward, walking over the false summit and on to the broad flat top of Little Bald Mountain.  More mountain bluebells populated the summit, and I lay on the mountain top to get a close look at them.

 

Night on Bald Mountain

I pull up Mussorgsky on the iPod as we pull into the Bald Mountain campground in the Bighorn Mountains to spend the night.  The Mussorgsky music swirls as we drive past a ring of women who sing in the first campsite.  No others are camped in the second loop of the campground, where we select site nine for the night.

Our site is backed by a small stream and lush wetland growth in an open patch of spruce.  Worn, browned flowers and early fruits of marsh marigolds dot the wetland and buttercups add spots of yellow.  Tucked among the sedges at the edge of the stream I find delicate stalks of heartleaf twayblade and alpine mitrewort.  Both are inconspicuous and have greenish flowers.  There is also a dense patch of bluebells, which is especially satisfying because we are traveling to find bluebells.

The multitudes of mosquitoes settle upon us as we set up camp.  Even as I wave my hand in front of my face to clear breathing room of mosquitoes, they simply land on my hand and raise their needles.  I slap my shin and kill a handful.  I spray on repellent, and this at least keeps the swarm from landing on my skin, although a buzzing cloud persists around me.

The mosquitoes abate in the cool evening.  I try to read at the fire, using my headlamp to illuminate the text, but the smoke is drawn to me.  I sit and the smoke comes.  I move, and the smoke changes direction to follow me.  I move again and again and again and the smoke follows.  Finally, I give up and go to bed.    

A poorwill calls from beyond the trees behind us.  The call is crisp and like a queary.  ‘Who there? . . . Who there?’

Time to botanize

The Snake River, which lies about ten miles south of town and about a thousand feet lower in elevation, is where I go each winter to look for spring.   As a sign of spring, I seek the first flowers of native plants. 

On a broad, south-facing shoulder of land that curves down to the Snake at Wawawai, among the stones and wiry branches of small shrubs, I found a week ago the flowers of Lomatium gormanii, known commonly as salt and pepper or Gorman’s lomatium, had emerged.  I walked hunched over to look among the low clumps of vegetation and saw perhaps a few dozen plants of the lomatium in flower.   No other native species were yet in flower on the patch of land I examined.

The umbels of the Gorman’s lomatium had probably emerged only a few days earlier.  Most of the flowers were still tightly clustered, although several flowers of each umbel were “open”—that is, their petals and stamens had expanded.  Anthers of the extended stamens had dehisced and held clumps of white pollen.  Flowers still in the process of opening held their reddish anthers just within the spreading globe of white petals.

I think ‘spring’ when the first flowers emerge, although it may still be a few days or weeks before we begin to find native plants in flower at the elevation of town.  There may still be snow—even weeks or months of snow, possibly even heavy snows, but the flowers, appearing in the middle of February as I have come to anticipate them each year on the slopes above the Snake River, denote the regular progression of day-length and temperature through the seasons.  The first flowers mark for me the beginning of spring, although the Gorman’s lomatium near the Snake River likely will be well into their fruits by the true beginning of the calendar’s spring.  The transition has begun—I call it spring, I call it time to botanize.

By the Selway

When we arrived in the dark the river was only slightly louder than the generator of the RV that was parked 50 yards away.  The river clattered as water rocked flat stones.  The RV droned like a stressed refrigerator.

I woke at first light to see we were enclosed by fog.  I had wished for fog when we went to bed.  In fog, I fell back asleep to wake hours later in bright sun and blue sky.

As I read by our campfire in the morning, I heard dancing in a cottonwood tree.  It must be a squirrel, I thought.  When I looked for the sound, leaves fell.  The brown leaves, stiff from an earlier frost, falling in a slight breeze, tapped and pattered against still held leaves like the feet of cloggers.

We walked into moist forest of the hills above the river’s banks.  Bright sprays of sword ferns stood on dark soil in the sparse understorey.  The shiny green fronds were like lights in the thick shade beneath western red cedar. 

Ravens roared above the dark woods.  I looked for them and followed a trilling screech as it curved down the ravine.  The birds were invisible.

Flowers for fungi

In the conifer forests at the edge of the Northern Rocky Mountains, flowers appear to be gone for the year.  It appears that flowers have been traded for fungi.  The woods bloom with fungi.
There are wooly chanterelles that have tops like shaggy funnels.  We find these in clumps, young and old together.  The young have burnished button tops. 

The western russulas are especially common.  The tops of their basidiocarps are purple and some approach six inches in diameter.  There is a slight dip in the center of the russula’s cap, and in those centers little moss communities stand where they have been displaced from soil to the top of the mushroom pedestal.  The western russulas do not age well.  They chip and crack.  Diamonds shaped cracks creep across the purple tops of the basiocarps to reveal white interiors.

Slimy red caps adorn the tops larch wax caps, which go also by the name Hygrophorus speciosus.  These caps—the diameter of a quarter and a half—we find tucked beneath the still green leaves of low plants.

There are upheavals of soil and duff at the trail’s edge pushed up by orange lips.  I bend my head to look and see down a throat to subterranean darkness.  It is as if we have found evidence of subterranean souls—like those belonging to Wagner’s Nibelungs that mine bright minerals.  I look closely and see the orange lip is the rim of a basidiocarp.  Gills stand behind the lip.  And yet, for a moment I think, those gills might be teeth, and this mouth, lips, throat and teeth might speak.  Whose mouth this is I cannot tell, but I stop to listen, hoping for words from the mysterium of mycelium.

*  *  *

Top photo is wooly chanterelle, Gomphus floccosus, and the bottom photo is western russula, Russula occidentalis (at least I hope those are correct determinations).  I've used the recently published Mushrooms of the Pacific Northwest by Steve Trudell and Joe Ammirati as my guide for identifications.

A tense season

This is a tense season for leaves.  Green remains, but one anticipates its quick dissipation.  Laminas in this season look worn, and they are spotted or fringed by yellow.  The worst bear hard brown cankers as if lamina had given up its defense against infection and allowed bacteria or virus to establish themselves in the final days of photosynthesis.

Gentians

We walk in the Clearwater Mountains through lodgepole pines to the scrubby flank of a valley.  Canteen Creek lies below us, and its headwaters are ahead.

Little is in flower. Along the margin of the trail we walk, there are a few late season composites that have weedy proclivities. Fireweed release fuzzy fruits.  Petals have shriveled on the white rhododendron, and its fruits swell.  The once lovely, saffron flowers of menziesia, a cousin of the rhododendron, have browned. In lieu of flowers, we turn our attention to huckleberries, and eat as we walk.

We cross Canteen Creek on stones, and I find among the grasses of the far side gentians in flower.  Little is as lovely as a gentian flower. 

The blue of these gentians is like the summer sky boiled-down to pure essence of blue.  That distillation feels especially concentrated in mountain light. I know when I find gentians in these mountains that summer is about to fade.  The still, cool blue of gentians has foreshadow of ice.

Evening at Big Fog Mountain Saddle

After dinner at the Wilderness Inn Café, we drive up to Big Fog Mountain Saddle.  The days have been hot, and we want to escape to a cooler place.  The saddle, set in an angle of the Selway River, is a high perch in Idaho’s Clearwater Mountains. 

The road to the saddle is slow and dusty.  It is beset with switchbacks, which keep one in first gear, at least to avoid shifting from first to second and then back to first every seven seconds, where the road climbs the lower slope above the Selway.  When the straights lengthen, the road tightens.  Thimbleberries overhang the road, and we dodge their slaps at the open windows.  The steep, straight runs of road serve also the runoff, and the roadbed is as eroded and rocky as a creek bottom.  We creep and bounce over the rocks and ruts.

Big Fog Mountain Saddle is a swayback meadow split by a dusty parking lot.  A forest service toilet sits among broad patches of yarrow, whose corymbs of flower heads make white spots in the thin, wiry grass.  The pussytoes are beginning to fruit, producing fluffy, stellate efflorescences from the sides of their pinkish heads. Pearly everlasting, a close cousin of the pussytoe, has elegant heads of rice papery bracts.  A few blue flowers remain among the fruits, which have collars of wrinkled brown corollas, on the stalks of penstemons.  Bees and butterflies visit the bright, orangey yellow saucers of potentilla flowers.  Sentinels of beargrass stand in formation at the edge of forest.  The beargrass flowers have finished for the season, and the infructescences bear young fruits.

As shadows slip from the evening, we walk down a trail.  Spindly paintbrushes, heavy with fruit, sway like pendulums when our shins knock against them.  We pass from warm to cool to warm to cool.  The temperature differences along the trail are sharp.  Cool sweeps down slope in broad bands that surround the trickles and seeps of water.  Tofieldia grow in the seeps.  I break-off a stalk for a closer look and its many glands leave my hand sticky.  The lily-like fruits of the tofieldia are swelling with seeds.  Small orange flowers stand above the mosses of the seeps.  These flowers belong to the bog St. John’s-wort, a small plant that creeps across seeps.  Dense runs of mountain boykinia, a rough plant that has toothy leaves, edge the trail like fence.

We can see a fire in a distant side valley of the Selway River.  A small plume of smoke rises from the valley and pools in the air above it.

When we return to our camp, the gibbous moon stands over the forest service toilet. We sit beside the truck in the encroaching darkness and extend our feet in the meadow grasses.  We drink tea as the sunset fades in front of us.   Arcturus enters fuzzy and red to my left, and Venus brightens behind my shoulders.  There is a whistle, perhaps a pika, at the meadow’s edge.  Cool breeze sweeps from the east over my exposed thighs.  We sit on the last step of summer.

Hills

A thousand meadowlarks sing.  The greasewood rings with their songs.  There is also the faint popping and hum of motors from the natural gas compressor stations that dot the Grand Valley and traffic on the interstate a few miles to the south.  I have stopped near Badger Wash at a hill with an S spine and a small round top from which steep flanks descend. 

It’s early morning, still cool and long shadowed.  I start walking up the steep western flank of the hill to achieve its spine.  The desert trumpets, which have ovoid stems below an umbel of branches that bear flowers, are dense, although they are only a few inches tall.  These plants have delicate, yellow flowers, only 3 mm in diameter, that look like tiny stars.  The thin branches of the umbel that hold the flowers are like lines drawn on a star chart to show the composition of a constellation.  I walk through a star field as dense as the Milky Way, although my footing is solid  rather than cosmic. This hill above Badger Creek has a yellowish brown pinnacle but its sides are gray.  The gray that I ascend is hard; it is crusted and has the appearance of dried mud.

I am looking for blazing stars, which are no more a star than are tiny flowers of desert trumpets, because I want to understand their distribution on the hills of the Grand Valley.  I want to understand where a poorly known species, the Book Cliffs blazing star, is distributed in order to ask next why it is there.

A small camissonia that stands no more than three inches tall catches my attention.  It has a bright yellow flower, in which there is a ball-like stigma that hangs to one side.  Aside from the stigma, the plant’s flower looks like that of an evening primrose.  The plant seems frail, and its single flower on a thread-like stalk turns in the slight breeze.

As I walk up the hill I see Thompson’s blazing star, not the species I hunt but a welcome find none-the-less. Although I knew that Thompson’s blazing star was in this area, this is the farthest east that I have found it.  It is an annual plant that flowers relatively early and all of the individuals that I find on this hill have young fruits.

After walking halfway up the hill, I turn back toward my truck without finding any Book Cliffs blazing stars.  I drive northward up a dirt road toward the Book Cliffs.  A Bobolink flies across the tops of the greasewood.  Its wings, which seem to fold like a Japanese fan as it flies, especially as it slows and lifts its chest slightly in preparing to land in a branch top, flash white and black.

At another set of hills between Badger Wash and West Salt Creek, I find the jaw bones of a rodent and the feather of a hawk but no blazing stars.

I backtrack to another road to take northward through the hills and stop where the road abuts the base of a gray hill.  Another hawk’s feather rests in the branches of a sagebrush, but this hill also has no blazing stars.

*

Hills occur in patches in the Grand Valley.  Some are oblong and nearly flat-topped like loaves of bread placed side-by-side on a shelf.  Others have more prominent peaks and sinuous ridges descend from these.  The descending ridges are sometimes humped with subsidiary peaks.  As I explore the hills, I begin to partition them into color and consistency categories.  There are gray hills that have clayey surfaces that feel like hardened mud.  Other hills are more reddish or yellowish brown, and these hills usually have gravelly surfaces, although sometimes they, too, have gray substrate below the gravel or even coal-like layers below the surface.

Each set of hills lures.  Foremost, I want to see whether they hold a population of Book Cliffs blazing star, but the lure is more general.  I’m curious about the mix of plants on each and whether I might find some flower that I haven’t seen before.  Finding weathered bones or raptor feathers is also satisfying.  The curves of the hills themselves have bodily shapes, like hips and the inflections of torsos, that elicit sweet wishes and memories.  Those senses of pleasure slip when one begins to walk up a steep slope, but pleasures return when one reaches the sinuous ridge.  Walking the S-curve that rises to a hilltop, one feels a part of the hill in each stride, sensing time and resilience, and one’s steps course like the elemental forces of water and wind that have shaped the sinuous slopes.

I drive out a road that has only two tracks to squat hills that have sparse vegetation.  I ease over large stones in four-wheel drive, then stop and walk to a broad peak.  There are no blazing stars or relictual bones or feathers.  There are three species of loco weeds, and they are pleasures enough.

*

What was once Highway 50 now parallels Interstate 70 as frontage road.  The old highway suffers neglect and heavy trucks.  It is rough and rudely patched.  Whole surfaces of the road built-up over decades of use and repair when it was the main highway through this area have eroded, and one drives now on one stratigraphic layer of pavement and then another.   It is a perfect road for botanizing.  The rough surface keeps me alert and forces me to drive slowly.  I watch the flowers at the roadside and wonder at the hills beyond.

*

It is late afternoon and thunderstorms have been passing through.  Wind ruffles the low vegetation.  At the Utah border, I see Book Cliffs blazing star where the old highway was cut through a gravelly hill.  I walk up the hill toward the plant. Stiff gusts of wind rock my balance.  When I bend to examine a plant, the wind pushes my t-shirt from my back to my shoulders.  I make notes and return quickly to the truck.

An obelisk marks the state line.  ‘Utah’ it says on one side and ‘Colo’ on the opposite.  The obelisk has been worn by winds and amplified by graffiti.

*

Another morning.  A gopher snake stretches across the road—it’s golden skin, spotted with dark patches, is bright in the early sun.  On my way toward Bryson Canyon, I stop at a gravelly hill with a surface of yellowish brown stone.  There are scattered junipers on the hilltop.  This is the environment that I have begun to associate with the Book Cliffs blazing star, but I don’t find it on this hill; instead I find white-stemmed blazing star, an annual that is widespread and common in the West.

From the hills to the mouth of Bryson Canyon, the land has little relief.  It is a sagebrush flat, like a lake of low shrubs.  Needle grass shines in the sun at the roadside.  Its fruits have long, needle-like awns at their ends.  As the plants sway, top heavy, in the light breeze, the fruit heads swing back and forth like the hair of a model shaken back and flipped around.  I watch the shining, swaying awns as I drive.  In the movement of the needle grass, time becomes  metronomic, ticking to the back and forth sway of the shiny awns, repetitive rather than progressive.  In this state, I stop thinking about needs and plans, about plants and places; I feel the warm sun and pleasure of moving through the landscape with hills in the distance.

Wind's ice

I lean between the haw’s branches to take a bite.  A wing of ice holds along the windward side of the branches.  The ice has built through the night and is now encrusted with snow, which still blows horizontally across the exposed ridge.  Careful of the haw’s thorns, I take a second bite of the ice blade.  It tastes like a circus snowcone, one sweetened by wind.