Wildflower Report

Weekly Wildflower Report
for week of July 9, 2009
Report and photos by Kathy Darrow

From desert-loving prickly pear cactus to marsh-loving monkshood, the Gunnison Basin is bursting with wildflowers this week. Like an extended fireworks display, “everything’s popping up here,” says Sherron Greene, who tracks the wildflower season from her home in Meridian Lake. Sherron also cruised Ohio Pass this week and reports a stunning display of wild roses, not to be missed.

Indeed, I had a hard time driving back up valley from Gunnison earlier this week, there were so many flowers beckoning to be photographed along the roadside. Good thing the cops don’t ticket for “BWD” (botanizing while driving), a practice more hazardous than texting behind the wheel!

On that drive through sagebrush country, alert drivers could be shouldered by bright orange patches of copper mallow. Or distracted by hot pink blasts of Lambert’s locoweed. Just south of Cement Creek Road, it’s hard not to swerve a little to ogle at the sea of purple and foamy white flowers blooming along the East River. That’s mostly small-flowered lupine (Lupinus parviflora) and creamy buckwheat (Eriogonum umbellatum) among the sagebrush, a scene brought to us by a couple winters of abundant snow and plenty of spring rain.

If you have time to wander up the hills south of Almont, watch your step. There are prickly pear cacti everywhere, well armed, but also superbly decked out in delicate yellow flowers frothing with stamens. A good bet for a botanical foray is the jeep road opposite Almont Campground along Highway 135, which will lead you up through sagebrush and meadows brimming with Indian paintbrush, golden aster, popcorn flower, fleabane, snowball sandwort, yucca, geraniums and scarlet gilia, just to name a few.

One need only run, bike or walk up the Lower and Upper Lower Loops to be overcome by botanical bliss closer to Crested Butte. A bumper crop of wandering fleabane (Erigeron flagellaris) carpets the lower flanks of Mt. Emmons. All along Peanut Road fluorescent purple Rydberg’s penstemon complement fields of yellow mule ear and aspen sunflowers. Out by Gunsight Bridge, Grand Mesa penstemons take over, black-light blue wands waving in the wind.

A couple of photographers from St. Louis, Missouri, Ken and Don, reported that their journey was well worthwhile just for the opportunity to do the drive up Washington Gulch and down Slate River Road over Paradise Divide. “I think we saw every flower in the book,” said Don, meaning of course, “Wild About Wildflowers: Extreme Botanizing in Crested Butte”, which I had the pleasure of autographing before sending them off to catch the golden banner (Thermopsis montana) blooming among the aspens on the west side of Kebler Pass. (Alas, this flamboyant yellow cousin of lupines is not in “the book.”)

But by far the most extreme botanizing I’ve experienced this week is a single robust specimen of black-tipped senecio (Senecio atratus) thriving on top of coal tailings opposite the Gronk along Peanut Road. Tall and proud against the bright blue sky, roots sunk into pure mine waste, a plant like this gives me great hope that life is much stronger than the destructive nature of human enterprise. In that very same pile of mine waste, I found a fossil of an ancient club-moss branchlet in a chunk of sandstone from the Mesa Verde Formation, the same rock group that includes coal seams for which Crested Butte owes its settlement in the 1880s.

The fossil is recorded in rock that was once mud in an extensive swamp at the edge of a Cretaceous sea that covered much of Colorado over 65 million years ago. Paleobotany reminds us of an ever-changing landscape in which plants adapt and migrate with extreme changes in climate, moving in very slow waves as the ancestral seas and mountains wax and wane.

Like the waves in time, wildflowers also bloom in waves in space, with peak flowering moving up the mountains as the summer progresses. By next week I expect that higher elevations around 10,500 to 11,000 feet will be decked out in the psychedelic colors we see now in the valleys where we are lucky to live, work and play.

Kathy Darrow is a natural history writer with a special interest in botany, and author of the book “Wild About Wildflowers: Extreme Botanizing in Crested Butte”. To contribute your special wildflower sightings to the Weekly Wildflower Report, e-mail Kathy at wild_kat@cox.net.