Cabin Journal

Gone Wild with Flowers

After a cold spring and delayed summer, the hills—not to mention the mountaintops, streamsides and rock clefts—are alive, if not awash, with colors. White bistort wave in a field of tall green grasses; yellow stonecrop emerge from a crack in the rocks; and hundreds of columbines spread across the hillside on the other side of the valley from my cabin.

Every inch around the cabin has been filled in with flowers and grasses, predominantly pale purple lupine and yellow cinquefoil, a fancy French name for a five (cinque)-leafed (foil) flower that grows in profusion.

In the past week on my mountain hikes, I’ve seen at least dozens of species of flowers—from the parasitic red coral root orchid growing in the deep forests, to the orange paintbrush on dry hillsides, to the intense blue (and wonderfully  named) sky pilot on the tundra. In the meadows, golden banner and purple penstemon (left) grow side by side, while the tall, stately angelica (below), with its radiating umbel of white flowers, floats up along the ponds and streams. Scattered among the grasses are tall green gentians with white starbursts running up and down the plant’s spine.

 

 

 

 

 

Most remarkable is that the modest, usually unnoticed sulphur flower (top) has spread itself across every field, which goes to show that there’s great beauty in numbers.

 

 

If you can behold the world in a grain of sand, you can see in a flower the interdependence, complexity and impermanence of life. On the hillside, the delicate looking columbines take shelter from the hot sun by growing in the shade of the aspens and willows. When I take a close look at a single flower, it is a symphony of elements that combine to form a perfect whole: the flower itself is composed of five white petals perfectly framed by five purple sepals, and the long purple spurs protruding from the back of the flower seem to balance the whole thing. And yet, the manifestation of this flower in the world is fleeting, only here for a few weeks at most before it pulls itself back into the dark of the earth.

How to handle this profusion of ephemeral beauty? With joy, only joy.

Flowers Amid the Snow

Last week, on top of Trail Ridge Road, one of the highest roads in the country, there were still snow drifts 10 feet high. This unusually late snow has become a tourist attraction in Rocky Mountain National Park, with visitors from all over the world—Indiana to India— posing for pictures in front of the walls of snow and etching their names and other marks (below) in it.

 

 

 

Despite the snow, the tundra’s native animals were active, searching for food and being playful with each other after nine months of of hibernation. The marmots (below, right), which some tourists thought were beavers) could be spotted running across the tundra, their long, bushy tails bobbing.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The smaller pikas (above left), one of the cutest animals around, are harder to see because they blend in so well with the talus piles they inhabit. These animals, which are related to rabbits, technically don’t hibernate but munch all winter long on the grass they collected the previous summer. Because they mainly survive at high mountan elevations, which are getting warmer, they are threatened by climate change. A researcher interviewed on NPR’s Science Friday last week said pikas can’t tolerate temperatures above 75 degrees. Unfortunately, they are also threatened by drought, which has been prevalent for the past few years across the West. When there’s not enough snowpack to insulate their winter nests, they can freeze.

Luckily this year we’ve  had record snowfalls, but that also means a shorter growing season and less time to gather the grasses the pikas will need for next winter.  But life has always been precarious and fragile at these extreme altitudes (10,000 to 12,000 feet in the park), with all forms of life having a short time span to breed or flower, produce the next generation, and then get ready for winter, which can come as early as September.

With the late snow, last week I didn’t expect to see any tundra flowers, which usually appear in late June, just as or after the snows melt. Where the ground was open, it seemed bare and brown—lifeless. But when we stopped the car to take a picture, I was amazed, first, to see the alpine avens, a brilliant yellow flower that blooms at the edge of snowfields. When my eyes scanned beyond it, I saw a familiar and welcoming blue: the tiny alpine forget-me-nots (above). In this cold, almost barren landscape, these flowers hug the ground, exhibiting some will to survive—as well as beauty—that is almost unfathomable.