Wildflower hikes

Can’t see the trees for the forest.

It’s easy to be distracted by the big picture when you’re standing on a western Washington alpine trail in summer. At Cascade Pass, for example, the supremely jagged pterodactyl teeth of North Cascades peaks surround you on almost every side – save the eastward view a world away and down 30 miles into Lake Chelan. High up on the flanks of Mt. Rainier, you can see the entire Puget Sound basin, an awesome geographic sight not even scenic airplane flights can replicate.

But I’m not here for that today. It’s mid-July, which is peak wildflower season in the Cascades, and I’m aiming to reverse the old mistake where one misses the forest for the trees. It’s time to ignore the galactic viewscape and gaze at my feet.

Well, near my feet.

“Did you know,” I tell my hiking companion David, “that the ‘flowers’ of Indian paintbrush are actually not flowers but bracts, which are specially adapted leaves? And there are yellow, red, purple and all colors in between versions of it?”

David rolls his eyes. Educational Eric.

“Same thing with lupines,” I continue, “although in this case the flowers are actually flowers. There’s a yellow lupine, purple lupine, cornflower lupine, dwarf lupine, sea level lupine, alpine lupine, all kinds of lupine.” I make an appreciative, mischievous face and sweep my arms wide to embrace the lupine/paintbrush hillside we’re standing in, just above timberline at about 6,000 feet. “Renoir should be here.”

It is an Impressionist colorscape that hikers encounter almost anywhere in the Cascades in July and August near and above timberline – entire hillsides splashed in blue, purple, red, white, yellow, orange and more. As awesome as a vista to the Pacific horizon may be, close attention paid to the pointillist details of the near vicinity reveals equally astounding sights, miniature postcards from the illuminated manuscript of wonders of our planet.

Consider the graceful glacier lily, which struggles to pass a vertical foot in its sudden climb skyward. It is often found poking up at the melting verge of snowbanks, a butter yellow botanical surprise that sometimes literally shoves its way through a few inches of wet snow. The bulbs are a significant food for bears, and for Native peoples and trappers, so one wonders how to describe the botanical impulse that makes it so conspicuous. Perhaps showy advertising for hungry mouths? Our summertime hummingbirds, the scrappy rufous, favor its nectar in their midsummer patrols at high elevations.

There are hundreds of such individual marvels to be seen in the Pacific Northwest.

The tiny shooting star, whose intense purple and faceted-jewel shape are far showier than any actual meteorite.

The dancing blooms of golden monkeyflower, which you’ll often find growing near and even in freshets of clear snowmelt above timberline, the rushing water of mini-cascades tossing the flower stalks like an afternoon breeze.

The cornflower-blue lupine that ranges from sea level to the highest ridges. Sometimes, below timberline in the montane zone, you’ll encounter such a lupine profusion in open pine forest that the delicate lush scent perfumes the woods. The Stehekin Valley hillsides are a fine place to find this phenomenon.

If you are hiking a lowland trail – say, the mesmerizing headlands of Iceberg Point on Lopez Island, where wind-trimmed old growth firs are barely 50 feet tall – keep your eyes peeled for the yellow lupine, which can form hardy shrubs three feet tall. That is, when you’re not savoring the hundred-mile views of the Strait of Juan de Fuca and the Olympic Range, Mt. Baker holding the horizon at your back.

The vivid red Western columbine, a native of almost every foothill and mountain environment, whose drooping scarlet flowers are like painted ballerinas framed against the deep green of their riparian homes. Of all the myriad flowers in the West, this is my favorite, a conspicuous sight when you find it, but only if you are looking.

I’d say, for wildflowers please go here or there, but the truth is that you’d best just go anywhere. Yes, alpine meadows provide awesome displays, almost nonstop from melt-out to first autumn storm, when the snowbound sight of glacier lilies is supplanted by snow-dusted autumn asters. But we are lucky to live in a region where flowers are a nonstop attraction more than half the year.

The wildflower season begins in late March or early April at sea level with blue camas, spreads up into lower elevation forests in late May when you can look for bleeding hearts and trilliums in old-growth forests, and surges up to timberline as the snow retreats in July. Up here, bend down in the rocky hillsides to look for creeping phlox, a ground cover in soft pink whose spicy scent may carry just a foot from the flower.

North Cascades National Park – home of Cascade Pass – is prime wildflower territory, of course. Backpackers can set out on a three-chapter flower hike here in July, starting in temperate rainforest at the Cascade River trailhead, climbing up through timberline to the 5,932-foot pass to gawk at miles of kaleidoscopic meadow, continuing on down toward Stehekin into the pine woods of the eastern Cascades. This 21-mile ramble can be done in a day out, a day back – but not if you’re poking around in the old-growth woods seeking the elusive fairy slipper orchid, stopping for a leisurely late lunch in the alpine meadows, or marveling at the fields of fireweed blanketing recent burns on the way down into the Stehekin pinelands.

As much as I’m urging a turn away from the scenic spectacular to the close divine, it’s really not necessary to pick one or the other. Unless, like some trekkers I’ve known, the drive to, well, drive, overcomes the serene impulse to stop and chill. It’s not a race, for us.

For the infinite blossoms that nature gives just weeks to accomplish a life, it’s not a race either. It’s a never-ending story on the wheel of life, and we only need read it.   X

Eric Lucas lives on a small farm on San Juan Island, where he grows organic hay, beans, squash and apples… and Western red columbines.