City Creek Part 2: Flowerpalooza!

The problem with being a mtn biker/wildflower nut* in May is that you keep stopping over and over again on rides to take photos. Though I almost always carry a camera when I ride, I’ve started to divide rides into Photo and Non-Photo rides. On Photo rides- which are by necessity solo**- I stop for anything cool. On Non-Photo rides I try not to stop unless I see something really new and amazing. Sunday morning I climbed the Shoreline trail up/East out of City Creek.

*Actually, that’s only one of the problems. Other problems include a) your mtn biking friends thinking you’re a greenie-enviro-science-plant-geek b) your plant friends thinking you’re a destructive, anti-nature, adrenaline-junkie-gearhead c) your wife thinking you have a girlfriend because you always get home late from “quick” rides and d) your coworkers repeatedly surprising you in your office, catching you with some big flower-shot on the screen. e) Oh and your mom reads your blog.

**Lest I manage to scare away the few riding friends who will still put up me.

So many of the blooms I’ve blogged about the previous 2 years are well underway. On the gradual climb up paralleling the canyon bottom, the Gambel Oaks were probably 1/3-way leafed-out. To climber’s left, along open, sunny, Southeast-facing slopes, Arrowleaf Balsamroots are already popping out in clumps all over the place, and the larger open spaces are nicely sprinkled with blooming Milkvetch (pic right). To climber’s right, shaded by the brunt of the sun by the Oak, Oregon Grape is in full bloom down low. Carpet Phlox and Tufted Evening Primrose are also blooming along this stretch.

New Flower (But not the flower I meant to blog about; this is just a warm-up flower)

Along this stretch, also on the sunny, Southeast-facing slopes, there’s a flower blooming I’ve meant to blog about for a year or so, but just hadn’t gotten around to. It looks like a giant Long-Stalk Spring Parsely, with a flower-stalk some 1.5’ – 2’ off the ground. It’s Fernleaf Biscuitroot, Lomatium dissectum (pic left), a common, if unspectacular, wildflower throughout the Western US and Canada.

There are some 70-80 species of Lomatium, all native to North America, and, like the Spring Parsleys, belonging to the Carrot/Parsley family, Apiaceae. Many species were used by Native Americans for food or medicine. The roots of Fernleaf Biscuitroot are edible when cooked* and were used locally by the Paiutes as a treatment for- among other things- venereal diseases, for which they applied it both internally** and topically. They- and numerous other tribes- also employed it as an asthma remedy.

*And supposedly also when raw in young shoots.

**I mean they ate it, not whatever else you were thinking.

Side Note: Speaking of Paiutes, something kind of interesting about Salt Lake Valley immediately prior to Euromerican settlement was that it was something of an in-between/no-mans-land between the Utes* and the Paiutes. Jim Bridger actually advised Brigham Young that Utah Valley was probably the better location for a settlement, but the Mormon settlers chose Salt Lake Valley instead, in part because there was a fairly consistent Ute presence in Utah Valley.

*For more about the Utes, see this post. Again, I am telling you- a post for everything.

The tall, yellow, branching-at-the-head umbrella-stalks are what you’ll recognize first. But after you come to associate the lower, fern-like leaves sprouting from the base with the plant as well, you’ll notice that the leaves- if not the flower-stalks- are all over the place on sunny, South-facing slopes. It’s another one of those things that once you recognize it, you suddenly start seeing it everywhere, and wonder how you didn’t notice it for so long…

Tangent: This brings up a maybe-obvious thing that I’ll mention anyway: Spring is a great time to recognize the leaves of shrubs/flowers, in that the ground isn’t yet all that crowded with vegetation. In another month or so the open patches will be such a jumble of things growing, grown and even already-wilting that although the flowers will still be easy to pick out, their leaves won’t be nearly as obvious. And though you may not think so, recognizing the leaves of wildflowers- before* the flowers bloom- is actually way cool, in that it tells you what is happening in an area and gives you a bigger framework- over both area and time- in which to check out a given wildflower. Right now you can easily pick out leaf-clumps where Balsamroots are about to bloom, and along damper/shadier stretches the Mule’s Ears are already obvious, a good 2-4 weeks before their flowers will bloom.

*Or after, as in the case of Sticky Geranium.

After about a mile and half the trail turns sharply left and starts switchbacking West up the steep slope. This stretch- which I call the Green Tunnel- is treed mainly with Bigooth Maple, which though of similar height and form to taller Gambel Oak, leafs out 2+ weeks earlier, such that this stretch is much shadier than the Oak-lined trail lower down. There’s much more Oregon Grape here (pic left) in the shade and some other familiar sights, including one of my favorites, Blue Flax (pic below, right). I blogged about this flower last year (in the same place I think!) but since then I’ve noticed something else and read something else about it.

The thing I noticed is that it has one of the most enduring blooms of Wasatch wildflowers. The bloom in the foothills may last till mid-June, but last summer I came across isolated patches up around 7,500 feet in Park City clear into mid-August. A given plant blooms multiple flowers successively over a period of weeks, even though a given flower lasts only a day or two. In other words, if you go ride this same trail tomorrow, you’ll almost certainly see the same plant blooming, but you’ll be looking at different flowers than I saw.

The thing I read is even more interesting. Blue Flax flowers come in 2 types. One type has slightly shorter stamens and pistils, and the other slightly longer. A given plant will have all flowers of one or the other types- but not both, and it turns out that pollination can only occur between flowers of different types. The existence of the 2 types thereby acts as a safeguard against self-pollination.

Side Note: I haven’t yet ID’d the 2 types. I compared this year’s photos with last years (above, left), but both appear to be the same, which may be because I’m pretty sure I photo’d the same plant…

(The Real) New Flower

In the heart of the “tunnel”, coming out of a tight switchback, I caught a flash of white down low I’d never noticed before. The flowers were tiny, 6-petaled, and arrayed on zig-zaggy racemes, and the leaves were narrow and pointy- both suggesting a monocot. A closer view revealed that the six petals were actually tepals (3 petals and 3 sepals) and I knew I’d found a new lily. It’s Star-Flowered False Solomon’s Seal, Maianthemum stellatum (formerly Smilacina stellata).

Maianthemum is a genus of a couple dozen species of tiny woodland lilies spread clear across the Northern hemisphere. M. stellatum is common from Alaska to Appalachia, but somehow I’d never noticed before. Once you do notice it, it’s worth checking out. The zig-zag of the raceme is an extension of the zig-zag form of the stalk, which zigs just a titch one way, then the other, with every leaf-base.

Side Note: Solomon’s Seal- “real” Solomon’s Seal- is a different, but closely-related family of lilies, Polygonatum. I always think it’s bit of a raw deal when something gets named “false” something-or-other. It’s not the thing’s fault we named it wrong…

After the switchbacks, the climb breaks through a long, mostly open, sidehill climb. Every once in a while the trail passes through a small stand of Gambel Oak, and as you go up, each stand is a bit less leafed out right now than the one below it. Eventually as you climb the upper slope before the saddle, you get back into the Oak- shorter now- but these Oaks are just barely just flowering and starting to leaf out. This stretch is well flowered in yellow blooms, mostly Balsamroot (pic left- love this shot), but some other things as well.

There are some Singlestem Groundsel (pic right) blooming right now (though oddly, nowhere near as many as this time last year.*) But the most common yellow blooms after Balsamroots are Dandelions. Or, well, things that look like Dandelions.

*And come to think of it, it sure seems like the scrub oak is about a week behind, leaf-wise, where is normally is for the 3rd week of May. And then there’s that whole weirdness with the Rufous Hummingbirds showing up early, but that’s a whole other post…

Dandelions line* most of this stretch of the Shoreline trail now and again; they’re quite common on the lower stretch paralleling the canyon bottom. And they’re up high toward and on the Saddle as well. But not everything that at first glance appears to be a Dandelion here is a Dandelion; you have to look more closely. At least half the “Dandelions” on this stretch are “Mountain Dandelions”, or Agoseris glauca, which of course aren’t Dandelions at all, but similar-looking composites typically found alongside SS Groundsel and Larkspur in the high rangelands.

Dandelions and Mountain Dandelions are easy to tell apart if you stop and check out the leaves; Mountain Dandelion leaves are long, narrow and unlobed, like exaggerated blades of grass, while Dandelion leaves are lobed/spiky. But with a little practice, you can pick them out on a ride-by on the flowers alone.

*And by “line”, I mean just that. They’re super-common alongside the trail, but there are hardly any just 6 feet or so off the trail, for what I suspect are 2 reasons: Firs, Dandelion seeds seem to do pretty well in disturbed soils, which of course is what the edge of a trail is… Second, Dandelion seeds are common in parks and yards and such, and so can be easily transported along trails by a hiker’s shoe, or say,… a dog. I’ve mentioned this before- I love dogs, but I’m convinced they’re a huge dispersal vector for exotics in the foothills.

On top of the saddle I broke out the helmet-cam, sipped some water, and turned around. Here’s the descent again, but this time I’ve got a cheat-sheet for you, so you can follow along, and know what we’re passing. I recommend you open the video* in a separate window, so that you can watch the timer and follow the notes below as you play it.

*And yes, I’m sorry, you need to select “HD on”; I still haven’t figured out KanyonKris’ hack…

Video Notes

0:00- The clip starts as I fork left and downhill. The Scrub Oak here on this dry, South-facing slope is only about chest-high, and at ~5,500 feet, hasn’t leafed out yet.

0:06- As early as here, and for a while on down, you’ll notice a small clump of dull, light green leaves rising just a titch above the grass. These are yet-to-bloom Arrowleaf Balsamroots. The lighter color/aspect is caused by the little white hairs covering the leaves catching the morning sun.

0:16- First blooming clump of Arrowleaf Balsamroot on the left. You’ll see it frequently the rest of the clip.

0:21- This one is hard to catch, but we pass a group of 4 blooming SS Groundsel (yellow) stalks on the left.

0:25-Even harder to catch- couple of Mountain Dandelions on the left.

1:00- Speed picks up a bit as we weave through a nice stretch of blooming Balsamroots.

1:13- It doesn’t look it, but I am telling you, this loose, off-camber, turn is the sketchiest piece of this whole descent.

1:30- we pass into another stand of Scrub Oak, and already you can see how much more leafed out they are just a couple hundred feet below where we started.

2:05- Check out the monster-trophy-homes below on the right. We’ll come back to these tomorrow…

2:22- At this point you’ll notice that the ground on either side of the trail is covered with a low, clumpy, yellow-green-blooming cover. This is the Evil Myrtle Spurge, the runaway Mediterranean exotic I posted about last year that is taking over huge sections of the foothills.

2:36- Pass through a Scylla-Charybdis pair of rocks. Check these out- we’ll cover them in tomorrow’s post. Immediately after, at…

2:37- More Evil! The blooms lining the trail here are Dyers Woad, which we covered way back in the original Weed Week.

2:59- Another big Spurge patch on left.

3:07- At this point you’re looking straight up to the head of City Creek Canyon. The snow-covered peak at the end is Big Black Mountain. Just behind it, to the right, is a slightly-higher (9K+ ft) Grandview Peak, still on my yet-to-climb list.

3:22- Begin series of switchbacks dropping down into the canyon.

3:34- The much more leafed-out tree on the right is our first Bigtooth Maple, the first of many we’ll pass.

3:44- This switchback always has Blue Flax blooming in May on the downhill of the inside.

4:04- Begin “Green Tunnel”. It’ll get way more tunnel-y over the next 2 weeks.

4:11 – Right here along the right is blooming the Star-Flowered False Solomon’s Seal.

4:43- Blooming Oregon Grape on left as we exit the switchback. BTW, that’s a “regular” Dandelion blooming across the trail on the right.

5:16- Exit the tunnel, turn right onto main trail paralleling canyon bottom

5:26- As we pass over the green pipe, we’re passing by a perennial spring, that… oh wait, I’ll leave this for the geo-post…. Right after this, things get nice and fast for a bit. Mostly Oak along this stretch, with the occasional (leafier) Maple.

6:10 & 7 :00- the open areas on the right are filled not only with the visible blooming Balsamroots, but also carpeted with hot-pink blooming Milkvetch (which unfortunately doesn’t show up in the video.

7:09- Don’t worry, I never run over kids. Usually not adults either, unless they’re Utah County Republican convention delegates. Dogs neither, unless it’s a Weimaraner (only dog that ever bit me on a bike.)

8:08- Down low, hot and dry, the Sagebrush starts up with a big clump on our right.

8:16- The Church office building, state capitol and the Southern end of the Oquirrh Mountains all come into view ahead to the South/Southwest.

8:55- A well-timed trackstand can be helpful in not getting run over.

9 minutes, 3 miles- that’s a lot of cool stuff.

Next Up: What about the rocks?

Breakout & Burdock

Sunday morning I had a 7 mile breakout trail run. “Breakout” is my term for when you climb up and out of an inversion under your own power. From my house, depending on circumstances, I can do it by bike (road or mtn) or foot. The last month or so has been probably the most consistently inverted winter I can remember here. The pattern of high pressure has meant few storms, so the skiing’s lousy. Backcountry skiing after a couple of snowless weeks isn’t much fun, and the resorts have rocks and shrubs sticking out all over the place. In this blog I’ve gone on many times about how great it is living in Utah, but the truth is that right about now, it kind of sucks.

Tangent: Awesome Wife and I have returned to a conversation that comes up every couple of years or so- should we move? Last week Northern Utah had the worst air quality in the nation. This can’t be good for any of us, but we worry most about Twin A, who is asthmatic. He takes daily medications, and we keep a steroid prescription on hand in the fridge for emergencies. We love our neighborhood, our proximity to both city and foothills, but is living here the right thing for our kids? Should we bite the bullet and move up to Park City, or maybe even out of state?

Our concern and frustration is exacerbated by the almost complete lack of effort or backbone on the part of local and state government to do anything about our bad air. Every January our state legislature convenes for several weeks, spent driving back and forth through the smog to the state capitol, where they worry about gay people getting it on, suing the federal government for possibly, maybe, trying to do something about healthcare, and passing yet another pointless abortion law that we’ll spend years and millions of tax dollars defending before it’s finally shot down by the Supreme Court. Our politicians just love to go on about how pro-family they are. Why isn’t kids breathing clean air considered pro-family?

What’s fascinating to me about inversions is how clear the demarcation is between the inversion layer, and the warm clear air above. Here’s a shot from early on in my run, behind the U. of Utah hospital at ~5,000 feet.

Here’s the view at the mouth of Dry Creek Canyon, looking East/up-canyon. You can see I’ve almost broken out of the inversion, with clear blue sky just ahead.

Side Note: What’s interesting is that I broke out of the inversion a moment later, just inside Dry Creek Canyon. But ~45 minutes later, while returning down-canyon, I encountered the fog bank just ½ way down, or in other words, ~3/4 mile up-trail and ~200 feet higher than just 45 minutes earlier. This was consistent with my general observation that inversions seem to rise over the course of the day, probably due to the sun warming the fog…

And here’s what it looked like partway up Dry Creek. The air is clear, clean and dry. Ahhh!

I haven’t blogged much about plants lately, mainly because I’ve been sticking close to home, or traveling to other Northern climes lately where not much is growing right now. But about ½ mile up Dry Creek, I noticed several weathered brown shrubs bearing these things. You know them- they’re the little weird Velcro-thistles that stick to your bike shorts or arm-warmers when you brush by, and then stick to your glove like crazy when you try to pick them off. But if you pick them off with your bare fingers, they don’t stick at all. What are these things and what’s the deal with them?

They’re Lesser Burdock, Arctium minus, an exotic weed native to Eurasia which has been wildly successful in North America. It occurs in every state except Alaska, Hawaii and Florida, and every Canadian province South of the Yukon. It even occurs in Greenland! Arctium phylogeny is complicated*, but it seems to have originated in the Iran-Iraq-Turkey area, and have been around for at least 9 million years.

*It’s closely linked/intertwined with the genus Cousinia, which contains some 600+ weedy species originating from the same part of Eurasia. Arctium and Cousinia were originally distinguished based on morphological features, but it turns out that Arctium is paraphyletic, unless grouped with a number of Cousinia species. Together with these species Arctium can be grouped in a true monophyletic clade, all possessing a haploid chromosome number of n=18, and dubbed the “Arctioid Clade”, within the broader “Arctium-Cousinia Complex”.

I’m just curious. Does anyone reading understand what I just said in this footnote besides me, the Catalogue of Organisms guy, KB, Ted and Sally? I always wonder when I write this stuff if people are like, “Oh yeah, that’s cool stuff…” or if they’re just like “zzzz… when’s the next tangent, already?”

Like almost all thistles, it’s a member of the sunflower family. Burdock is a biennial. In its first year of life, it’s just a small, low-to- the-ground clump of leaves (a rosette.) It doesn’t flower, but just accumulates and stores energy for the year to follow. In Year 2 the plant shoots up and flowers. Following pollination and seed development, the plant dies. Every burdock you see right now in Northern Utah has already died.

In summer each purple flower-head consists of dozens of disk flowers (no ray flowers.) They’re pollinated by bees of all sorts- bumblebees, honey bees, wild bees- and also by several moths and butterflies. After pollination, the flower-heads turn brown and dry out.

One of the cool things about flowers in the sunflower family is how often reproductive hardware gets re-purposed for seed dispersal. Dandelions, Salsifies and Spotted Knapweed are all examples we’ve looked at before, and in each of these flowers, following fertilization, the calyxes of the individual florets dry up and transform into little parachutes, which are then carried away by the wind, hopefully some number to a possibly viable location for germination.

In burdock the calyxes also are transformed, but not into parachutes. Rather each dries and hardens into a stiff, thin little stalk, the end of which culminates in a tiny hook. The dried calyxes remain firmly attached to the flower-head, but the connection between the flower and stalk dries up, becoming brittle and weak. When a passing animal bearing a coat of fur brushes against the dried heads, the hooks catch firmly on the animal hairs, with a grip much stronger than the weakened stalk-connection. The heads- full of seeds- remain attached to the animal, and are borne wherever that animal wanders.

In the early 1941 George de Mestral, a Swiss engineer, returned from a hunting trip and noticed the numerous burdock thistle-heads stuck to both his clothing and the fur of his dog. Curious, he examined several up of the heads under a microscope and noted the tiny hooks which had caught on the fibers of his clothing and the hairs of his dog’s coat. It occurred to de Mestral that the same mechanism might be used to bind two materials. It took him 10 years of experimentation and development, first using cotton, then nylon* to come up with a fully mechanized process for producing Velcro.

*Cotton worked, but only for a short while before wearing out. Nylon was a brand-new material at the time, and de Mestral’s biggest problem with it was working out how to cut hooks out of it.

The new fastener didn’t catch on for a number of years. NASA used it for space suits in the 1960s, but the first large-scale consumer uses were for skiwear, followed by Scuba gear. Today of course, Velcro is everywhere; I can’t think of a day where I don’t connect/disconnect a velcro connector of some sort at least ½ a dozen times.

Many angiosperms of course use animal agents for seed dispersal. But all Asteraceae fruits are achenes, which, being dry and generally small, lend themselves easily to wind dispersal, which is why so many species in the sunflower family- including Dandelions, Balsamroots, Mules Ears, Knapweeds, Asters and Salsifies- use an Agent-Wind pollination-dispersal strategy. But Burdock is Agent-Agent, and it’s interesting to think about what the relative advantages of each approach might be.

On the downside, there’s always wind, but depending on where you’re growing, there’s no guarantee that an animal will brush against you. But on the upside, when an animal does brush against you, that animal is generally going somewhere. And it occurs to me that animals generally- eventually- get around to going to places conducive to growing plants. An herbivore seeks out plants to eat, and such plants obviously grow in places where plants can grow- not on sun-baked barren outcrops of rock or sand, or in the middle of a pond. And carnivores go looking for prey in places where herbivores are likely to be found, which, again, are places where plants are capable of growing. So while it may be likelier that a breeze will brush against you than an animal, it’s likelier that the animal is eventually headed to someplace where your seed might gain purchase*.

*Always wanted to work that “gain purchase” expression into a post. I think I originally heard it in Raising Arizona, when “Hi” is narrating his fertility problems with Edwina.

I continued running up the trail, blue sky up above. It hasn’t snowed in close to a couple weeks, and the trail surface is packed snow and ice, treacherous for runners and bikers alike. Fortunately Sunday’s run was my first with a new gear acquisition: Yaktrax, which you can think of as little tire-chains for your shoes. They grip wonderfully on snow and ice, the only minor downside a small increase in foot-weight. I ran over sketchy, slippery trails for 7 miles without even a slip; I don’t know why I waited so long* to get them.

*One of 3 cool gear-acquisitions over the last week, the other 2 of which will most certainly make their way into the blog in coming weeks.

There’s another advantage to agent dispersal, which actually occurred to me last week in this same spot, when I biked past and acquired several burdock-heads on my lycra tights. As I stopped to remove them I thought, I’m dispersing seeds in January. Think about that. No dandelion is scattering parachutes now. But animals like deer, coyotes and mtn bikers pass by year-round. Burdock- dead for months- is still dispersing seeds.

Tangent: I thought about something else, too, and that was how many times over the course of this project- and before- I’ve noticed really cool things biking or running up Dry Creek. Glacier Lilies, Ballhead Waterleaf, Stellers Jays, Spotted Towhees, Mule Deer, Coyotes, a lion-kill, Oregon Grape, Milkweed, Balsamroots, Arnicas, Beardstongue, Wild Rose, Salsifies, Lichens, Mosses, Dragonflies, Myrtle Spurge, Spring Parsley, Oaks, Maples, Bitterbrush, Sagebrush and so much more- just on this little (<2 mile) stretch of trail. Think about that*. Over the past 2 years, if I’d done nothing but ride up and down Dry Creek, I still probably could’ve down ¾ of this blog.

*Better yet, search for “Dry Creek” in this blog.

I ran up the canyon, then switch-backed out of the bottom and climbed up along the side-hill to the overlook, running the last 100 yards in the bright morning sun. The air was dry and warm, the light clear and bright, and I felt like I was awake- really awake- for the first time in weeks. At the overlook I paused and looked out over the valley.

As I did so, I was reminded of the wonderful, awful irony of inversions: that something so ugly, foul, cold and downright unhealthy can be so heart-achingly beautiful when viewed from above. If there’s something prettier than looking down on a valley inversion on a warm, sunny winter morning, I haven’t yet seen it.

I lingered a while, then reluctantly turned and began the long run down. Toward the bottom of the canyon I began to feel the cold again, creeping through my jacket, my flesh and into my very bones. I exited the canyon and jogged back along the foothills toward home, responsibilities, work and another week in the smoggy valley.

I’ve found though that the sense of wakefulness and clarity from a breakout lingers for a day or two back down in the fog-world. It’s as though your brain is still carrying a bit of the clear sky around with you. After a couple of days though, the effect wanes, and your mind begins to haze over and fog up again, like the air around you.

Montana Part 1: Missoula Weeds, Larches and Singletracks Not Taken

Note: Here’s the deal. We’re still on vacation, up in Northwestern Montana*. But I’ve already come across so much I want to blog about that if I wait till we get home later this week, I’ll be blogging about Montana till Christmas. So I’m borrowing a page out of KanyonKris’ book and starting to blog about the vacation while still on it.

Also, just a disclaimer/heads-up: I’m on a new system, with a new version of LiveWriter, and blogging from a spot with iffy access. So if there are format issues with this post or the next one, just be patient and I’ll clean things up sometime in the next week.

*New masthead photo taken yesterday morning. I need to do a post on clouds.

The Post

Driving North on I-15 out of Utah, you pass a series of low ranges in Southern Idaho before clearing Pocatello and dropping out onto the Snake River Plain.

The plain is generally flat or gently rolling, and it lasts for a couple of hours. Sometimes it’s agricultural land, but more often just open range, or scrub and lava fields. The plain breaks for good right around Spencer, just short of the Montana border, and when it does, forests start appearing again on the mountain hillsides. Although various tree guides to the West define these forests as the same type- Rocky Mountain Montane Forest- they’re different from the ones you left behind a few hours back in the Wasatch.

Side Note: The drive from Salt Lake to Glacier NP is also fascinating hydrologically. Just shortly across the Idaho border, at Malad Summit, you leave the Salt Lake drainage basin- and hence the Great Basin- and enter the Snake River Basin, which eventually drains into the Columbia and so is part of the Pacific watershed. But at the Montana border you cross over into the Atlantic watershed, specifically Red Rock Creek, which drains into the Yellowstone and then to the Missouri, then the Mississippi and into the Gulf of Mexico. But then, just ~100 miles or so ahead, at Deer Lodge Pass (just South of Butte) you cross back into the Pacific watershed, specifically the Clark Fork, which eventually also finds its way to the Columbia. And finally, inside the park, you cross over into the Atlantic watershed one last time, specifically the Marias River, which leads- again- to the Missouri…

Our first day we drove up to Missoula and spent the night. Friday morning I did my usual family-road-trip schtick of getting up before dawn to sneak in a mtn bike ride while the family slept. I drove in the pre-dawn up to Rattlesnake Recreation Area, about 5 miles North of town, unloaded the bike and started climbing.

Tangent: I’ve previously described this family road-trip custom of riding super-early. It’s a little trickier when you’re just passing through, spending a single night. You either need to arrive in town early enough so that you can stop by a bike shop, or have really good beta- from the web or otherwise- before you arrive. Because you’ll be searching for a strange trailhead right around dawn. And you want a ride that’s fun, that’ll expose you to the local environment- whether forest, desert, or whatever- and that will give you a good workout/climb, but not be so technical that you’ll come back to your family all crabby and out-of-sorts from excessive dabbing/walking on a strange trail first thing in the morning when you’re not really awake, or worse yet, bruised from a crash. (Yes, I’ve done both.)

Given all that, Rattlesnake Rec Area was a pretty good choice. Totally non-technical, but plenty of climbing, real singletrack, nice forest, close to town and a fun, fast descent back to the trailhead.

The first big obvious difference of the forest around Missoula from the Wasatch is of course all the pines- specifically Ponderosa. Though riding through open pines isn’t terribly unusual in most of the West, it’s unheard of in the Wasatch. Ponderosas are the most common tree around Missoula, and in fact for the first hour of my ride, it was one of only 2 trees I saw, the other being Douglas Fir. That’s right- I rode for an hour and saw just 2 species of tree. And that’s the first interesting thing about the North side of the Snake River plain, is what’s not there. When you finally cross the plain and hit real mountains and forests again, you leave behind several common species of tree. Gambel Oak and Bigtooth Maple we’ve already talked about; we actually left those guys behind by the time we hit Pocatello. And in their absence, other shrubs- such as Ninebark and Rocky Mountain Maple (pic right)- seem to do well, a trend we saw several weeks ago over in the Sublett Range.

But we left behind more than that. White Fir, that ubiquitous conifer of the Wasatch, is gone. So is Blue Spruce. As a rule, species diversity in forests declines the further you go from the equator. Certainly that’s true as you go North from Arizona to Utah to Wyoming. And so it wasn’t surprising that this Montana forest had just two trees.

Tangent: Species-sparse forests- consisting of just a couple of tree-types- can either be really cool, or really boring, depending on your mood. Sometimes seeing the same darn tree or two for hours on end gets a bit old, and you start thinking about how to cut the ride short. But other times it brings on a quiet sense of order and appreciation for detail. When you can identify pretty much everything growing around you, your mind sort of settles in and you start to see little things you didn’t notice before.

Side Note: Another difference is Aspen. Though we saw plenty of Aspen later in the trip, up in and around the Flathead Valley and Glacier NP, they don’t usually seem to form the vast expanses so typical of Wasatch forests. Interestingly, when I did research for my Aspen posts last summer, one of the most intriguing things I read was that the Aspens of Montana reproduce primarily sexually, unlike ours in the Wasatch, which almost always reproduce clonally. And this difference begs the question of whether the Aspen of Montana are actually evolving faster than those in the Wasatch. Over the last 10,000 years, Aspen in the Wasatch- and most of Utah and Colorado- have effectively experienced one single, clonally-extended generation, while those in Montana have probably experienced something like 200-250 generations.

Montana’s Meanest Weed Is Way Pretty

The paucity of species extended to wildflowers. With the exception of a few Asters, I saw none of the familiar wildflowers back home, and overwhelmingly just one species of flower in bloom. But that may have less to do with latitude and diversity than it does with the flower in question: Spotted Knapweed, Centaurea maculosa (pic left).

C. maculosa is an exotic, native to Eastern Europe. It’s a member of Asteraceae, and so related to things like Dandelions and Mules Ears and Balsamroots, but belongs to a different tribe, Cynarea. In fact, the thing you’ve no doubt seen here in North America that’s much more closely-related to it is Carduus nutans, the dreaded, evil Musk Thistle.

Spotted Knapweed is a tough, tenacious invader, particularly in the Northwestern US; in Montana alone it’s invaded more than 4.5 million acres. It regularly outcompetes and displaces native ground cover due to 4 attributes: 1) It’s got an extra-efficient tap-root, giving it first dibs on groundwater. 2) Like its evil cousin, it’s a super-high seed-producer (an advantage shared to greater or lesser degree by most composites.) 3) It’s not much favored as a food source, and 4) There’s some evidence that it may be allelopathic, inhibiting the growth of adjacent plants.

Interestingly, factors 3 and 4 may be connected, as both appear to be the result of the Knapweed’s production of phytotoxic chemical, specifically a catechin.

Side Note: Catechins are a class of secondary plant metabolites. Primary plant metabolites are organic compounds associated with plant growth, development or reproduction. Secondary plant metabolites aren’t directly involved in any of that stuff, but rather perform other functions, like- for example- poisons.

The catechin produced by C. maculosa is present in both the leaves and roots. In the leaves its presence makes the foliage unpalatable to grazers. From the roots it infiltrates the soil, where it appears to cause cell death in the root tips of other plants. Exactly how it kills the cells is not completely clear, but one hypothesis is that it somehow causes a spike in calcium ions, which act as messengers in plant signaling pathways associated with stress response.

Back in Europe, Spotted Knapweed occurs in and among other ground cover and isn’t dominant. But here in North America, our plants don’t know how to deal with, and it ends up being the only wildflower around in large areas (pic above, left). Lots and lots of countermeasures- both chemical and biological- have been, and are currently, used to attempt to control it. I read that in Glacier NP, in the high meadows near Rising Sun, rangers remove it by hand when found*.

*Whether or not that’s actually the case, I saw plenty of the weed in the park below 5,000 feet, especially on the East/Atlantic side.

All About Larch

OK, back to trees. After an hour of climbing I paused at a trail junction to pee*. As I did so I looked up and around, and noticed a couple of trees that looked different. And sure enough they were. They were Western Larches, Larix occidentalis.

*Yes, that’s right- yet another botanical discovery/observation while peeing!

Larches are that epitome of weirdness in the world of conifers- a deciduous PLT. In fact many of us use the words “conifer” and “evergreen” almost interchangeably. But just as there are evergreen angiosperms, there are deciduous conifers, most of them Larches, and Larches are the only deciduous conifers in North America. We’ve looked at Larches before, last summer in Maine, when I saw them around the Mud Pond, and again, fleetingly, from the train window last October*, en route from Prague to Vienna.

*Which is, regrettably, the only time I’ve seen Larches changing color. Those would have been European Larch, L. decidua, which has supposedly also been introduced and subsequently escaped/naturalized in the Northeastern US.

The Larches in Maine are Tamaracks, L. laricina, far and away the most widespread and common North American Larch, extending from Maine, clear across the Canadian Boreal Forest and into the Alaskan interior. But there are 2 other North American Larch species.

These Larches occur only in the Northwest- the Cascades and Northern (but not really Northern) Rockies. They’re almost like outliers of the Tamarack domain, and when I looked at the range maps, I assumed that Western Larch was an isolated population of Tamaracks that became a new species.

But when I checked out the research* on North American Larches, I was surprised to find out that the opposite seems to be the case. Western Larch shows a much more diverse gene pool than Tamarack, which appears to have gone through some recent genetic bottleneck (presumably due to recent, repeated glaciations of its range.) If anything, Tamarack is likely to be the (wildly successful) offshoot of Western Larch!

*If you follow the link and actually read the paper, the story of Eurasian Larches is way fascinating. If you’re a plant-geek, anyway.

Side Note: I discussed genetic bottlenecks this Spring when talking about the Blue Piñon down in Mexico.

In the West, Larches don’t occur any further South than central Idaho. In a sense, they’re almost a “Boreal extension” into the Rockies, a hint of the cold, endless forest beyond.

Side Note: The other species is Subalpine Larch, L. lyalli, which occurs in Glacier NP, but which I didn’t see/ID this trip.

Larch needles are lighter-colored than most other conifers, giving them a comparatively light green, almost cheerful, aspect. They’re attached to the tree in little, flaring bundles of 10-20 needles, which makes them easy to ID up close (pic left). The needles are also short, and together with their unusually twig-attachment architecture, this gives them a relatively “scraggly” silhouette when compared with adjacent Pines or PLTs. Larches are shade- intolerant, love direct sun, and given the right conditions, can quickly outgrow surrounding pines, firs and Douglas Firs. Unlike Tamaracks, which almost never reach 100’, Western Larches can grow over 200’ in height (pic right, Bird Whisperer for scale.)

The Singletrack Not Taken

After another 20 minutes of climbing (and a cool but ultimately dead-end side-trail* exploration) I reached an overlook to the North, framed by this stunning stand of Larch (pic left). Beyond, the trail continued, dipping down a bit. It looked mysterious, twisty, smooth and inviting, the ultimate promise of fine, new singletrack ahead(pic right). But I was out of time. The family would be waking, and we had places to go, things to do. I always hate this moment. Looking ahead at new, untraveled trail, in a place where it might well be years- or never- before I return with time and opportunity to explore further, to see what’s around the next bend. This is what I both love and hate about the West: a thousand unexplored trails, and no matter how many you manage to explore, there’ll always be a thousand more. You can spend your life exploring this part of the world, and yet never really know it.

*Aren’t those the weirdest? You’re in a strange place, riding along, you find an obvious, well-traveled side trail and decide to follow it. Over the next mile or so it gets fainter and fainter, and eventually disappears altogether. What happened? Where did it go? Why are all these other bikers following it? Are they all just clueless out-of-towners like me?

I made it back in time to catch the hotel continental breakfast with Awesome Wife and the Trifecta. As we munched on scrambled eggs, cocoa puffs and do-it-yourself waffles*, I mused about how though we’d “lost” a few tree species on our trip North, we’d gained at least 1 new one. I didn’t yet appreciate how weird things would get as we continued North.

*Don’t those hotel/motel continental breakfasts have the oddest food combinations? I always think about European tourists coming down from their rooms in the morning, checking out these weird breakfast buffets, and thinking, “OK that’s it. These Americans are totally whacked. It is utterly beyond me how a people that eats so poorly managed to put a man on the moon.”

Next Up: The Fantabulous Columbian Forest

4 New Foothill Flowers, The 5 Axes Of Life And My Hunky Neighbor

Fabulous Peak Spring continued this past weekend. The highlight was the Big Shoreline ride I did Saturday afternoon with my next-door neighbor- let’s call him “Chris.” “Big Shoreline” is what I call when I ride from my house up to the zoo, then get on the Bonneville Shoreline Trail, ride it over behind the U. Hospital, up Dry Creek, along the ridge, down into City Creek, then up the other/West side of City Creek , regain the ridge, ride to the dirt road, and then grind up the dirt road all the way to the top/third antenna tower (view from turnaround below, right). Then I turn around and do the whole thing in reverse. It’s a big, great ride that takes between 3.5 and 4 hours, depending on how much time I kick back at the turnaround.

This past weekend, and probably all this coming week, is probably the best week of the year to ride Big Shoreline, because a) there’s great flowers the whole way, and b) the Scrub Oak is leafing out more and more each day. I’ll talk about both in a moment, but first let’s talk about Chris.

All About Chris

Chris has been my next-door neighbor for the past 6 years. I couldn’t ask for a better neighbor. He’s smart, fun, helpful and considerate. We’re of similar age, and have similar-aged kids attending the same school (he and Awesome Wife take turns walking our kids to the bus.) He’s also one of these neighbors who has like every tool you might ever need- star-fangled screwdriver, compressor, whatever- and is happy to lend them to you for as long as you like. And- most relevant to this post- he loves to bike, both mountain and road, and does so at a similar level of ability to me.

Wow! What a great guy! Why haven’t I blogged about him before? Why don’t I do like, well, all my riding with him? Because our schedules almost never line up. In Chris’ family, he’s responsible for most of the domestic-type stuff: getting the kids to school, managing the house, etc. In the Watcher Family, Awesome Wife handles most of that. So when I ride, Chris is usually hustling to get kids fed, dressed and out the door. When he rides, I’m usually at work.

So on the one hand, Chris and I have pretty similar lives, but on a daily basis they’re way different. And this is as good a place as any to bring up something I’ve been asked about repeatedly in relation to this project, both directly, and through occasional comments, and that is the whole Work-Life-Passion balance thing.

The 5 Axes Of Life

I really believe that the central life challenge of virtually all middle-aged married outdoor-heads with children is determining and managing the appropriate balance in their lives between 5 key “axes*”: their spouse, their offspring, their career, their friendships and their passion(s). Ideally, we want our relationships to excel with all 5 of these axes all of the time. But in the real world, with limited time, resources and focus, we can’t manage that, and so we constantly make judgment calls and trade-offs to live the best balance we can.

*To be clear, I am speaking of the plural of “axis”, not the thing you use to chop down a tree.

On each of these axes, at any given time we’re in a Green Zone, Yellow Zone or Red Zone. Green is of course where we want to be. Red is where we know we need to avoid ending up. And Yellow is where so many of us find ourselves so often; managing but not thriving. Here’s a graphical example of the various zones on each axis.

If you think of your own life, or that of people you know well, you can probably “map” yourself or them into various zones on each axis. It’s really hard to wind up in the Green on all 5. And what so many guys do is they chuck Axis #5; they give up on their passions, intending to apply their focus on the first four.

But here’s the weird, ironic thing about the Axes of Life: If you chuck Axis #5, you pretty much doom yourself to always be Yellow on the other 4. I don’t know why this is, but after a decade+ of watching friends marry, have families, navigate careers and try to make their lives work, I’ve become convinced it is true. If you can’t make your passion work, ultimately nothing else will ever shine for you.

Chris and I clearly have overlapping passions. But the life-balances we’ve worked out for ourselves are different enough that despite all we have in common, how well we get along and how close we live together, we only ride together a handful of times per year.

Tangent: I feel the need for a tangent here, for 3 reasons. First, I’ve started this post on a somewhat somber note, and feel I should lighten the mood a bit before diving into geeky botany stuff. Second, having used Chris to illustrate my point, I feel I should include something “fun” about him. And third, my posts of late have been peppered with all sorts of gratuitous references to Selma Hayek and Le Caille waitresses and hairstylists; I feel I need throw a little something in for the ladies.

So here’s another thing about Chris. He is widely acknowledged to be the Neighborhood Hunk. Hunky as in Very Handsome.

As a straight male, I am almost always unable to directly determine whether another man is handsome; to me, all men are hairy, unattractive and sport poor hygiene. It is utterly beyond me why women find any man attractive, and in fact one of my deep-seated fears is that after human cloning is perfected, women will finally get their act together, figure out how much better off the world would be without men* and kill us all in the night.

*Think about it. We start all the wars, commit virtually all the violent crimes and have absolutely no fashion sense.

But I have compelling indirect evidence that Chris is hunky, and this evidence takes 2 forms. First is the behavior of the various Suburban Neighbor Ladies in our neighborhood. When I drive by and see Chris out chatting with any of the ladies in the ‘hood, they always seem just a bit more attentive than when they’re chatting with, well, say… uh, me for instance. They’re always smiling, and seem just a bit too quick to laugh, and touch their hair just a little too often, all of which combine to give off a general, “Hey wow- I’m talking to a Hunky Guy!” vibe…

But second, and more interestingly, he looks like the kind of guy who could be on a TV show. Let me explain: Most of us “normal” people, even if we look OK in real life, are nowhere near attractive enough to be in a TV show or a movie. A good example is Steve Buscemi. The guy always plays “weirdo” parts in movies, and as soon as we see him appear in a film, we think, “Oh OK, here’s the maladjusted weirdo in the movie…” But he doesn’t really look that weird, and in fact if he worked in your office you probably wouldn’t think twice about him; he’s just nowhere near movie-handsome.

That’s how it is with most of us. If they put one of us in a movie, when we appeared the audience would think, “Uh-oh. What’s this guy’s story? He must be a psychopath/alcoholic/victim-of-childhood-abuse/tortured loser… I better keep an eye on this character…”

Nested Tangent: This is a good a time as any to bring up one of my big complaints about TV & movie plots: that any character with the name “Alex” is always problematic and untrustworthy. (As most readers of this blog know by now, my first name is “Alex.”) For years growing up, whenever an “Alex” appeared in a movie or on a TV series, the guy was inevitably a criminal, traitor, diabolical genius, or just tormented, angst-ridden loser. Think about it. The dead guy in the Big Chill, whose funeral they’ve all come out for after he killed himself? “Alex.” Malcolm McDowell’s character in “A Clockwork Orange,” a crazed, brutal, sadistic hoodlum of the near-future? “Alex.” The evil, scheming, diabolical Administrator/criminal mastermind of Salem Hospital in Days Of Our Lives? “Alex Marshall.” Even in “The Bionic Woman”, when Lindsay Wagner is sent to disable a crazed AI-supercomputer controlling a doomsday device, the computer is named- in a godawfully flagrant rip-off of 2001’s “HAL 9000”- “ALEX 7000.” ‘Cause of course anybody named “Alex” is always smart and evil and messed up…

But if you were watching a TV show, like “Law & Order Mentalist SUV” or something, and Chris walked onto the set, you wouldn’t think twice about it, because Chris looks like a guy who could be on a TV show.

Flowers Already

Phew- that’s a long intro. So anyway, we had a fantastic ride, and the flowers were blooming like crazy. The Balsamroots are exploding and Bumblebees are all over the Ballhead Waterleaf. Every bend in the trail, when you round it, is another explosion of color, and as you ride along it’s all you can do to keep from saying “ooh” and “ah” aloud.

I saw 3 new wildflowers on Saturday’s ride. (Yes I know the title says “4”; all will become clear in a moment.) The first was this guy, which I am embarrassed to say I saw all over the Wasatch last year and never got around to IDing. So I made sure to get it right this year- it’s Singlestem Groundsel, Senecio integerremus. It looks kind of like several wimpy little yellow daisies atop an unbranched stem a couple of feet high. But it’s not a daisy. A true daisy has multiple layers of sepals at the base of the flower; Groundsels have just a single layer of sepals.

An annoying thing about this flower is that it has like 4 different names, the second most common being Lambstongue Ragwort. I think the “Lamb” part may refer to the leaves, which are covered in fine, soft hairs. But here’s an interesting thing about this plant: over the course of the summer, the leaves will become progressively less hairy, and almost totally smooth. So if you can remember to pick out a clump on one of your usual trails, you can check it out from time to time through the summer.

S. integerremus (and several other Senecio species) contains high levels of alkaloids, and can cause liver damage in livestock that graze on it excessively. It’s just starting to be common in the foothills North of Salt Lake.

Tangent: But it’s already really common down around South Mountain/Corner Canyon. And these leads to something really interesting I just noticed last week: Spring is 3-7 days more advanced down in the South Mountain foothills- just 20-22 miles South, but at the same altitude- than it is in the foothills North of downtown Salt Lake.

I did lunch rides on South Mountain trails twice last week, which revealed far more developed blooms of Groundsel, Waterleaf and Bluebells than 20 miles to the North. Here’s a quick example. The Bitterbrush in the photo above right was fully bloomed at about 5,400 feet along the Oak Hollow trail in Draper on Thursday 5/7. The photo left is Bitterbrush at the same altitude and exposure just above City Creek 2 days later.

Higher up, you’ll see this flower pretty much all summer long, so it’s a good one to remember. But be careful. There are a bunch of other flowers that look kind of like it if you’re just looking quick. Here’s one I saw Monday morning up in Mill Creek Canyon. It’s Western Wallflower, Erysimum asperum (pic right, below left). Once you stop and look at it, you see it’s completely different, but if you just pedal past at 15-20 MPH, you could think “Oh Groundsel…” and just roll on by.

Here’s the cool thing about Western Wallflower: it has the greatest altitude range of any Utah plant, occurring from ~2,000 to over 11,000 feet. (OK, so this is the fourth flower- but I didn’t see it on the same ride. Get it?)

The second flower I found while climbing out of City Creek on my way up toward the antenna towers. It’s Blue Flax, Linum lewisii, and it’s a real beauty. It’s never super-common, and doesn’t seem to occur in big groupings. Close-up the veins in its petals have a cool, almost hypnotic pattern and it’s fun to stare at for a bit.

Tangent: I’d argue that this stretch- from City Creek up through the switchbacks in the Maples until it opens up (see map, above)- is the best part of Shoreline, particularly as a descent. The switchbacks down are like zipping through a series of green tunnels, and then the fast stretch from the bottom of the switchbacks- which didn’t even really seem like a climb on the way up- just screams on the way back down.

Here’s something useful about Blue Flax: you can make rope out of the stems. You soak them in water for like a week+ to get the bark off and then twist the stems together to make cord or rope. Another cool little factoid about Blue Flax is an apparent defense mechanism; its seeds contain cyanide. Whether it’s enough to be seriously harmful in small quantities I don’t know, but supposedly it gets removed through cooking, making the seeds edible.

The third flower was the real beauty of the day. As you descend shoreline Westbound toward City Creek, the trail bends through a deep, shady, well-watered draw. And carpeting the floor underneath the Maples is this- spectacular reddish-pink flowers. And unlike so many wildflowers, these smell- and they smell fantastic. I’ve never seen these anywhere else in the foothills, and they were the highlight of the ride for me.

When I returned home I poured through 3 wildflower guides looking for a match. Finally I emailed Sally, who ID’d a likely suspect: Dame’s Rocket, Hesperis matronalis, native to Eurasia and a frequent garden ornamental, which has escaped cultivation and established itself in similar sites nationwide.

That’s right- my favorite flower of the day, the one with which I was absolutely smitten, appears to be an exotic. I have to admit I’m a bit crestfallen, but it really is lovely. Assuming it is Dame’s Rocket, an interesting question is how it got there; it’s at least ½ mile as the crow flies from any house, and more like a full mile by trail. Of course there are plenty of exotics in the foothills, and the hillsides on either side of City Creek Canyon are exploding right now with Dyer’s Woad. But this is the only place I’ve encountered H. matronalis.

Side Note: I blogged about Dyers Woad last year. You can check out that post if you want more info, but here are the 3 cool things about it: Its name (“Woad” sounds so evil), that it is a natural source of blue dye, and its allelopathic seedpods.

Oh before I forget, a cool thing about the Gambel Oak. As they leaf out this week, it’s an excellent time to check out the clonal boundaries between stands. As I’ve mentioned before, Scrub Oak in the Wasatch reproduces primarily by root-cloning, so that big stands are all linked together. During the summer and Winter you can’t really tell where one clone ends and another begins, but as they leaf out, they do so at different rates, and it’s fairly easy to tell from a distance where the boundaries of a given clone lie.

Like I said up-front, this week is peak wildflower action in the foothills, so make sure to get out. Hell, call in sick if you have to: this week is worth a dip into Yellow on the Career Axis.