How Night-Riding Is Like Hotel Sex

Quick Note About Another Post: I’m the guest-poster today over at Fat Cyclist. If you’re not familiar with Fat Cyclist, you really ought to check it out. Even if you’re not a cyclist, the writing and humor alone make it a great, regular read. In addition, Fatty’s blog is one of the very few out there that effectively bridges discussion between a fun, recreation-related topic and a real tough personal issue on the personal and family front, namely cancer. I actually work with Fatty. He’s at least, if not more, likeable and good-hearted in person as he comes across in his blog. And the thing is, he’s like not even fat.

Quick Note About THIS Post: Despite the somewhat risqué theme of this post, there’s really nothing in this one that should cause prudish concern. I usually avoid adult topics in the blog, but this analogy is so good I just had to make an exception. (And besides, only about 5 people read this blog anyway, and I think they’re all over 30… Except maybe Kristin. Hey Kristin: why don’t you skip this one and go read the post about Moss instead?)

So many of the things I blog about here, from hybrid oaks to moose to birds, I see on a mountain bike. And several times this year I’ve made references to mountain biking at night- which I will hereafter refer to as “night-riding”- and even hinted at doing a post about it from time to time. So now I’m doing it.

Night-riding is one of those things non-mountain bikers totally do not get. And what’s more, the vast majority of mountain bikers don’t seem to get it either. They may have tried a night-ride or two, or even participated in a 24-hour team event, but almost always seem to have quickly retreated to the light of day. Of the mountain bikers I know, fewer than 5% (way fewer, like maybe 1%) night-ride regularly. And this just amazes me, because night-riding is so utterly, unbelievably awesome.

But when I try to explain to other mountain bikers why night-riding is so great, I get blank, you-seem-weird looks in return. They just can’t seem to get mentally past the whole dark-and-cold thing. So for a while, I’ve desperately sought an analogy that could somehow impart the complete and utter coolness of night-riding. And finally I think I’ve found it: Night-Riding is like Hotel Sex.

Hotel Sex

So here’s the deal: if you have, or have had, small children, you will totally and immediately get this analogy, and if you don’t, or haven’t, had small children, you will totally not get it.

When you grow up and get married and have a baby or two, there comes a time when you and your spouse finally get away from the kid(s) for a night or a weekend. It may be for weekend away, or to go a wedding, or a reunion, and it may be anywhere from 6 months to a few years after the birth of your most recent child. And you leave your kid(s) with your family or friends or whatever, and you spend the night- just you and your spouse- in a hotel. And when that happens, and while at the hotel you and your spouse do you-know-what, even though it’s pretty much just like doing you-know-what back home, it’s like somehow totally, way different, better, newer and somehow feels a bit naughty. That’s Hotel Sex, and that feeling, that experience, is exactly the feeling and experience of night-riding: the same, but different. Somehow familiar, new and naughty all at the same time, like you’re somehow getting away with something.

When my friends and I first began night-riding, during the winter of 1995/96, our lights were so lame and weak that we night-rode at a snail’s pace, riding as much by “trail-braille” as by vision. When we were fortunate enough to ride during a full moon, we killed the lights and rode by moonlight, which was easier and less disorienting. But over the years, as light technology and our willingness to invest in serious lights) has improved, we’ve amped it up to the point where we now night-ride at daytime speeds, and the thrill of descending a fast singletrack at 25+ mph in the dark is a fantastic high.

Tangent: My friend Rainbow-Spirit-Paul long ago pointed out the “arms-race” aspect of bike lights. When we began night-riding, we all had crappy lights and poked along slowly and happily. Then in 1996 or 1997, our friend Louis bought a “real” light- a 10 watt headlamp. Suddenly Louis was the alpha-male of our pack; every descent he dropped us like a bus full of old ladies on the way to Wendover. After a year or so, one by one, our masculinity was finally irked enough to start buying “real” lights, and the process has continued since. The most dramatic “escalation” of this race since was the 2004-2006 period, where most of us upgraded to HID lighting systems.

A couple of posts ago I mused over what it must be like to see the world through the eyes of a bird or other creature (or tetrachromatic woman.) In a way, night-riding is that experience; it’s the exact same world/trail, but the view is totally different. Colors are gone, dimensions are altered (see tangent below) and perspective is funneled to a cone running 40-50 feet ahead. The world around sinks back from the lighted cone-of-reality into an all-enveloping cocoon of inky darkness, which is at first un-nerving, but later becomes strangely soothing. Riding fast at night is to constantly and continuously emerge from darkness into light, like somehow being born again and again.

Tangent: One of the most initially disturbing aspects of riding fast at night is the strange perception of dimensions, and apparent “flatness” of the view ahead. This is at least partially mitigated by the use of 2 lights- a bright, flood-type light mounted on the handlebars, and a more focused “spot”-type light mounted on the helmet. The combination of the 2 helps soften the harshness of the light/shadow boundaries in the view-field ahead, and partially restore a 3-dimensional perspective to the rider.

A head-mounted light is also exceedingly helpful in twisty switchbacks, where a bar-mounted light can’t “look ahead”…

On our Fall/Winter Gooseberry Mesa trips, the guys and I have started doing a night ride, after a short late-afternoon siesta, to make better use of the long dark evenings. This past trip Clean-Colin and I extended the night-ride on our own, along the Hurricane Rim trail. As we descended into China Wash we crossed the Mojave zone transition boundary, and the familiar smell of Creosote filled the dark around us. After we climbed the other side of the draw we realized we were ahead of our pick-up schedule and stopped, killed the lights, ate cookies and watched meteors for about 20 minutes (it was during the Leonid shower) before continuing.

Ultimately the most wonderful thing about night-riding is that it gives you back time. When you get down to it, the only thing we’re really given in life is time, and if your preferred way of spending time is out-of-doors, then the limited daylight of the winter months represents a huge loss of time and, therefore, loss of life. Night-riding gets you outside, doing something wonderful, in the dark. It recovers time, and in the end, recovered time = recovered life. If you want to extend your life, get a light, set your alarm, and get out.

The Unbearable Lightness of Aspen Part 1: Karma, Clones and Suckers

So I’m back home, and running out of summer. And though I’ve mentioned them in passing several times, I’ve yet to blog about Aspen.

When I moved here from Colorado, in mid-summer 1995, I didn’t know a soul. My first weekend here I joined up with the Wasatch Mountain Club for a mtn bike ride around Park City. The ride was a great time, and convinced me that I’d be able to enjoy living here and make friends as well. But the thing that struck me the most from that ride was the Aspen. Endless, twisty singletrack trails winding their way through light, sunny Aspen groves.

Tangent: Joining the Wasatch Mountain Club was the single best thing I did when I moved to Utah. Though I’ve long since stopped joining them for weekly rides or weekend trips, the core of my best friends here today are people I met in or through- directly or indirectly- the club. Years ago, my friend Louis, who’s long since moved away to Portland (I still miss you buddy) commented on how many of the club members (including both of us) joined the club following a break-up or divorce, and joked that it should be renamed "The Lonely Hearts Club". He was probably right. At least 3 of my old club friends have since married other club members, and while I didn’t, the friendship and introduction to the backcountry of the Wasatch was the right tonic for my broken heart.

The Colorado Front Range has great Aspen as well, but not nearly as close to the places where most people live. The closest great singletrack through Aspen to Denver is the Colorado Trail at Kenosha Pass. A lovely trail, but a full hour+ drive from the city. Along the Wasatch Front, the aspen-lined singletracks are only 20-30 minutes away, up any of the canyons, over the hill in Pinebrook/Jeremy Ranch, or even right from Affleck Park. Over the last 13 years I’ve spent probably the better part of a thousand hours biking, hiking, skiing or camping in Aspen forests, and it’s been one of the highlights of my life here in Utah.

To a native Easterner, an Aspen forest is probably the strangest and most inviting forest they’ve ever seen; there’s nothing like it East of the Rockies. While Aspens grow across the continent, only West of Denver do they form vast, unbroken, monotypic forests. And the forests are lighter and, therefore cheerier, than any other North American forest. The lightness gives them an almost ethereal, not-of-this-world quality that pulls your mindset out of the day-to-day world and into another place for a short time, before re-emerging, refreshed, and almost “cleared”, back into the “real world”.

The genus Populus is part of Saliceae, the Willow Family. It includes roughly 30 species, and is broken out into 6 groupings or sections. One of those sections is Cottonwoods. Another 4 sections are various types of Poplars, both New and Old World, and the 6^th section is Aspens. Two of those Aspens are native to North America. Bigtooth Aspen, Populus grandidentata, is native to the Northeastern US and Canada. The other, Quaking Aspen, Populus tremuloides, our Aspen, is the most widely distributed tree in North America, ranging from Newfoundland to California, and Alaska to Guanajuato, Mexico. The two species are closely related, and do hybridize naturally where they overlap, but not as often as you might think, because they flower at different times.

Quaking Aspen (which I’ll just call “Aspen” for the rest of this post) have boring, wind-pollinated flowers, and produce huge volumes of wind-borne seeds. But the while Aspen regularly reproduces by seed back East, and even a fair amount up in Northern Idaho and Montana, it rarely does so here in Utah or Colorado. Instead around here it reproduces overwhelmingly by root-cloning.

We’ve talked about root-cloning with several plants, including Creosote and Gambel Oak, but Aspen is quite possibly the champion root-cloner of them all. In Utah huge stands are single clones, so in a sense when you ride or hike through an Aspen forest, you’re traveling inside of a single living organism. From a distance in the Fall, you can often get an idea of where one clone starts and another begins by the leaf color; trees within a given clone usually change color at the same time.(Example in pic right.)

Some of these clones are huge. The current champion, a clone named “Pando” (Latin for “I spread”) lies in the Fish Lake National Forest, a couple hundred miles South of here, at about 8,800 feet. It’s thought to be the world’s largest single organism (if you count a multi-stemmed plant clone as a single organism, which is still somewhat debatable) and includes 47,000 stems spanning 107 acres. It’s thought to be more than 80,000 years old- roughly 20 times as old as the oldest Bristlecones, which means that it was around all during the last ice age, the interglacial before that, and well into the previous ice age before that. Pando has seen the world change like you and I can hardly imagine.

Tangent: There’s a continuing debate about this whole largest-organism thing- whether a clone is a single organism, whether the roots got severed between some of the trees, or whether a clone of Giant Sequoias or some fungus in Michigan. Then there’s a whole big debate about whether Pando is the oldest living thing, with some experts claiming that it’s actually more like a million years old, while others claiming that some of the Creosote clones or even some kind of Mediterranean sea grass are older. I’m not qualified to weigh in, but here’s what I will say: Pando, and other large-scale Aspen clones like it, are really big, and really old.

Amazing Nested Tangent/Factoid: In fact, Walter Cottam, probably Utah’s most accomplished botanist in the last century, suggested that the average Utah Aspen clone is over 8,000 years old. The average. Think about that the next time you hike/bike in Aspen around here; that stand has probably been in that spot since before writing was invented, before the first pyramid was built and since before your 400X great-grandfather was farming, hunting, pot-making, or whatever people did before Law and Order was around (Christ I hate that stupid show.)

It’s thought that clones are so dominant in the West in part because roughly 10,000 years ago- at the end of the last Ice Age- the climate shifted enough to create soil conditions that were relatively poorer for Aspen seedlings. And Aspen seedlings are at a considerable disadvantage to begin with relative to “clone-seedling”, which are called “suckers.” (Is that great or what?)

A seedling of Aspen- or any angiosperm- survives its initial sprouting and rooting stages fueled only by the triploid endosperm it’s packaged with (see this post for review on creation/design of an angiosperm seed.) As soon as possible, the seedling needs to start photosynthesizing to fuel continued growth. And that seedling- the shortest thing around- is often in a tough spot on the forest floor trying to compete for sunlight with neighboring 50 or 100 foot-high giants.

A sucker on the other hand is born with a ready, fully functional root system- it doesn’t need to grow one. And that same, clonal, interconnected root network carries needed nutrients to the sucker to fuel its initial growth. Side by side, an Aspen sucker usually has a huge advantage over an Aspen seedling.

Next Up: More Cloning, Bark, Old Carvings and Good Karma

5 New Summer Wildflowers, 3 Revelations About Me, and TdF-Related Shocker!

Ah, another great summer weekend. Racing, wildflowers, pool-time with the Trifecta and margaritas with the neighbors. Summertime does not suck. Lots to blog about, so let’s get rolling.

Sunday morning I did a nice, mellow Mill Creek mtn bike ride with OCRick. I hadn’t ridden with OCRick in a couple of weeks and we were both in the mood for something easy. Usually OCRick has zero tolerance for my stopping-and-checking-out wildflowers/moss/lichens/shrubs hijinx, but yesterday he was not only indulgent, but even encouraging, of my frequent stops. I attribute this to 2 reasons.

First, OCRick has finally figured out that frequent photo-geek stops have the side-effect of moderating my pace. I tend to be a fast climber on a bike, which sometimes means I set a faster pace than some of my friends- OCRick included- are entirely comfortable with. After 13 years of riding together, he’s finally figured out that encouraging my stops slows the overall climbing pace of a ride*.

*In marked contrast to UTRider, who figured out the same approximately 20 minutes into our 1st ride together, and cunningly loaned me his camera- as a substitute for the one I’d just dropped on the road- for the remainder of the ride.

But the other reason was that we were both beat. OCRick had just returned from a week+ combination mtn/road biking trip in Colorado and…

Tangent: OCRick (pic right), who did this trip while recuperating from recent knee surgery, managed to crash in Carbondale and received about a dozen stitches in his arm as a result. And this brings up probably the most remarkable thing about him*: out of all my circle of friends, OCRick has been to the emergency room at least 5 times as often as any of the rest of us. At age 63, his extremities are festooned with scars and held together with the help of several pins.

*Other than never reading my blog.

First Thing About Me

…and I was trashed from Saturday’s race, which brings me to the first- and only one of which I am proud- thing about me in this post. Over the last 2 weeks I mentioned my recent racing-category-upgrade to Cat3, and my ensuing self-doubts concerning both my ability and sanity in doing so. Saturday was my first Cat3 race, the Porcupine Hill Climb up Big Cottonwood Canyon, and I’m pleased to report that I did not embarrass myself: I placed 4^th.

Tangent: Because when you get right down to it, for us 99.99% of bike racers who never get anywhere near being pro, there’s really only one thing that matters- Not Embarrassing Yourself. That’s it. That’s all we really care about. Guys will tell you they like the camaraderie, they like being part of a team, they like challenging themselves, and maybe some of that stuff is at play too, but mainly we just don’t want to embarrass ourselves.

This leads me to ponder on the bizarre nature of hill climb-races. In a hill-climb, you just go up. That’s the whole thing; there’s a minimum of strategy or skill required. The experience is a little over an hour of pure suffering. This was my second year doing the Porcupine Hill Climb, and both years, around Silver Fork Lodge, I thought, “This is awful. I am so hating this. Why did I pay $40 to suffer like this?” But then you finish and everyone’s telling each other what a great job they did, and within an hour you forget how much you hated it and are already thinking about next year’s race. Why is that? Why does my memory suck so badly? Oh wait- I’m going to get to that in the second thing about me…

So anyway, back to the ride. The upper Mill Creek flowers right now are fantastic. Even if you know absolutely nothing about flowers, you can’t helped but be blown away up there right now. The trails are lined with touches of almost every color- white, blue, purple, yellow, red, pink- and every open meadow is just an explosion of color. It just doesn’t get any better than right now.

Many of the flowers blooming up there are flowers we’ve looked at already- Columbine, Wild Rose, Thimbleberry, Scarlet Gilia, Utah Sweet Pea, Chokecherry, Ninebark, Small-Flowered Stickseed, Indian Paintbrush, Sticky Geranium, Richardson’s Geranium, Showy Penstemon, Mountain Bluebells, Western Larkspur, various Arnicas, and so much more. But what’s really cool about riding in the Wasatch right now is that after almost 16 months at this project I can ride a trail I’ve ridden probably a hundred times and still pick out new wildflowers. In this post I’ll highlight 5 great ones I either hadn’t seen, or hadn’t ID’d before today.

Flower Number One

First up is one I’ve been looking for for a long time- Orange Mountain Dandelion, Agoseris aurantica (pic left.) It’s closely related to the “standard” Mountain Dandelion, A. glauca, which we looked at back on May in Round Valley, and in fact the 2 species sometimes hybridize. I’ve seen this guy in every flower guide I own, but never spotted it till yesterday, trailside up at the meadow on the saddle between Mill Creek and the Canyons at about 8,500 feet. This one is a stunner- it just might beat out Blue Sailor for my all-time favorite composite.

By the way, an interesting little anatomical thing (besides their ray-only flowers and calyx-parachutes which I explained last year when I blogged about “regular” Dandelions) about both orange and yellow Mountain Dandelions is that their “stems” aren’t really stems. They’re peduncles, which is technically the connecting stalk between the base of a plant and its flowers

Second Thing About Me

So many composites are yellow, one that’s not is really eye-catching. If you don’t pay close attention, yellow composites can start to run together. And that brings me to the 2^nd thing about me of this post, of which I’m considerably less proud, as it suggests that I’m inattentive, gradually senescing, or possibly even a little bit racist. But here goes: little blonde-haired children are all starting to look the same to me.

Twin B has 4 friends in the neighborhood. All are little girls, 7 or 8 years old, with blue eyes and shoulder-length blonde hair. And I’m starting to get them mixed up. It’s to the point now where I deliberately avoid using first names (“Hey there!” “Hi kiddo!”) because I’m afraid of making a mistake. Of course this could be attributable to my previously-blogged-about dismally low Dunbar number, but I sometimes wonder if there’s some strange sub-conscious race-recognition/categorization thing going on.

I grew up in a place where blonde kids were fairly rare. Oh sure there were blonde kids around, but they were maybe like 1 out of every 10 or 15. But here in Utah it seems like 4 out of 5 little kids are blonde. And because I didn’t grow up around so many blonde people, well, sometimes, when I’m tired, or had a couple of drinks, they all look the same to me. Is it racist or something to admit that? Oh boy, I feel terrible just writing it. I probably just lost a bunch of (probably blonde) readers. Well, all I can say is, it probably didn’t freak you out as much as the next/third revelation of this post will, which is a Total Blasphemous Shocker.

Flower Number Two

The second flower is considerably less spectacular, but one I’ve pedaled by countless times before finally knuckling down and IDing yesterday: Large-Leaf Aven, Geum macrophyllum (pic left). It’s all over the place between 6,000 and 7,500 feet, low to the ground and easy to ignore. It’s not spectacular but it’s so common that it falls into the I-really-need-to-know-what-this-is category. This little guy has an impressive range; it occurs all over Western North America, from Alaska to Mexico, and it’s yet another member of the fabulous Rose family. It belongs to that first subfamily I blogged about in the monster-long Rosaceae post I did last week, and so is more closely-related to things like Wild Rose, Raspberries or Thimbleberry than it is to say Serviceberry or Chokecherry. A good clue for this guy is its distinctive leaves (pic right).

Side note: “Aven” is a tricky name. It’s most often used for plants like this guy, which is part of the Geum genus. But it’s also used for plants like Mountain Aven or Drummond’s Aven, which belong to the genus Dryas, and are part of a completely different subfamily of Rosaceae, specifically the Cliffrose-Mountain Mahogany group.

Flower Number Three

The third flower is also yellow, but it’s a total looker: Common Yellow Monkeyflower, Mimulus gutattus (pic left). Like Penstemon (and Toadflax), Mimulus is part of the Snapdragon family, and the flowers are obviously similar in form. But in Monkeyflowers, the “face” is the showiest part, whereas the “tube” of a Penstemon flower is considerably longer than the “face” is broad. There are about 20 species of Monkeyflower in the Intermountain West, more than half of which are yellow. And there are all sorts of varieties of M. Gutattus, so this group can be a bit confusing. But there are at least 2 cool things about this flower. First, all Monkeyflowers have hinged stigmas at the ends of their styles. If anything touches it, it closes. But- and here’s the cool part- if it closes on anything other than pollen from the same species of Monkeyflower, it re-opens in a few minutes! Even cooler, it will re-open if it closes on its own pollen, meaning from the same plant, whether the same or another flower!

Side Note: Supposedly this is easy to see later in the summer, as the petals and stamens fall away, leaving the style exposed. I’ll be on the look-out for it.

The second cool thing is that over the last 60 years, Mimulus has been one of the most intensely studied plant genera. It includes tremendous variation, with different species adapted to deserts, mountains and even aquatic environments. It includes both annuals and perennials, herbaceous forbs and woody shrubs, diploids and polyploids, and best of all, it has a small genome, making it well-suited for genetic study. Anyway, even if you don’t care about that stuff, it’s got those cool red dots inside its “throat.”

Flower Number Four

Three down, two to go. This next guy is another in the category of “small, unspectacular, but I see it all over the place, so should get my act together and ID it." It has a cool name: Leafy Jacob’s Ladder, Polemonium foliosissimum (pic right). It’s a perennial, so you’ll see it in the same spots from year-to-year. Polemonium includes about 25 species and is part of Polemoniaceae, the Phlox family, and the various phloxes we saw early in the season in the foothills are the things we’ve looked at most closely-related to it.

Now here’s the interesting thing about Leafy Jacob’s Ladder: If you live in Colorado or New Mexico, or other stretches of the Rockies, you may be saying to your self, “Hey wait a minute- Jacob’s Ladder is blue!” And mostly it is. But here in Northern Utah, almost all of our P. foliosissimum is of the subspecies var. alpinum, in which the flowers are white. So if you fall out of an airplane in the night in July between San Francisco and St. Louis, and wake up* in a Mountain meadow and want to figure out if you’re in Utah or Colorado, check out the color of these flowers.

*OK I grant that it would be extremely unlikely that you would in fact, “wake up.” But it is possible. This, right here, is my absolute favorite falling-out-of-a-plane story. Seriously, how amazing is this?

Third Thing About Me – The Shocker

OK, I saved the best flower for last. But first, I need to deliver on my aforementioned third, shockingly blasphemous self-revelation. I hesitate to share this, knowing that a good portion of my readers are cyclists, and fearful that this will alienate me from them forever, but I just have to come clean. I can’t keep living a lie. Here we go:

I don’t watch the Tour de France.

That’s right. I- an avid cyclist, epic mountain biker and Cat3 road racer- do not watch the Tour de France. I don’t know what stage it is* or who’s wearing what jersey now or who’s shooting up what. Of course I admire the racers and the event and tradition and all, but I’m just not that interested in watching. Here’s the deal: I am the World’s Worst Sports Spectator. I don’t watch the Superbowl, the World Series, the NBA Playoffs** or the US Open. I’m just not interested. Part of it is probably that I come from a total non-sports-watching family, but I think an even greater factor is that I am fundamentally and inordinately self-involved; if I’m not playing, I don’t care who wins. You know, there’s 2 good tangents here:

*I think it’s either Alpes d’Huez or Omelette du Fromage…

**It’s the “Playoffs” in basketball, right? Or is there some other big event I’m missing?

Tangent #1: One of the absolutely weirdest things about me is that I am at all athletic. The rest of my birth-family is like an advertisement for poor fitness and lack of coordination. My Mom (who was and is pretty much the Best Mother Ever) always dutifully asks me about my races. She’ll ask how I did, and then ask the distance. And here’s the great part- whatever distance I tell her, say 80 miles, she’ll scream “Oh My God!” as I if I just told her I had paddled a canoe across the Pacific or derived a Unified Field Theory. The idea that someone could pedal- much less race- a distance on a bicycle that would take longer than 15 minutes to drive in an automobile is utterly incomprehensible to her.

Tangent #2: OK, so you think I’m a whack-job because I don’t watch the TdF. But can we at least agree that sports fandom often borders on complete lunacy? Here in Utah, the most bizarre rivalry is the football rivalry between the U. of Utah and BYU. Grown men- even old men- get phenomenally amped up about these games and their outcomes, which of course involve… a bunch of 20 year old kids throwing an oblong ball around. The fans profess to hate the other school and all it stands for, as if they were Jews and Arabs fighting over the Golan Heights. Which is odd because both schools are largely composed of… white, mainly Mormon, kids from Utah.

This wacky fandom extends to the Tour. All kinds of people tell me how they record and watch the Tour nightly, which is all well and good, except that many of these people- who react incredulously when I confess I don’t watch it- are people who pretty much never ride their bikes. They’re like, ‘What? You’re not watching the Tour??”” And I’m like, “Well I’ve been busy doing stuff- like actually riding my bicycle.”

Phew, good to get that off my chest. Well, if there’s a still a reader left who hasn’t clicked away in revulsion or disgust, I’ve got a great flower for you. Check this out:

Flower Number Five

It’s Case’s Fitweed, Corydalis caseana, ( pic right) and it’s a member of the Poppy Family, Papaveraceae (and in fact I think it’s the first member of this family I’ve blogged about since the rare Bearclaw Poppy, which we saw last Spring down in St. George.) Its flowers are unlike any others, with 2 white outer petals flaring out at the top, and 2 reddish-purplish petals nestled inside, joined at the tips. This species is pretty rare in the Wasatch- and in Utah in general, and occurs most often streamside in PLT forests between 7,000 and 9,000 feet, which is exactly where you can find it in Upper Mill Creek Canyon (see map above), along the Great Western Trail (pic below, left).

It’s called “Fitweed” because of its effects on sheep and cattle. Although they find the foliage tasty, the plant contains the alkaloid Bulbocapnine (diagram below, right), which is toxic to livestock. Late in the summer the fertilized flowers will transform into inch-long seedpods, which will burst explosively to scatter their seeds.

There were at least 3 other new flowers up there I could’ve blogged about, but well, you need to stop reading now and start composing your TdF-related hate-mail. But I am telling you, this week is spectacular up there. Make sure to check it out.