Grand Canyon Part 4: Alcoves & Hanging Gardens

From our camp at the junction of Tuckup and Cottonwood Canyons, we day-hiked up Cottonwood one afternoon. The lower part of the canyon involved a bit of scrambling and meandering around and through various jumbles of boulders. There were pools and trickles of water the whole way up. After a while we reached a pour-off with a couple of cottonwoods at the bottom, which we had to leave the canyon bottom to get around. The slope on the Northern side was loose and full of talus; we climbed it one at a time to avoid setting off a rockslide on each other.

Arizona Steve ascended first. As I followed, I could see that the sidehill placed us at the base of a second, higher pour-off that was recessed into an alcove, which Steve had already detoured into. As I paused scanning for a route on up, he called for me to come check it out. The alcove was fronted by a stand of small cottonwoods, behind which lay a pool backed by a wonderful hanging garden.

All About Hanging Gardens

Hanging gardens occur across the Colorado Plateau where continual seeps of water emerge from rock/cliff walls, creating little oases of moisture, and often shade, which support a community of plants quite different from the surrounding desert.

The reason for these seeps has to do with the hydrology of the rock layers. When you’re traveling across slickrock, it’s easy to see it as dry and waterless. In rainstorms water quickly runs off the rock surfaces (leading to flash flooding). What water does linger pools in pockets and potholes that generally dry up after a time*.

*That time of course varies by the size, depth and aspect of the pocket. Exceptionally large/deep pockets are known as “tanks” and are often year-round effective water sources.

But the rock layers are full of cracks and crevices, and some portion of rainwater trickles down into these hideaways, working its way downwards, leading to the creation of effective reservoirs or even modest aquifers within the rock. Where the crack/crevice network leads to a sidewall or cliff, the waters seep out in tickles or drips. The seep works slowly to weaken and break apart the structure of the wall underneath, causing just to break off and fall away, gradually forming an alcove.

Often this happens when the water encounters less permeable rock below, such as less fragmented/porous rock or a layer of shale, and is forced sideways. In canyon country a likely place for this to happen is at the interface of 2 distinct geologic layers. Further North in Southern Utah, this often happens where the Navajo and Kayenta formations meet. Down here in the Grand Canyon, those younger layers are nowhere to be seen, and so the Cottonwood Canyon alcove-garden, which is also a transition-layer garden, occurs among very different- and older- rock layers.

Extra Detail: Almost all hanging gardens in the Western US occur in/on sedimentary rock layers. And interestingly, some types of sedimentary rock are better “hosts” than others. Specifically layers like the Entrada and Navajo Formations, which have strong cross-bedding, which creates frequent, horizontal layers of increased impermeability, are common host formations. But Wingate- just a little below Navajo- has thinner, less clearly-defined cross-beds, and almost never hosts hanging gardens.

*For non-geology-minded Utah mountain bikers: Navajo is what you’re rolling across on Moab’s Slickrock Trail. Entrada is what you’re “surfing” up at Bartlett Wash. I did a geology-mtn biking post early this down around Gooseberry Mesa, but would love to do a broader mtb-geology post across Southern Utah. We’ll see.

When I learned this, I thought about my absolute favorite hanging garden, at the head of Twin Corral Box Canyon, which I will describe further on down in the post. Twin Corral Box, when you hike into it from the Dirty Devil, is walled with massive Wingate cliffs. But at its upper end, higher up, the cliffs are Navajo. Higher up-stream on the Dirty Devil BTW, the side canyons are overwhelmingly Navajo-walled, and as a result many of them, like the Robber’s Roost system, host wonderful hanging gardens all over the place. (One of the most rewarding things about this whole project has been the numerous ah-ha! moments when something I noticed years ago suddenly makes sense…)

Immediately above the garden is the bottom of the Redwall Formation, which we looked at in the last post. Our hike led us up through the Muav, but in between appeared a narrow and very different layer, which I believe was the Temple Butte Formation (and which I’ll describe later in the post.)

Floor

An alcove-hanging-garden- which is a specific type of hanging garden- supports an array of plants roughly divided into 3 zones. At the bottom of the alcove, by the base of the wall and often alongside a pool, are the most “normal” plants, by which I mean plants that root in soil and grow upwards. The soil is formed very gradually from fragments of the collapsing rock wall. Because the soil is limited and forms so slowly, alcove-gardens are fragile places. If the limited soil gets excessively trampled, peed/pooped in/on or otherwise abused, the plants community in this bottom layer can be disrupted or destroyed. (Exotics- like Tamarisk or Ravenna Grass, Saccharum ravennae, can also mess up this zone.)

Plants here include not just rushes and grasses, but also ferns and alcove-specific species of Columbines, Orchids and Death Camas.

Wall

The middle zone is the “wall” zone, up against the flat, damp, soil-less vertical rock wall of the alcove, and this zone supports mainly algae and cyanobacteria.

Most of the algae species that live on alcove walls are not endemic to that environment, meaning that most occur also in other environments. In a study in the late 1980s roughly 204 species of algae were found on Utah hanging garden walls, out of ~1,900 known statewide*. Of those 204, only 16 were not known to occur in any other environment than hanging gardens.

*I don’t know if this number has increased significantly since then.

But what is different about the algae in hanging gardens is the mix of species. Many are Chrysophytes, Golden Algae (pic right, not mine). The times we’ve looked at algae in this blog, we’ve generally been talking about Green Algae, which are sort of like really, really simple plants- either unicellular or multicellular- that have no specialized or differentiated cells.

Like Green Algae, Golden Algae are generally teeny-tiny photosynthetic creatures, but they’re not at all closely-related to them. In fact they’re likely about as distantly-related to Green Algae as we are. The systematics of these guys are still unsettled (and the group itself appears to be polyphyletic), but it now appears that they belong to a completely separate kingdom, the Chromists, Chromista*, which includes Brown Algae, Yellow-Green Algae and Diatoms, in addition to a few other things you never heard of.

*Way unsettled. In the 2005, an alternative kingdom, Chromolveolata, was proposed, and then in 2008 it was proposed that this group be split into 2 kingdoms. I can’t keep up. In any case, they’re way, way different from Green Algae, and they’re most certainly not plants.

Tangent: This is what is so cool about life at the microscopic level. Up here on the giganto-macro level where we reside, we perceive only a little fraction of the diversity of living things. The “kingdoms” or “kinds of living things that we can see and touch- animals, plants and fungi- appear to be just 3 of 6, 7, or maybe 11(?) kingdoms of eukaryotic creatures. And then of course there are the kazillions of prokaryotes…

Most of the time, most Golden Algae species behave more or less like Green Algae- sitting around, mostly in damp/wet places, and photosynthesizing. But here’s something cool about many of them: when deprived of light, or when they find themselves in the presence of abundant alternative food, they can switch to a predatory mode, feeding upon bacteria and diatoms. Golden Algae are sort of like little alternate-universe plants that can turn suddenly and opportunistically carnivorous.

Chrysophytes are common in fresh water, and important in lakes, where they’re believed to be a main source of food for zooplankton. Hanging garden walls seem to be a good environment for them: Roughly half of the 1,900 known algal species in Utah are Golden Algae, but they account for about 70% of the species on hanging garden walls. There’s more happening on those slimy walls than meets the eye.

Ceiling

But the most interesting and eye-catching plants occur in the uppermost zone, at the top of the wall or on the “ceiling” of the overhang, rooted directly on or right by the seep itself. Small bits of soil do form and accumulate here, providing nutrients and helping plants to root/attach. But oftentimes the substrate in this uppermost zone is neither bare rock nor soil, but tufa, specifically calcareous tufa. Tufa is a type of porous limestone created by water depositing carbonate minerals. A very dramatic example of tufa is the huge columns ringing Mono Lake in California. Calcareous tufa, the type found in desert seep-alcoves, is a type of freshwater-deposited tufa with a specific laminate structure and is less porous than most tufa types. Tufa of all types can contain lots of organic matter from debris trapped in its formation. In alcove hanging gardens calcareous tufa often forms a thin, flaking layer on the “ceiling” and sloping upper walls of the alcove.

The common plant at the seep zone is Maidenhair Fern, genus = Adantium. There are more than 200 species of Adantium ferns* worldwide, many of which have adapted to rock walls, seeps and waterfalls. Our species here on the Colorado Plateau is Adantium capillus-veneris, known alternately as Black Maidenhair or Venus-Hair Fern (pics left and above right). A. capillus-veneris has atypical, sort of “un-ferny”-looking fronds, which look almost like little Gingko leaves. They root well on calcareous tufa, and form thick, lush, bright green, hanging “mats” within the alcoves, decorating the upper walls like draperies.

*I covered the basics of Ferns, and their freaky-cool haploid-diploid generational pattern last year down in Costa Rica. Man, it is like I have a post for everything.

Another seep-zone plant was in flower. When it first caught my eye I thought it some type of Gilia, but it was actually Scarlet Lobelia, Lobelia cardinalis (pic right*). Lobelia belongs to the Bellflower family, Campanulaceae, and probably the most closely-related thing to it we’ve looked at previously was Harebell last summer up in Glacier NP. Scarlet Lobelia favors moist environments such as stream banks, bogs and meadows in addition to alcoves. Its red, deep and narrow-tubed flowers are pollinated by Ruby-Throated Hummingbirds (like Gila). It was used medicinally by Indians to treat bronchial ailments (including asthma) and supposedly syphilis.

*Sorry- for some reason I only snapped this one rather low-quality shot. I have no excuse except that I take lots of photos when I hike, and don’t really know at the time what- if anything- I’ll blog about.

Tangent: I say “supposedly” because I can’t count how many plants I’ve read about that Indians allegedly used to treat syphilis. Seriously, it has to be dozens. What I wonder is whether any of these plants actually eased the symptoms of the disease (certainly none of them cured it) or whether the Indians were just so desperate that they pretty much tried anything. And in fairness, Syphilis appears to have been a much more virulent (and horrible) disease during its first recorded few decades in Europe than it was by the later 16^th century, by which time it was basically the disease it is today.

Syphilis BTW has a fascinating and still unsettled history. For a long time, it was cited as a classic example of a New World disease spreading to the Old World. But other researchers believe that it was already present in both New and Old Worlds. Still other researchers hypothesize that it evolved in the Old World, was carried across the Beringian land-bridge with Paleo-Indians, and then re-encountered by European explorer. The timing of the disease’s history in Europe is tricky; the first major outbreak was in 1494, which would mean that if it was a New World pathogen, it pretty much would have had to arrive in Europe via Columbus’ first voyage.

Nested Tangent: I sometimes pick up a tone of explanation or justification in traditional New-World-Origin accounts of Syphilis. Yes, we gave the Indians Smallpox and a whole bunch of other diseases, the story goes, but hey, they gave us syphilis, as though it somehow balances things out.

Today in the age of AIDS, syphilis is farther down on the list of most folks’ STD-worries, yet another of the multitude of terrible diseases that’s largely been beaten in the First World, allowing so many more of us to live long enough to succumb to cancer. I wonder, if they ever cure cancer, what we will start dying of next?*

*I’m reminded of the old Red Foxx line (paraphrasing): “All these health nuts are going to feel stupid someday, lying in a hospital bed, dying of nothing.”

Scarlet Lobelia’s medicinal properties- whatever they are- likely are a result of the plant’s alkaloids, which can be toxic, and probably shouldn’t be messed with. BTW, you won’t find this flower in hanging gardens up around Moab or Canyonlands; though it’s common in them around the Grand Canyon, Glen Canyon NRA and Zion, it doesn’t appear in hanging gardens further North.

Alcove hanging gardens always seem quiet, contemplative places. When I’m in one I always feel as though I should speak softly and be respectful somehow. I don’t know that this feeling stems from any karmic-greenie Earth-vine or anything, so much as they half-consciously remind me of cathedrals, with their dim light, still, cool air and vaulted ceilings. The Cotton Canyon Alcove is small- maybe 30 feet high, but I’ve stood in others that are huge. The side canyons of the Dirty Devil in particular contain a number of spectacular ones, the largest and most amazing of which lies at the head of Twin Corral Box Canyon, with a ceiling of well over 100 feet high.

Alcove-gardens are cool, refreshing places offering a break from the sun and heat of the surrounding desert. In the really large ones, the cool, damp air can induce a deep chill within 15 minutes or so, driving you to fumble around in your pack for an extra layer, or retreat back into the sun. Our small alcove was just perfect though, and we found ourselves lingering for a bit. These places have an out-of-time feel to them; it’s easy to be surprised at how much time you’ve dawdled away if you get distracted or don’t keep an eye on your watch.

Tangent: Yes, I backpack with a wristwatch. I do almost everything with a wristwatch. Once on a trip along the Dirty Devil about a decade ago, Steve and I decided we wouldn’t bring a watch. After all, we were backpacking, we had all day, why be constrained by something so civilized as a watch? Why not wake when it gets light and go to sleep when it turns dark? Isn’t that the right, “natural” way to live?

It turned out to be a terrible idea. The trip was in October- a time of shortening days- and we spent most of the trip in deep-walled canyons under overcast skies. We never could never tell what time it was, and as we didn’t want to get stranded out day-hiking away from our base camp after nightfall, we really needed to know what time it was. As a result, we must have asked OCRick- who accompanied us on the trip but abstained form our little back-to-nature-wristwatch-rebellion- the time at least 30 times a day.

Continuing up around and above the alcove was the only tricky part of the hike, involving an exposed scramble up a series of ledges on the North side. Fortunately the rock of these ledges was distinctly different from that below or above- an extremely rough-surface, abrasive stone that was wonderful for free-climbing*. I’m pretty sure this was the Temple Butte Formation, a relatively narrow band between the Muav and the Redwall, that tends to be thicker in the West End of the Grand Canyon**.

The Temple Butte Formation is interesting in that it appears in channels in the underling Muav layer. The channels may have been streams or estuary channels within with deposits accumulated that became the Temple Butte rock some 350 – 400 million years ago.***

*But would be awful to fall or slide on.

**And which I either missed (entirely possible, as this geology stuff is still pretty new to me) or is absent in the main drainage of Tuckup Canyon.

***Different sources give really different ages for this layer.

After ascending 2 sets of ledges and crawling between 1 more (pic right), we were atop the alcove* and back in the Redwall, through which we continued up a drainage full of gullies, chutes, pockets, plazas and pour-offs. Every bend revealed some interesting little plaza or pool or minor obstacle (pic below, left)**.

*There’s a bolt at the top of the alcove. Rappelling down would be easier and safer than the ledgy down-climb

**This, BTW, is why hiking narrow canyons is so great to do with kids. The constant surprise-around-every-corner aspect and frequent scrambling opportunities distract them from the mundane-ness of trudging along for hours.

Eventually we broke out of the Redwall and the canyon, now just a shallow gully on the giant Esplanade terrace lined on either side by low shale hills. A short while later we crossed the Tuckup trail and arrived at the Cottonwood Spring. The Esplanade is dotted with a number of springs like this one. Here the hard capstone creating the terrace* serves at the hydrological barrier forcing the water to the surface.

*Which I described in Part 2 of this series.

The Spring was marked by a stand of young Cottonwoods (pic right). Standing snags suggested that much larger Cottonwoods used to shade the spot and we wondered why none of the giants still lived. At several point on our hike up we’d come across huge old trunks, even below the alcove, reminders of the force of floods that must scour the canyon.

The ground all around the spring was damp and grassy, and the grass here had a strange appearance, almost hazy, as though you couldn’t focus on it. On closer examination the “haze” was an abundance of super-fine stalks bearing seeds, like nothing I was familiar with.

Back home later I learned this was Western Panicgrass, Dicanthelium acuminatum (pic left, not mine), which is common across much of the US, but which I’d never before noticed in such concentrations. Panicgrass, BTW, belongs to the same grass sub-family, Panicodeae, as our old friend Crabgrass. While Crabgrass is an Old World native that has become a naturalized pest in the New World, Western Panicgrass is a New World native that has become naturalized pest in the Old.

Arriving at the spring we suddenly felt beat, and lazed for a while in the shade before heading down. After the Temple Butte down-climb we stopped in at the alcove again to pump some water, then picked our way down-canyon through lengthening shadows back to camp.

Next Up: The River.

Note About Sources: Geologic info for this post came primarily from Bob Ribokas’ Grand Canyon Explorer site, Stephen R. Whitney’s A Field Guide to the Grand Canyon and Wikipedia. Hanging Garden Info came from David Williams’ A Naturalist’s Guide to Canyon Country, and On The Distribution of Utah’s Hanging Gardens, Stanley L. Welsh, from the Great Basin Naturalist*. Welsh’s paper provided the algal species distribution info, but was apparently published before(?) the classification of Chrysophyta as Golden Algae, for which my primary source was the University of California Museum of Paleontology site. Panicgrass info came from the Master’s thesis, A Morphological Invesitagtion of Dicanthelium Section Lanuginosa (Poaceae), Justin Ray Thomas, Miami University.

*Now the Western North American Naturalist. Man, there is like a publication for everything.

Montana Part 3: Flowerpalooza

Note: This is a technical post. Lots of botany/floral info, no biking stuff or funny tangents. So if wildflowers aren’t your thing, you might skip this one and check out Friday’s post if you missed it or check back tomorrow*.

*Or whenever I get around to the next post, which will include biking through clouds and Awesome Wife’s run-in with a bear. Unless I get distracted by another topic.

Tangent: So why do I do posts like this? So that I force myself to identify, learn about and remember what I saw. Seriously, that’s why I do them. If I can make the post entertaining along the way I try to do so, but if not, I just hammer out the post while the images (visual, sonic, olfactory) are still fresh in my mind.

The Post

I hesitated to do this post. I’ve been at this project for almost a year and a half and see haven’t blogged about anywhere near all of the wildflowers in the Wasatch. Then we go up to Glacier and a whole mess of other wildflowers are blooming all over the place. How can I cover them all in one post?

Tangent: I really believe you could go up to Glacier for a 3 or 4-day vacation, anytime between July 1 and September 1, and just do wildflowers. No biking, no serious hiking, no birding, no wildlife or waterfalls or glaciers or lakes- just wildflowers, and have an awesome and totally fulfilling vacation. That’s how great they are.

I can’t of course, but I wanted to convey at least a bit of the floral awesome-ness of Northwest Montana, so I’ve picked out a few flowers to highlight in this post. I’ve picked them because either they’re different than anything we’ve looked at here in the Wasatch, or because they have some connection, link to, or relationship with something we’ve looked at or will look at here in Utah.

On our hike up to Avalanche Lake through the Cedar-Hemlock forest we noticed many familiar flowers, but several newbies as well. Probably the most common understory flower was this guy, Foamflower, Tiarella trifoliaya (pic left). It does well in deep, moist shady spots. They’re easy to spot even when not blooming because of their distinctive, toothed maple-like leaves (reminiscent of Rocky Mountain Maple.) The “foam” by the way supposedly comes from their appearance in large numbers across the forest floor (but I didn’t really get it.) It’s sometimes also called Laceflower, which is probably a better name. Though I don’t have a good close-up shot, the 5 stamens extend way past the petals, giving the flowers a distinctly “lacy” look.

When we arrived at the lake the forest opened up by the shoreline, and numbers of less shade-tolerant flowers appeared, including numerous asters and daises similar to those we see back home. But the most unique and remarkable-looking flower is this fellow. It’s Self-Heal, Prunella vulgaris. This is an odd one. The flowers are born in clusters/clumps atop a small stalk. Self-Heal is a member of the Mint Family, Lamiaceae, and so is related to things like Basil, Thyme and Oregano. The flowers have 5 petals which are fused into 2 lips; the top lip is the “hood”, and the bottom lip 3-lobed. Like all members of the Mint Family, the flower cluster looks like a single cluster but is actually 2 separate clusters crowded together.

Self-Heal’s name refers to its medicinal properties. It’s been used to treat everything from rashes to diarrhea to bruises, and clinically demonstrated to possess antiseptic and antibacterial capability.

It looks weird, it’s great medicine, but the thing that initially stymied me about it was its origin. Several sources describe it as a European exotic, while others list it as a North American native. What gives? Prunella includes 7 species, of which vulgaris is the only one found in the New World. Its presence here seems to pre-date European settlement (Native Americans used it medicinally) but by how long is unclear.

Side Note: I wonder if it’s a “recent” Pre-Columbian import/migration, like “native” Dandelions in North America (~100 KYA) or Cacti in North Africa (~3-5 KYA). Just a thought…

Our 2^nd day in the park the weather was still foul, but we took our chances and drove up to Logan Pass At 8,000 feet, the pass is just a smidgen below tree-line, and features wildflower-filled meadows interspersed with stands of shrubby conifers and mats of krummholz. Clouds blew in and out, the temp hovered in the low 40’sF. While Awesome Wife and the Trifecta huddled in the visitor’s center I ran around the paths threading the meadows, checking out flowers.

One of the most eye-catching flowers up at the Pass was Explorer’s Gentian, Gentiana calycosa. This flower occurs in Utah as well, though I’ve yet to spot it here. There are over 1,100 species of Gentians worldwide*, occurring on every continent except Antarctica. Most Gentian species in Europe and North America are blue. In other parts of the world red or white-flowered species are more common.

*According to the Gentian Research Project. Other sources gave different/ lesser numbers.

Side Note: At least one white-flowered species, Alpine Gentian, G. newberryi, occurs here in Utah. It often hybridizes with G. calycosa, and when it does so produces blue flowers.

Gentians flowers are always tubular, with 5 fused* petals and 5 fused sepals**. If you look down inside the tube you can see the 5 stamens and a split, 2-part stigma. Gentians (mainly the roots) has been used for centuries for medicinal purposes in both the Old World and New for a wide range of ailments, but mostly gastro-intestinal things. But in excessive quantities it can cause nausea and vomiting.

*At the base, but not all the way up.

**Almost always. A few species have some number other than 5 sepals, but always between 4 and 7.

Probably the best-known (or at least most bally-hooed) flower in the park is Beargrass, Xerophyllum tenax, (pic right & below, left) which blooms in July and August and is easy to spot/ID. The white flowers are borne in clusters atop large stalks up to 4 feet tall. The blooms are unpredictable; an individual plant blooms only once every 5-7 years. We lucked out and caught this blooming hillside just West of Logan Pass. I also saw large numbers of post-bloomers when biking in Big Mountain Ski Resort later in the week.

Contrary to folklore, bears don’t eat Beargrass, but other animals do. Elk go for the flowers; Mountain Goats eat the leaves/blades. Speaking of blades, when you first see the stalk, you may wonder why it’s called a grass. You have to look down at the base, at the leaves, which look like a big clump of long grass (pic right).

Side Note: The stalk BTW, when not flowering, looks kind of like a Horsetail. We haven’t talked about Horsetails (family = Equisetaceae) before, but they’re considered a “living fossil”, with just a single present-day genus still remaining of a once numerous and diverse family. Back in the Devonian, all sorts horsetails, along with Ferns and Lycophytes, dominated terrestrial vegetation. Horsetails produce spores, not seeds, and reproduce via the same alternating haploid-diploid, gametophyte-sporophyte generation strategy as mosses and ferns. Common Horsetail, Equisetum arvense, is common in the park around streams and by lakes. Here’s one (pic left) we spotted along the shore of Bowman Lake.

What Is Bear”grass” Anyway?

So is Beargrass a “grass”? Not quite, but close. It’s not a member of the grass family, Poaceae, but it is a monocot, so like grass, the leaves/blades grow from the base, not from the tip. It’s actually a member of the Lily family, Liliaceae*, and this becomes apparent if you look closely at the flowers. Each has six petals (monocots have petals almost always in multiples of 3) and examine them carefully you’ll see that 3 of the petals are actually sepals, just like our old friend the Glacier Lily**, and for that matter all Lilies.

*More recently, some botanists have stuck it in a new, closely-related family, Melanthisceae.

**I keep coming back to that flower again and again. It was the very first flower I profiled in this blog, and through sheer dumb luck it was a wonderful choice.

Another common flower both high up and lower down was this tall, green, flowering stalk (pic left). The flowers are 6-petaled (pic below, right), suggesting a monocot, and the leaves look familiar too. The whole thing looks like a almost like a cornstalk. And of course that’s where we’ve seen it- its Green False Hellebore, Veratrum viride, a close relative of the deadly Corn Lily we looked at here in the Wasatch a couple weeks back. GF Hellebore shares all of Corn Lily’s nasty, toxic properties- don’t mess with it. And it looks remarkably like Corn Lily, with the obvious exception of flower color.

Why Would A Flower Be Green?

Green flowers can at first seem a bit of a head-scratcher. Most flowers are brightly colored to attract pollinators, so a green flower seems counterintuitive. Of course with wind-pollinated plants, a green flower makes perfect sense. But Veratrum- both viride and californicum- are agent-pollinated, by bees, moths, flies and butterflies. So why no bright colors?

In fact there are plenty of green, agent-pollinated flowers. Many use scent to attract pollinators. And it may be (conjecture alert) that what appears to be green to us may look quite different to an insect or bird that’s able to see frequencies (UV for example) that we can’t. And some flowers are even pollinated by bats, who only “see” their target ultrasonically.

*Although I think some pollinating bats locate flowers by smell. Didn’t have time to confirm/research for this post.

GF Hellebore, BTW, occurs in both Western and Eastern North America, unlike Corn Lily, which is found only in the West.

In the afternoon we descended from Logan Pass over to the East slope of the park, where we hiked along St. Mary Lake (pic left). The flower mix here was different but just as beautiful as the West side. One of the most common flowers was Harebell, Campanula rotundifolia. Harebell is a member of the Bellflower Family, Campanulaceae, which we haven’t looked at previously. The flowers have 5 united petals and hang downwards, sort of like giant Bluebells* (Mertensia ciliata.) Confusingly, the leaves look like tufts of grass (like Beargrass, above) but Campanula is neither a grass nor even a monocot. It’s a dicot, and if you break off a leaf/blade tip, milky-white sap will ooze out.

*Confusingly, Harebell is called Bluebell in the UK.

Here’s something else interesting about Harebell. It has a wide distribution, occurring across North America and Europe, but across that distribution seems to be diverging into different polyploid races. On continental Europe Harebell is chromosomally diploid, with 34 chromosomes, but in Britain and Ireland populations are generally either tetraploid (68 chromosomes) or hexaploid (102 chromosomes.) In Norway, both diploid and tetraploid populations exist.

Longtime readers may recall a similar story I told over a year ago, about Creosote here in the American Southwest, and its diploid, tetraploid and hexaploid races across the Chihuahuan, Sonoran and Mojave deserts respectively. Both might possibly be examples of regional polyploid populations at an early stage of possible future speciation.

Side Note: Frustratingly, I was unable to determine the ploidy of North American Harebell populations in time for this post. I know the research has been done and that the chromosome numbers are known… Just can’t find a free-online copy of the paper…

Also on the East side we saw plenty of Lupines (pic left). Lupines are of course common here in the Wasatch, though I haven’t blogged all that much about them, probably because, with 600+ species, they can be tough to tell apart. But as you get to know Lupines, some subtle differences start to become apparent.

The Lupines on our hike along St. Mary Lake looked just like Silver Lupine, Lupinus argenteus, a common Lupine in Utah (pic right). But if you check out the backside of the banner* on the each flower, you’ll notice a difference: while the back of the Silver Lupine banner is smooth, the banner-backside of these Lupines were covered with fine hairs, identifying them as Silky Lupine, Lupinus sericeus.

This is one of those subtle species-differences you can’t catch on a “ride-by”; sometimes you have to get down on hands and knees to figure a flower out…

*Lupines have the banner-keel architecture common throughout the Pea Family, and which I explained in this post.

Tangent: While I’m talking about Lupines, here’s something fairly important you should know, particularly if you have kids and take them out in the backcountry. Lupines are somewhat poisonous and can actually kill livestock. But the nasty part is that their pea-pods (pic right, taken Friday AM up above Jeremy Ranch) , which are starting to look “ripe” now here in the Wasatch, look like the kind of pea-pods you eat buy at the supermarket, and supposedly there have been instances of kids getting poisoned by eating them.

OK, one more flower, then I’m calling it a post. High and low in and around Glacier was this unimposing yellow flower, Canada Goldenrod, Solidago canadensis. Goldenrod is a member of Asteraceae, the Sunflower family, and so is related to a whole bunch of flowers we’ve looked at in this blog, including Dandelions, Balsamroots and Sunflowers, though it’s far less impressive than any of them. So why include it in this post? Because in addition to being super-common in Northwest Montana, there are 2 real interesting things about it.

First, it’s an exotic weed. Not here in the US- but across Eurasia. That’s right- over the last year+ I’ve blogged about countless weeds and exotics that have made their way from Eurasia to, and thrived in, North America, from Dandelions to Musk Thistle to Field Bindweed to Chicory to Spotted Knapweed. But Canada Goldenrod is North America’s revenge. It’s a common and widespread roadside and meadow weed across Europe, and is a huge problem in China, where it’s been blamed for the extinctions of several native plants.

Second, it’s also native to Utah, and when I returned home and over the weekend started riding the old familiar trails that I’d been away from for much of the past 3 weeks, I saw that it had blossomed during my travels, almost following me home as it were, and is now blooming all over the place between 6,000 and 8,000 feet. And in fact it’s just one of a whole slew of late-summer-blooming yellow Wasatch wildflowers, about which I’ll blog in the coming week.

Next Up: Riding Through Clouds, and Awesome Wife Meets a Bear

Road-Trip Part 2: Phil’s World and Eating the State Flower

Although the focus of the long weekend was visiting Anasazi ruins, no trip to the desert is complete without a little mtn biking and botany, both of which I enjoyed on our Memorial Day Family Road-Trip. But first, let’s talk about something a little closer to home.

The Problem With Lambert Park

If you live and mtn bike in Northern Utah, you’re probably familiar with Lambert Park. It’s a modest-sized network of not-very-difficult trails in Alpine, which is tucked into the Northwest Corner of Utah Valley. I think most area mtn bikers would classify the Lambert Park trails as fun, nice-to-have-close-by, but not amazing.

Tangent: I have a Love-Hate relationship with Lambert Park. For several years I would head down there ~once a year, usually in March or April. Much of Lambert is low, open and South-facing, so it’s quick to melt out in the Spring. To drive there from my house (up by the zoo) is the better part of an hour.

Every year I’d go down and jump on the trails and be like, “Wow! This is awesome! How come I never come down here? I’m going to start riding these trails all the time!” Then, about 20-30 minutes later, I’d be like, “OK, that was fun, but I think I’ve looped past this point at least 2 or 3 times already, I wonder what else is around here… “ And then finally, after riding around in various circles for about 45-60 minutes, I’d think, “That’s it? I drove all the way down here for this? This is so lame… I’m not driving all the way down here again!”

And then another year passes, the memory fades, Spring rolls around, and I think, “Hmm. I wonder if Lambert Park’s melted out- I should go check it out!” and I do the same frustrating day all over again… Because when you get right down to it, I am a total Utard.

What If…?

Lambert’s fun for people who live close by, but it’s not quite worth driving ~an hour for. But imagine if Lambert were different. Imagine if instead of covering maybe a dozen acres, it covered a couple hundred acres. And imagine if it included over 20 miles of trail- all great singletrack- trails that didn’t just criss-cross each other in circles and figure-8’s, but trails that really went places, and went to places that were kind of different- some through woodland, some through open flowery meadows, some over slickrock slabs along canyon rims.

Then imagine that instead of being set in the scrub oak at the base of the Wasatch, it was set in the high desert through Piñon-Juniper Woodland. And then lastly, imagine that the trails Freaking Rocked. Like wild, buff, fast roller-coasters, where you hit maybe 2 G’s at the bottom of a trough and then 0 G at the next crest- over and over and over again, while turning and banking and twisting this way and that.

Seriously, how could it get any cooler than that? Here’s how- if it existed. And coolest of all- it does. It’s called Phil’s World.

Phil’s World lies just 3 ½ miles East of Cortez, close enough to sneak out, ride at dawn, and get back just as the family is stirring.

Tangent: There is a delicate art to waking and exiting from a motel room before dawn without waking anyone else in the room. I am a master of this art. The key is to have everything that can be left in the car the night before- helmet, gloves, glasses, extra layers, etc.- already in the car, and to have a small pile of stuff at the door with things that cannot be left in the car the night before- shorts, jersey, socks, wallet, phone, keys and of course, bike.

I never leave my bike in or on the car in a motel lot. Yeah I know, most motels have those big “No Bikes in Room” signs nowadays. Screw that. Just get it inside fast, get it out at dawn, like a tree falling in the forest…

Nested Tangent: We also camped one night, which I mention only to highlight, once again, what an Excellent Camper I am. We had plenty of rain in the evening, but for the Well-Equipped Excellent Camper, rain is no obstacle. Here’s Awesome Wife happily toasting a marshmallow under the protective cover of the Single Best Piece of Camping Gear I Have Purchased This Decade- the Kelty “Noah’s Tarp” 9’x9’ fly. I cannot recommend this item highly enough- best $60 I ever spent.

The trails are in excellent condition and the soils respond well to moisture/heavy rains, becoming firm, not muddy. The trails are that weird, wonderful combination of interesting-but-not-actually technical, so that you feel like you’re riding really, really well, but when you stop and think about it, you realize you’re not riding anything all that difficult. The climbs are minimal, fast and moderate- just enough to provide a little elevation gain for the fast, thrilling descents. I rode it 3 times over the long weekend, twice at dawn and once before dinner, a different combination of trails each time.

Extra Details: I strongly recommend Rib Cage and Stinky’s Loop. The Ledges Loop (pic left) is a bit less exciting, but possibly the most beautiful, with a nice combination of woods and meadows. There are little signs at most junctions, making it near-impossible to get lost.

Bonus Tip: One of my rules when I get to a new trail network for the first time is this: If there’s a trail with the word “stinky” in its name, take it. “Stinky” trails are always great. I don’t know why this is.

Seriously, you gotta go check it out.

Riding The Southwest Uplands

As longtime readers know, I welcome any excuse to spend time in P-J woodland, and this is another reason to ride Phil’s; it’s classic Southwest Uplands riding. In many ways it’s similar to the flora atop Gooseberry or Little Creek, but it lies a couple hundred miles to the East, and as I’ve become more attuned to desert plants, I’ve started to notice little differences. The Utah Juniper is the same, but the Piñon here is 2-needled Colorado Piñon (pic left), rather than the 1-needled Singleleaf Piñon common to the St. George/Hurricane area. There’s Mormon Tea all around, but only of the “Green” variety (Ephedra viridis.) The “bluer”, more angular Torrey Mormon Tea (E. torreyana) that’s all over hills surrounding St. George is absent.

The Sagebrush (Artemisia tridentata) seems lusher, leafier and more strongly aromatic, probably in part due to heavy recent rains and time of year, but also I suspect due to elevation; Phil’s World lies ~6,200 – 6,500 feet, while Gooseberry and Little Creek range from ~5,400 – 5,800 feet.

These minor floral differences extend beyond Phil’s World. Here’s a shot of a Gambel Oak leaf against my hand that I took up in Mesa Verde; it’s bigger than any such leaf I’ve ever seen in the Wasatch. The higher mesas/cuestas support Ponderosa Pines in the sheltered draws. On Saturday as we hiked down the long, narrow canyon to the Ute Reservation-ruins site, Ponderosas started appearing in the lower, shadier, wetter reaches of the canyon.

Tangent: Several of the canyons up in Mesa Verde National Park have spectacular flora. A good example is the canyon in which Spruce Tree House is located, which includes everything from Juniper to Piñon to Gambel Oak to Skunkbush, Sagebrush, Mormon Tea, Poison Ivy, Hackberry and even Douglas Firs in the canyon bottom. Here’s a shot of some Eaton’s Penstemon (Penstemon eatonii) also called Firecracker Penstemon, blooming alongside the trail down to the site.

Even the lichens were different. Bright orange Elegant Sunburst Lichen, Xanthoria elegans, which is all over the place around St. George, is almost absent around Cortez (though it seems common a bit further West, out at Hovenweep.) And foliose lichens (pic right), so rare around SG, are common throughout the area, both in P-J woodland and in open shrublands.

Phil’s World had a number of nice wildflowers in bloom, some familiar, some not. Groundsel was all over the place, but it wasn’t the Singlestem Groundsel/Lambstongue Ragwort, Senecio integerrimus, that’s all over the Wasatch right now. Instead it’s Lobeleaf Groundsel, S. multilobata (pic left.) You can tell by checking out the leaves, which are smooth and well, “multi-lobed”, rather than simple and hairy like our Groundsel up here.

But let’s zero in on my favorite, which was blooming all over the place: the fabulous Sego Lily, Calochortus nuttallii, which happens to be the state flower of Utah.

We’ve already talked about Desert Mariposa Lilies (genus = Calochortus) back down in St. George, when I woke up next to a Winding Desert Lily on my overnighter with KanyonKris. The Sego Lily is a close cousin of that flower, with an identical petal/sepal architecture. You can take your pick as to which is the more beautiful (I slightly prefer the C. flexuosus), but they’re both absolute stunners.

The Sego Lily earned its state-flower crown largely due to its supposed* role in early pioneer times. In the early years of Utah settlement, cricket infestations caused significant crop damage. According to tradition, famished pioneer families augmented their diets with the edible bulbs of Sego Lilies.

*The story may be apocryphal. I don’t know, but many of these early pioneer stories often are. A prime example is the Seagulls eating the crickets story, in which it’s usually told that Seagulls never existed in Salt Lake Valley before the crickets showed up. It’s not true; guano deposits on islands in the Great Salt Lake have been dated back over 5,000 years.

How I Really Am Like Euell Gibbons After All

Now, longtime (and I mean really longtime) readers may recall that I have a continuing fixation/jihad on identifying, collecting and consuming edible foods in the wild. The reasons for this are convoluted and, well, probably stupid, and I’ve already detailed them in another wandering, stream-of-consciousness tangent in another post, so I won’t repeat them here. But suffice it to say that most of my efforts to date- such as digging up Glacier Lily corms and roasting Gambel Oak acorns- have turned out pretty dismally. So I was determined to give Sego Lily bulbs a try.

On Monday morning’s Phil’s World ride I collected a couple of bulbs (pic left) and returned to the motel, where the Trifecta and I sampled the goods. And the verdict was… OK. Definitely edible. Though the Trifecta had no urge to indulge in seconds, I found the flavor not half-bad, and I daresay that a suitable quantity, sautéed lightly in butter or olive oil, might just make an appealing side dish. Have to tear up a lot of pretty flowers though.

So there we are. I like fry sauce and Sego Lily bulbs*, and I’ve got a whole posse of Mormon friends ready to baptize me just as soon as I kick the bucket. I think I’m a real Utahn now. Gotta get me a handcart!

*Oooo….. Maybe I should try dipping Sego Lily bulbs in fry sauce…