Nature pulls out all the stops to create a wildflower season to remember
A lone fireweed stalk sits alongside Going- to-the-Sun Road. Fireweed typically grows in burned or logged areas and can grow to be 6 feet tall. The young shoots of this flower can be boiled like asparagus and eaten. Chris Jordan/Daily Inter Lake
As a breeze stirs from somewhere high atop Logan Pass, the fields near the Hidden Lake boardwalk in Glacier National Park ripple with waves of purple, blue, pink, red, white and yellow wildflowers.
You name it, it bloomed or is blossoming in Glacier's alpine area this season.
"It's an extraordinary year," park restoration biologist Joyce Lapp said.
The perfect combination of weather factors produced an exceptional season of blooms for a wide variety of plants, Lapp and other experts say.
"It's just going gangbusters up top," Lapp said.
On any given year with the right conditions, one or more particular plants, such as lupine or lilies, might have a good season (meaning more blooms). But in the same year, different neighboring plants might not produce as prolifically.
This summer is not that type of season.
"It just seems like a year when there was enough of everything - light, warmth, moisture - for all of them to really go forth and prosper," Lapp said.
Bob Zavadil, who regularly hikes in the park with the Over the Hill Gang, has seen 15 seasons of wildflowers. This one, though, stands out to him for the sheer number of plants that are flourishing.
"It certainly is a banner year in my experience," he said.
The rain gets most of the credit for this summer's display.
"This year is exceptional because of the moist spring we had," Janet Bones, an instructor for the Glacier Institute said.
June was a record-breaking month for rainfall and it was damp through much of the preceding months. Lapp and park ecologist Tara Carolin agree the rain had a major impact on the flowers.
When conditions aren't ideal, plants "sequester their resources," Lapp said.
"And if things get really bad the plants will rest a little," Bones said.
During those kind of years, flowers won't produce as many blossoms. Others, such as beargrass, won't blossom at all and will wait until another year when conditions are better.
Beargrass blooms every three to 10 years, depending on conditions, Carolin said.
This year the beargrass, a member of the lily family, was anything but shy. Most of the blossoms have already faded but wide crops of the dried stalks along the Highline still are reminders of the fluffy white fields that populated the trail earlier this summer.
The list of other flowers bursting this season is lengthy: gentian, Indian paintbrush, daisies, lupine, penstemon, columbines and monkey flowers, to name only a few.
Many of the plants at lower elevations have stopped flowering, but alpine areas still have spectacular displays that likely will continue for another two weeks or so, Bones says.
Pretty much any trail at higher elevations will offer good flower shows, but hikers have mentioned in particular Hidden Lake, the Highline, Siyeh Pass and Reynolds Mountain. Many of the park gift shops sell wildflower identification books and laminated, fold-out guides.
That this is an unusually spectacular season for Glacier might go unnoticed by first-time park visitors, although many could be heard commenting on the beauty of the wildflower fields near Logan Pass.
Trish Shaner, 54, of Montgomery, Ala., carried her wildflower guide with her while hiking to Hidden Lake with her son and husband this week.
"This is the first time I've had the chance to see something just carpeted with flowers," she said.
She spotted almost all of the flowers on her guide during their hike, she said.
Sylvia Headley, 52, of Missoula notes this summer is one of the best she's seen for Glacier's flowers. The palette seems more vibrant, from the abundance of purple blossoms to the very red Indian paintbrush, she says.
What most impresses Barbara Bason, 66, of south Florida, though, is that the flowers grow so well without a gardener's touch. She wishes her rose bushes at home needed so little attention as do the alpine flowers, she joked.
But the flowers certainly added to the magnificence of Glacier, which "exceeds the expectations," Bason's husband, Edward, says. He and his wife looked out at the fields of colors and remarked on the waves of colors.
"I call it God's masterpiece," she said.
Reporter Camden Easterling can be reached at 758-4429 or by e-mail at ceasterling@dailyinterlake.com