On August 7, Mr Watt (aka grnchile) and I finally got up to Hurricane Ridge to inventory wildflowers along the Hurricane Hill trail. This is part of a personal project that we started in 2009 to record the blooming times of wildflowers at Hurricane Ridge in the Olympic National Park. By hiking the same trail and taking pictures of every flower we see, we’ve collected a nice dataset. (i.e. date stamped photos) from 13 hikes so far. Every year, I learn more and discover new wildflowers that I simply missed before. Previous buckets report on hikes on August 6, 2013, June 11, 2014, July 24, 2014, May 22 and June 22, 2015, August 20, 2015, and July 2016. You can see the flowers earlier in the 2018 season in owktree’s recent bucket.
It’s rather late in the season, but we’ve run into various scheduling delays. The most important complication is that the park service is closing the trail for 8 days at a time, then reopening it for 6 days (and repeat) to do trail reconstruction. This project will be going on for 3 summers. If you are planning a trip, consult the schedule. To further complicate matters, the trail will be closed for mountain goat relocation in September.
Each year, the timing of blooms is determined by the depth of the winter snowpack and the melt out date. On May 1, there was a healthy 135% of normal snowpack, but then it got warm enough to accelerate melting. Thus, the meadows now seem exceptionally dry. Some wildflowers that I’ve seen this late in the season in previous years are already spent.
Looking over the landscape, one gets an impression of silvery gray and not just patches of green on a background of dried out brown. It’s interesting that some of the most prevalent flowers we saw on this hike, have gray foliage — Pearly everlasting, Wooly daisy, and Mugwort.
One of many patches of Pearly everlasting Wooly daisy Western mugwortNot all the wildflowers at this time of year have this silvery foliage, of course. There were also many blue Harebells. Their thin stalks and leaves, although green, don’t contribute much green to the overall color palette.
There were spots of other colors in small numbers — including a few Indian paintbrush, Fireweed, and Owl’s clover flowers in the meadows.
Even after so many years of doing these inventories, I still discover new-to-the-project plants to add to the database on every hike. This year, we found a small patch of One-sided wintergreen in the shade of a tree, a tiny white flower stalk that I IDed as White-flowered hawkweed, and a specimen of Pinedrops along the trail to the overflow parking area. My spreadsheet has grown to 95 species! This hike yielded 21 species with the 3 added ones.
Harebell Fireweed Mountain Owl Clover One-sided wintergreen Pinedrops
Here’s the list of all flowers I was able to ID on August 7:
Yarrow (Achillea millefolium) Pearly everlasting (Anaphalis margaritacea) Western mugwort (Artemisia ludoviciana) Olympic aster (Aster paucicapitatus) Harebell (Campanula rotundifolia) Indian paintbrush (Castilleja sp.) Fireweed (Chamerion angustifolium) Wooly daisy or Oregon sunshine (Eriophyllum lanatum) Cow parsnip (Heracleum maximum) White-Flowered hawkweed (Hieracium albiflorum)* Oceanspray (Holodiscus discolor) Broadleaf lupine (Lupinus latifolius) One-Sided wintergreen (Orthilia secunda)* Mountain owl clover (Orthocarpus imbricatus) Parrotbeak (Pedicularis racemosa) Broad leaf penstemon (Penstemon ovatus) Spreading phlox (Phlox diffusa) Western bistort (Polygonum bistortoides) Pinedrops (Pterospora andromedea)* Douglas's catchfly (Silene douglasii) Parry's catchfly (Silene parryi)
* New to me this year
Now It's Your Turn! What have you noted happening in your area or travels? As usual post your observations as well as their general location in the comments.
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