The sugar bowl!
Lance-leaved chiming bells
A hike I didn't start out to complete yesterday became engrossing because of the variety of wildflowers that dotted the hillsides and meadows. Later there will be more flowers, but few additional varieties and the pasque flowers and sugar bowls will have completed their blossoming. I went to the Goshawk Ridge Trail near Eldorado Springs, CO, about 8 miles south of Boulder thinking that the sugar bowls might possibly be out. Their blooming season is shorter than most of the wildflowers in this area, and I didn't want to miss them.
Approaching the first bend in the road, I wondered at the burst of yellow. As I neared there were wild iris too--and the yellow was a hillside of golden banner. Farther into the hike I would find meadows and fields filled with golden banner, a wildflower I think of as belonging in the higher mountains. I'll still appreciate its setting there, but enjoyed the splashes of yellow in the fields yesterday. The lance-leafed chiming bells were profuse and their blue bright against the hills and grasses. Chokecherry bushes provided blossoms and perfumed the nearby air. And as I looked at iris in a hilly meadow, I spied--yes. Sugar Bowls. They were smaller than I remembered, but they were there. I climbed a hillside that seemed steeper than it feels coming down, the usual approach to that part of the trail. I was doing it backward, intending to reach the blossoms and then to turn around and go back.
I was startled by a loud chugging noise. Where was it coming from? It sounded like a train, but there was nowhere for train tracks was there? Then I looked up at the mountainside high above and what appeared to my eyes to be a toy-sized train was snaking through the trees. My camera doesn't have a long zoom and the photo below doesn't show the perspective from which I looked but I wanted to show the top of the mountain. You get a bit of the idea, right?!
Golden banner on the hillside.
The train.
A first paintbrush (orange) delighted me. I found a wonderful rock near bright blue-purple larkspur and stopped for a snack, deciding whether to go on. I was near the top of that hill climb, but had not yet reached the stream and hillside where I was accustomed to finding pasque flowers and sugar bowls. Would they be bigger, more of them, than those I had found? After a short rest, I resumed my hike. Yes, it was farther to that stream and hillside, down a steep hill and up another, and I was rewarded with more and yes, bigger sugar bowls and pasque flowers (these are taller than in the mountains) than those I had seen earlier. By that time I was much closer to the beginning of the trail through the woods and down the road than going back the way I came. My reward was to find those fields of golden banner and penstemon along the roadside. I posted photos of many of the flowers on Facebook, and will put only a few here. It was a rewarding couple of hours with few people to interrupt my reverie. (And now I will have no excuse to keep me from my new book proposal in the morning.)
NOTE: This is a new blog format, and I'm just discovering how it works. The photo settings are completely different.
Chokecherry bushes behind the rocks
The train.
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