View from the Middle Fork
Standing knee deep in flowers. For me, it is usually somewhere in the Rockies, middle to late July. I once counted eighteen species in one high meadow. Every shape and color, some on the edge of the woods, or right near water. The most exotic blooms, generally in some dappled light, in thin and moist woods, are the columbine. All who see this fantastique surely are transformed. The best flowers I have seen were in Fravert’s basin, across the river and staring at the backside of Snowmass Mountain, in Colorado, and various unnamed meadows in the Selkirks in British Columbia. I have routinely shot 150 pictures a day, back when we used film only. Once, I shot a snow covered meadow, to awaken the next day to yellow blooms in the same place. It was like I got two seasons in one place, without having to pack ten feet more.
We famously enjoy wild flowers in Central Texas in March and April especially, and then find the cousin to our Blue Bonnets and Indian Paintbrush blooming in the cooler mountain climes in July. Many famous pictures of the Grand Tetons are awash in the blue lupine down in the Snake River basin. It makes an interesting link for us to find our Hill Country flowers prolific in a different season.
I try to get my wife up into the flowers every year, but sometimes she seems to like the Miner’s Cabbage as much as any bloom, and it is all leaf. There is something about this short growing season, and the need to take full advantage of stored nutrients, good water, and warm sunshine. The whole country explodes, even if for only six weeks.
I discovered flowers, and mountains, living in El Paso. Living halfway up the side of Mt. Franklin, it now seems natural to have eventually wandered to the top of all three peaks. But more than the ravines, and sudden mule deer, and hidden springs, it was the proliferation of plants I found in the barren, lifeless, dust and rock rubble Chihuahuan desert that stayed with me. Using techniques employed by divers, I began to carefully study some small area, say 100 by 100 feet. It was as if plants, and some creatures, gave up their camouflage to my deliberate pace and inch by inch inspection.
Then, the short monsoonal season comes in from the Baja, and you get a few showers for a few days. Excepting the winter snow, that is about it in those parts. But, the whole country blooms. The Juarez Mountains across the Rio take on a greenish/reddish hue. If columbine are unavailable, I can heartily recommend the Claret Cup Cactus bloom. Evolving about 20,000 years ago from roses, all cactus blooms are sweet, spectacular, and short lived. Â
And so the desert waits in quiet anticipation almost all the time, and then gets it all when the bloom finally comes.
Frog Rincon
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