From My Nature Journal: Making Peace with Western Washington Weather While On the Road to Rhodies

Okay, it’s time. I’ve been here long enough and I’m done bellyaching about Western Washington weather. And though it’s stretching me, I may even be ready to begin making peace with it.

No, Colorado, that doesn’t mean we don’t still miss you desperately, and the utopian weather we’d relished all our years with you. Your year-round nearly predictable sunshine was a hiker’s delight, and this Vitamin D deprived region could use a bit more of it. Oh, weather is predictable here from October to May, too, if you want to call ‘rain and within six degrees either side of forty-two’ predictable. It’s just that it’s about time I stopped moanin’ and groanin’ about how much we dislike the rain here. They said it would take a year for us to get accustomed to it. They lied. We’re still not used to it. That being confirmed, it’ll take an act of the will to make that happen.

And so, as an expression of that will and a symbol of my new resolve, Gail and I went to REI a few days ago and I outfitted myself with some serious Gore-Tex raingear, inaugurating it yesterday with relative success. No, I’ve never paid that much even for a Minnesota-worthy winter parka, or maybe even the three winter jackets put together that I’ve owned in my entire adult life. Still, though I can’t yet say that I LIKE hiking in the rain, at least I’ve made a start of it.

But in addition to my brand-spanking-new orange raincoat, there’s another thing that is motivating me these days: we’re coming up on rhody season here in the Pacific Northwest. Yup, the Pacific Rhododendron -- the Washington state flower -- is about to make its annual showing. Our little acre here in the woods outside of Coupeville, in fact ALL the wooded areas in the region, are nearly covered with the dazzling things, and we can hardly wait to see them in bloom, yes, even while we hike in the rain. In fact, it’s going to take a hike in the rain to see them, rhodies, among the loveliest of state flowers.

Rhododendrons are found in numerous places around the world. In fact, a thousand of these evergreen species are known in Europe, China, Australia and North America. Besides, horticulturists have cultivated many hybrids for garden plantings over the last two hundred years. But the wild Pacific Rhododendron, rhododendron macrophyllum to be precise, may be one of the most beautiful, especially in the context of its natural environment. A leggy, understory shrub that can grow to twenty feet and more while it reaches for light beneath towering conifer groves, its large, showy and prolific light pink to purple blooms stand out refreshingly on gray, misty days, particularly amid the dark, wet trunks of enormous Douglas Firs nearby. Made prolific due to toxins in the plant that make them unpalatable and unbrowsable to deer, it is that aforementioned rain combined with the acidic soil beneath those gargantuan conifers that make conditions right for the rhody to thrive.

And those trees themselves present another ambience unique from my more familiar Midwest haunts: on wooded trails snaking through giant fir groves, it might be upwards of fifty feet from the forest floor to the lowest branches, leaving a cavernous, auditorium-like opening akin to a large room, one full of flowering bushes. R. macrophyllum, which literally means ‘rose-tree large-leafed,’ stretches from southern British Columbia to northern California, and is variously known as the Pacific, California, Western, Coast or Big Leaf Rhododendron, or the California Rosebay. It was first described for science by famed botanist Archibald Menzies, who collected the plant in Washington while accompanying the Pacific Northwest exploration of British sea captain George Vancouver in 1792.

So back to the rain. The Bible says that God causes his rain to fall on the just and the unjust (Matthew 5:45), inferring that his manifold blessings are heaped upon both those who revere him and those who have not yet learned to do so. I am grateful for wild rhododendrons, how they will beautify the forest under dark and rainy skies. My new raincoat and I are ready for them now.

“Consider the lilies,” Jesus said, “how they grow. They don’t toil or spin, yet I tell you that even Solomon in all his glory was not dressed as one of these. But if God so clothes the grasses of the field… can you not trust God to care for you?” (Matthew 6:28-30)

~~ RGM, February 26, 2018

From My Nature Journal: Consider the Lilies

(This is a piece from my old nature journal. It goes nearly ten years back to a June afternoon when the Ridgeline Trail near our Castle Rock home was brand new, an area we had begun exploring well before the trails had been cut.)

~~~

Ridgeline Trail

We never anticipated so many.

Gail and I hit Ridgeline Trail today outfitted with gear we had not hiked with there before: a spiral notepad and pen. In the days prior we had noticed an incredible profusion of spring wildflowers in bloom, observing ones newly-opened almost daily. Finally, yesterday, we mused that we should bring paper and pen sometime soon and record how many we see. “There must be twenty-five or thirty,” one of us said. So today we gave ourselves extra time for our regular three-mile loop, and started recording from the moment we left the trailhead. Astonishingly, we had not even gotten off the feeder path before we had already surpassed our imagined number.

Prairie Smoke, one of our favorites

It was quite stunning, a magnificent diversity. In that small distance we counted eighty-four different blooming wildflowers! Eighty-four! And this was a conservative count, especially because we had not the patience this time around to differentiate all the varieties of vetches (at least four) and the plethora of penstemons (at least six); no doubt there were more of these ubiquitous species. Additionally, this count included only those plants near the trail, and only those in bloom – it omitted those more than several yards off the path, as well as tiny groundcovers we may not have seen and those in leaf or bud but not bloom. All told, there would have been far more.

Thirty of the eighty-four blooming species were

shades of yellow, with nineteen purple and

eighteen white; those remaining were various

hues of pink, orange, blue and coral…

Hummingbird moth sipping Thistle

Gail is the wildflower expert between us. (I’m more the tree, rock and sky guy.) She has an uncanny knack for name recall of plants she even rarely sees. “Don’t you remember when we saw this one once several years ago at blobbity-wherezit?” So she ends up having to school me each year even in some common ones I always seem to need to relearn. Even still, many of the names escaped us both (an effort for another day), so those we could not ID we recorded by color, character and leaf shape, so as not to duplicate. Some were so odd as to almost defy description – fern-like, butterfly-shaped, spidery, fringed-clusters,

Paintbrush, Penstemon and Pikes Peak

asparagus-leaved. And yet others were so common-looking or plain-seeming that we have very likely overlooked them typically – dandelion-like, dandelion-like B, and dandelion-like C. Thirty of the eighty-four blooming species were shades of yellow, interestingly, with nineteen purple and eighteen white; those remaining were various tints of pink, orange, blue and coral. Many species there were that have also been cultivated: wild roses, geraniums, orchids, yarrows, asters, alyssums, clovers, forget-me-nots, daisies, alfalfas, lupines, sunflowers, spiderwort, potentillas, yuccas, sweet peas, larkspurs, wallflowers, paintbrushes, flaxes and phloxes. There were even wild onions, plums, currants and cherries. But those undomesticated, at least to our knowledge, were also well-represented: arnicas, mallows, other worts, harebells, fairy trumpets, dogbanes, thistles, prairie smoke, holly, knapweeds, prickly poppy, banner flower, cacti, and who-knows-what-else. Yet there they all were, every one of them in their created glory.

Mariposa Lily, another favorite

Hmmm… Glory... That’s what it was, inestimable beauty, even regal, exceeding the splendor of a king.

Jesus said, “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. If God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you, you of so little faith?” (Matthew 6:28-30)

Oh, the depth of the riches… of God! How… unfathomable are His ways!  (Romans 11:33)

The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God stands forever. (Isaiah 40:7)

~~ RGM, from an early journal entry,

Adapted for my blog May 22, 2016

POTM...*: A Little Lake with a Big View

(*Photo of the Month)

A week or two ago we posted a new cover photo on our Facebook page, and since several have asked about its location, I thought I might highlight it as this month’s POTM on my blog. I took it on a beautiful June day a couple years back. Before I share its whereabouts, though, I wonder if any of my Colorado friends recognize it… One big clue: RMNP.

By default, Facebook always crops photos people use as their cover so that they will fit their masthead. What that has done to my FB photo is make it seem panoramic, which also ends up emphasizing its mirror image. One friend even told me she looked at it upside down to see if she could tell the difference of which side was up! But as you can see from the complete snapshot above, the broader view opens up the mirror effect somewhat. Click the photo for a larger image.

There is something quite lovely about mirror images in water. Gail and I have loved finding locations for them, on certain trips getting up in predawn hours just to be able to catch them at sunrise over still surfaces, even over beaver ponds. Interestingly, reflection sometimes changes a landscape’s color, or the very image itself, by reflecting wavelengths differently than the way our eyes see them. For example, we have photos that reflect clouds in water very differently than how we see them directly with our eyes, reflecting some we cannot even see! This photo is pretty accurate – the differences you see in the lake’s foreground are actually underwater rocks.

OK, this one’s location? It didn’t even require a hike, one of those amazing photos that can almost be taken from a car window (though we didn’t)! Rocky Mountain National Park has four entry stations on its east side that are staffed by rangers at an entry booth.  The southernmost of these is the Wild Basin entrance off Highway 7, north of Allenspark, which leads to some of our favorite places to hike. Just inside the kiosk you will find this beautiful little tarn, Copeland Lake, adjacent to Copeland Moraine to its north (at right in the photo); I believe the mountain the lake reflects is Copeland Mountain. (If someone knows differently, correct me if I am wrong!)

Copeland Mountain is one of many ‘thirteeners’ in Rocky, and one of, believe it or not, over 600 in Colorado. A thirteener, for you lowlanders, is a mountain 13,000 feet or higher. Copeland is 13,167 feet, advancing well above treeline, which is about 11,500 feet at this latitude. But the crazy thing about Colorado is that it contains 54 of our nation’s 87 fourteeners, or 62%, and 637 of its 884 thirteeners, a whopping 72%! Alaska, of course, has the nation’s highest peaks, in fact the nation’s eleven highest, topping out at McKinley/Denali’s 20,328. California has the highest in the Lower 48, Mt. Whitney in the Sierras at 14,505. But it’s just the raw number of high peaks here that makes the place so amazing, and it is no wonder that one of the state’s nicknames is “The Highest State.” It has by far the highest average statewide elevation (about 6800 feet), as well as the highest low point (3,317 feet). So, contrary to what you might first think, the nickname has nothing to do with the legalization of a certain green herb here last year, nor of the fact that one of our official state songs is Rocky Mountain High by John Denver!

Many people here make it a goal to climb all the fourteeners, and some even all the thirteeners! We have only climbed one of these so far, Mt. Bierstadt at 14,065 feet, the photography of which I featured in last week’s blog.

Anyway, one of the things we love about this place is Rocky Mountain National Park, a must see if you visit Colorado. It never ceases to inspire us. Come, and we’ll be glad to take you there!

I lift my eyes to the mountains – where does my help come from? My help comes from the Lord, maker of heaven and earth. (Psalm 121:1-2)

~~RGM, May 12, 2013

P.S. And in the "Useless Piece of Information" category, did you know that of the 637 thirteeners in Colorado, five of them are named Grizzly Peak? Not only does that show an embarrassing lack of creativity among namers, but there aren't even any grizzlies IN Colorado...