Crested Butte early summer days, the snow retreats up the mountains until the last of it hides from the sun among the north facing peaks and their shading boulders. The town has its flavor, locals and visitors enjoying food, beer, nice places to say and the chance to go outdoors. But we found the best thing to do by far in the summer is to find one of the many meadows near town and marvel at the amazing stands of wildflowers. I have never seen flowers like these, especially Colorado columbine and exuberant, tall and extreme.
Why the best wildflowers in the state grow here may have something to do with the massive snowfalls that hit the West Elk Mountains most winters and fill the streams and volcanic soils with clear water. The West Elks are a somewhat discrete volcanic mountain range of mountains north of the massive San Juan range and just east of the Uncompahgre Plateau that rises along the Colorado, Utah border. West of these peaks the Utah deserts contort away to the west with their singular mountain ranges rising above the Colorado Plateau red-rocks and the more distant deserts to the west.
Maybe the Pacific storms hit these mountains with more moisture because of the shape of the land to the west, or maybe the surrounding mountains channel and concentrate the storms onto these mountains. Skiers will tell you these mountains hold some of the best snow in Colorado.
The flower that catches everyone’s eye is the Colorado columbine that grows well above the knee by the tens of thousands in these meadows. These are the blue and white columbine and sometimes they are just white. Other flowers grow around it but the Columbine has a mythical presence that seems to dominate the scene, like an exceptional musician stands out from his accompanists.
Colorado names Colorado columbine their state flower but it has cousins in nearby places. In New Mexico we find red and yellow columbine a few inches tall along the alpine trails in the northern mountains. Up higher we find the blue and white Colorado columbine near the peaks, on the swept shoulders of the high mountains. The blue and white are large and showy while the red and yellow columbine hide among other plants near the forest floor.
Columbine are members of the buttercup family (Ranunculaceae) which has members all over north America. Plant families are groups of plants that share particular details of their flowers, the key feature for classifying flowering plants. (Flowers are reproductive organs.) Though their leaves may look the same as plants from other families, it is the flowers that botanists zone in on to determine relationships.
Other members of the buttercup family are the monk’s hood, commonly seen in the mountains in wet soils, the Pasque flower, anemones (not to be confused with the intertidal creatures), buttercups and larkspur, and the Clematis, that light lavender flower that grows on a vine clinging to trees and cliffs. There are several species of columbine. The red and yellow found in the New Mexico middle high elevations is formosa while the blue and white is coerulae.
Seeing the columbine in the woods makes me think about the long evolution of flowering plants. Why are these plants like they are compared to sunflowers or redwood trees? We know that all plants began as slime, as almost formless algae at the edge of lakes 500 million years ago. Gradually some algae stiffened and became seaweeds and to make a very long story short, algae evolved into land plants like mosses, ferns and horsetails that reproduce with spores – tiny balls that root like seeds. Then plants evolved cellulose, wood, that allows them to grow 350 feet tall at times. About 320 million years ago gymnosperms evolved from other tropical life forms. Gymnosperms are plants like the evergreen trees, pines, spruces etc. Plants that reproduce with flower branched off from gymnosperms 270 million years ago. Grasses and flowers of all kinds – these are flowering plants and they dominate the modern world.
Those flowering plants differentiated into vast numbers of plant families and species that we know today over hundreds of millions of years. Look into the columbine flower and think about it persisting over tens of millions of years, summer after winter over spans of time.
Walking through the columbine near Crested Butte my mind reels through the vast eons of time and the slow evolution of the plants we see as incredibly beautiful. Our life is possible because of the peculiar twists of plant evolution long before humans existed. Were it not for grasses, we wouldn’t be here for example. A simple twist of fate.
Those cow free meadows are havens for plants to express themselves and for us to sleep in the grass or walk in bliss. It is critical that there be places for plants to live without being grazed and trampled by domestic livestock or by the tires of vehicles so they can continue to express themselves and evolve into the future, beyond the time of humans. They need healthy bee populations to fertilize their flowers and make seeds.
Who knows how columbine will deal with climate change over the next centuries. Who knows if they will survive the unknown changes to come. I hope they are strong and will continue to grow in meadows long after humans and their cows have faded away.
Nice piece, Tom. Love the columbines!