Iron Mountain

If you live or travel to the high mountains in early summer, you already know what a magical time it is as the wildflowers burst into full bloom. This is their chance to propagate their species, and they make the most of it. Much of the year, they are buried under snow. Even in early July, a few snow banks linger in shady spots.

Summer is the wildflower's season. Intense colors, lovely shapes, each aimed at enticing to themselves the insects that will spread their pollen and make sure that next year more of their type will still be there. Side by side, their diversity is amazing.


July 3rd on Iron Mountain in the Cascades, Farm Boss and I hiked the trails, photographed the flowers, and enjoyed the vistas with Parapluie and her husband, who I have nicknamed Fisherman here for the obvious reason. They had been there many times before and talked of its beauty in early summer, but I really hadn't expected it to be as wonderful as it was.

Iron Mountain and Cone Peak are noted for having 300 types of flowers. I can't begin to name the ones I saw, well maybe a couple, but for me it's not about names but the glorious feeling you get when at that elevation, hiking along a trail, turning a corner and there spread before you is a rainbow of colors, planted by nature.

If you go clear to the top of Iron Mountain (I didn't), it rises over a thousand feet from the trailhead. It does it with a series of switchbacks; so nothing requires being a mountain climber. I did see a lot of walking sticks and had been reminded by Parapluie to bring ours because the trail did have a few steep spots and a lot of places with loose rock.

Walking at an elevation of nearly 5000 feet, when you live at under 300, means frequent breaks, but I'd have taken those anyway to get the photographs but also to let it all soak in.

If I had gone clear to the top, I'd have had views of several snow capped mountains-- dormant (for now) volcanoes; but I was there for the mountain wildflowers, and to see a hole in the wall (which took going quite a ways up), and did get, as a bonus, a photo of Mt. Jefferson.

After I got home and began to work with the flower pictures, the thing that most impressed me was how they are so brilliantly colored, wondrously shaped, with each doing what is required to draw to them the insects they need. What other reason could there be for those tiny hairs on this white one?

The butterflies visiting the flowers will often match their colors. It is all very symbiotic. To say it was a treat is to barely express what I felt when up there.

At one point a butterfly was drawn to Farm Boss and then Parapluie, landing on their clothing. We weren't sure why it picked them. A sign? Serendipity? The fact that they both have Type O blood that also draws mosquitoes?

In the photograph, if you enlarge it, you will see the butterfly's battered wings which I am guessing means it had flown a long way to get to this place. That fact alone seems one of those little miracles of life. How could something so tiny fly potentially thousands of miles? How does it know where to go? How beaten up can its wings be before it can't fly again?


Seeing butterflies in the high mountains is one of those things that goes beyond words, paintings or photographs. You just have to be there once to know what I mean. Two years ago we were in Montana and saw them flitting all around a small meadow in the Bitterroot Mountains. Many years earlier we were in the high Cascades and saw hundreds of Monarchs in a small, canyon. Each is a memory that I have stored to never let it be forgotten.

Each of the rock gardens seemed to be planted. No gardener could do a better job of mixing the colors and putting together combinations that resonated joy. Sure, plants can't feel joy. Tell me you know that for sure!

(Tomorrow will be more photographs, and for fans of mountain wildflowers, I will add a link to even more from the recent hike. To fully appreciate them, I think it takes seeing them in mass. If you visit my wildflower site, doing a slide show maybe, giving the individual blossoms time to really sink in, you will get some of the feeling of being up there from the early morning 'til almost noon as the light changed and then walking a little higher for different flowers or those which only grew under the shade of the big trees. Magic is all I can say.)