Wretched excess

If you're getting tired of wildflower photos, I may be able to promise that I've just about reached the end.

Last weekend my hiking partner, Glenn, and I made a foray out to Timp Point, a trailhead on the Rainbow Rim Trail. He'd never been out there and I wasn't going to recommend Parasnotowitz to anyone, so we went to Timp. We drove the one highway out of the park to the short Forest Service road on the upper right of this map. Then we made a series of rights and lefts, or maybe it was the other way around, to get to Timp on the lower left. We were the only ones parked out there but as the day went on we met several bikers. This is maybe the only trail around that's open to bicyclists.

Once again, I found a fairly unremarkable trail. It goes far inland through the forest and, with the exception of a few late bloomers, there wasn't much to see. No reptiles this trip.

Here's another view of a cranesbill geranium, petal-less, but with a bud on the next stem over. I'm captivated by the colors.

This is a penstemon. I made a mistake in calling a similar flower a penstemon a while back. I think it was a foxglove, but it's much different from foxgloves I've seen in the wild in western Washington. The description I'd seen for the penstemon said one of the five stamens was bearded, and now I've finally found a flower to fit the description.

Thistles are hangers-on but the earlier blooms are now going to seed. One look at this seed head explains more than anything how easily they propagate.

At the North Timp trailhead, the turn-around point of our hike, we met a bicyclist from Virginia, who lives not far from where I lived. He'd been biking all over the South Rim from Flagstaff to Sedona, and  had made his way around to the North Rim. He'd ridden down from Jacob Lake without cookies!, spent the night at one of the other points, and was on his way into the park. These bicyclists make me feel so lazy, logging 50 miles or so a day. Just the thought of it makes me ache all over.

The view here is lovely. Soak it in 'cause there isn't another.

We hung around for a while before heading back. Glenn is a rock hound with a lapidary setup in his garage, so on our way over he looked for rocks while I looked for flowers. According to Glenn, collectors can take 15 pounds of smaller stones and one rock, meaning something bigger, on Forest Service or BLM land. He'd picked up three or four small ones but at North Timp found his rock, managed to break off part of it, but was still left with a bowling-ball size chunk that he put in his backpack to carry back to the truck. I told him we could drive around to pick it up but he carried it. His pack must have weighed 50 pounds.

It's amazing what you see in one direction that you didn't see going the other way. Heading back to the truck, I found this strange plant, one I've never seen before and sure hadn't seen it earlier. It has a waxy look and feel to it.

Here's a different view of the same plant. The yellow-green disc is about an inch across. I don't know what stage of bloom it's in but I think the drooping parts are spent flowers.

There were a couple of feathers lying along the trail. This is probably from a flicker, a member of the woodpecker family, and is the underside; the top is all black.

When we got to our turn-around, Glenn asked if I'd seen the skeleton. What?! What kind of skeleton? He didn't know but it was something big. How in the world did I miss this, which he pointed out to me on our return trip? There are no elk here and it's much too big for a deer, so it could be a cow. There's open range between the park and Jacob Lake, (in fact, the bicyclist said on his way from Jacob Lake he rounded a curve and found a cow grazing on the side of the trail) so HH surmised this one could have wandered off from the herd. What surprises me is that scavengers didn't scatter these bones.

I've worked thistles to death, I know, but there's no way I can ignore their glow. You'd think they could light the night.

Almost every bee I saw on the thistles were this kind, and all of them bottom-up into the center of the flower. This one's a good pollinator; it's covered!

What a find! Who's ever heard of a polka-dot feather?

Luckily, yesterday I was on-site when the Bookmobile from Flagstaff appeared. I've seen the monthly schedule but have somehow missed it every time. I turned in my driver's license to the librarian/driver (who, interestingly, is about my age and got his library degree the same year I got mine, and got it at Wayne State University in Detroit, where I got my undergrad degree. It really is a small world.) I'm now a happy owner of a Flagstaff Public Library card. The more library cards, the better. He just happened to have a book on bird feathers - that's it, just feathers - and I found this one. It's from a woodpecker, either a downy or hairy; I couldn't tell the difference between the two birds from the photos.

Along the trail, a gigantic bee-like thing lifted off from a thistle and came at me. I warily stepped back and watched it lumber away. Later, I saw another one working so hard to get from flower to flower and was able to get a few shots off. This flower is a little on the small side, but it still shows the gigantitude of this critter, which may be a carpenter bee. Wikipedia says males don't sting and females will only if provoked. I wonder if walking into the bee's flight path counts as provocation.

So, to get off the subject of wildflowers after this, here are some of what I dredged from the archives to cap the season. I know the names of some, but not all. If you're sick of them, it's best to stop reading now.

Salsify. These are the showgirls of the floral lineup. They're three or four inches across in exuberant bloom.

This is salsify's seedhead. When I saw the first one, among what looked like buds, I thought this plant went from bud directly to seed. Later I saw that the salsify closes after bloom, then forms a seedhead "bud," and then opens to a three-inch puff of shimmer. They're really beautiful.

I found this on the Widforss trail some time ago, nearly at the far point of five miles in. I wanted to see it in bloom but wasn't willing to go back out there just for that. Later I saw milkweed in bloom along the highway and recognized that it was this plant. Here is another delicious color combination.

 A white lupine along the path I walk to work.

Out in The Basin lived this soft lavender lupine among its brilliant purple cousins.

Aster.

Skyrocket.

No idea what this is, but in looking at slide after slide of flowers in the park, I know enough to say with some uncertainty that this is a composite. Each little bubble in the center is a flower and each thing we call a petal is a ray flower. 

Pinedrops! I saw a slide in the collection I was working on and thought this was the same. It's a root parasite and doesn't come up every year. There was a small cluster on the Widforss, I think, and they were the only ones I saw anywhere. They're endangered in Michigan and threatened in Wisconsin, New York, and Vermont.

I found this along a path that leads to the Grand Canyon Lodge. It was only an inch or so off the ground but when I saw the purple I got closer. The camera revealed these delicate clusters.

A sego lily. I didn't see a lot of these and they weren't around for long.

Locust blossoms. They're the rose on the thorny shrubs that take over paths and wild country very quickly.

Here's another low-growing flower, name unknown.

Not a wildflower but a grass. It would be possible to study grasses all summer here. We noticed one day that in plain view of our house, we could see at least a dozen different kinds. This is one of the more unusual ones. When green, it's loosely closed but opens like this when it's going to seed.

Funny, but I just now noticed the bug on the petal. I took the photo because of the backlighting and never noticed the occupant. Observant, huh?

Last one here, but at least hundreds more on the hard drive. Wild roses had been in bloom in several places, but never where it was safe to stop along the road. We finally found one I could get to.

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Thought of the day:
Moderation is a fatal thing. Nothing exceeds like excess. - Oscar Wilde