Day 96: Glacier lilies!

Yup - you read that right :-) It's still June and we've seen our first glacier lilies of the year. And I hope that they won't be the last :-) Much like my search for white fawn lilies, I can get a little excited about finding glacier lilies. It's become a bit of a standing joke among our hiking friends, dating back to 2007 when we saw our first glacier lilies along the trail to Mt Frosty.

In practice I get excited about seeing a whole range of flowers when they first bloom: western anemone, alpine marsh marigold, paintbrush, bleeding heart, queen's cup, arnica, oregon grape, bunchberry, coralroot, trillium, columbine, stonecrop, gentian, monkeyflower... You get the picture :-) In fact, one of the amazing discoveries of today's hike was the number of trillium blooming on the upper reaches of the trail. That was a surprise, as I regard them as low-level spring flowers. Even more amazing was that they were much smaller than the lower-elevation versions, often barely 8 inches high, and with leaves only a couple of inches long (compared with 6-8 inch leaves in the valley bottom). And then there were the views... All in all a pretty good day out.

Glacier lilies