I had a family portrait session reschedule from Sunday afternoon, so I took a look at the clouds to the east and decided to head up to Heather Meadows and Artist Point for some landscapes. I didn’t get out of town until after 2 pm, which was fine since I really wanted sunset at 7:10.

This is the season to pick wild blueberries and I ran into several people on the trail who had big containers of the tasty fruit. The photo here is of a Cascades Blueberry, which has the very appropriate Latin name of Vaccinium deliciosum. They’re indeed among the tastiest of our native blueberries (which some folks call huckleberries). This was a case of being able to eat my subject after finishing photographing it.

I picked and ate a goodly number of blueberries along the trail, savoring the sweet morsels. I didn’t take a container to bring any home, but if I had I certainly could have filled it without much difficulty.

My other favorite species is the Black Huckleberry, Vaccinium membranaceum. They grow on bigger shrubs and don’t produce as much fruit.

While the blueberries were nearly everywhere along the Bagley Lakes Trail, the botanical gem of the day was this little Alpine Wintergreen, Gaultheria humufusa. It’s one of two low-growing relatives of Salal that we have in the northwest.

This was the first time I’ve found Gaultheria humufusa, although I’ve looked for it over the past several years. Our native plant society had a field trip on the same trail a couple of weeks ago and the group reported having seen it and told me where they’d found it. There was just a small patch, not much more than a meter across, on the rocks just above the trail. Each leaf is only about 3/4 inch long and the berries were a little less than 1/4 inch across.

The Grapeferns (right) get their name because their spore-bearing structures resemble bunches of grapes. This little specimen is Lanceleaf Grapefern, Botrychium lanceolatum. It’s only about 3 inches tall and very easy to miss. I spied four plants just off the Bagley Lakes Trail. I probably would have missed them if it weren’t for another larger species of Botrychium that caught my eye within a foot of the trail.

Among fern aficionados the Grapeferns are among the sought-after species. They’re uncommon, more primitive than most other ferns, generally small, and rather interesting in the way they grow and produce spores. We have several species in the North Cascades, but I don’t come across them often and when I do it’s usually in the company of someone who knows more about them than I do. The Yellow Aster Butte trail is known to be home to several Botrychiums but you’d have to know where to look to find them.

What would a day at Heather Meadows and Artist Point be without photographing Mt. Shuksan? It’s probably the most-photographed mountain in the world. Did I need another variation? Likely not. Could I resist? Of course not.

This dusk photo was made with the iconic mountain reflected in the calm waters of a small tarn toward the end of the Artist Ridge trail, just below Huntoon Point. It’s a favorite vantage point, but a little harder to get to than the standard view from Picture Lake. I met a good many people heading back to their cars as I walked out the trail to the tarn.

I knew that sunset would be about 7:10 pm so I got in position in time for the sunset light on the mountain. I’d hoped that the clouds that lingered most of the afternoon would still be around the mountain at sunset, but they dissipated before the light got sweet. Oh well. I shot the sunset, and then waited around a while.

This is the last variation I made, at 7:38 pm. The sky was starting to darken, giving a nice glow to the glaciers below the summit. I often find that I like the after-sunset light even better than earlier in the evening. Sometime I’d like to do a family portrait here.

Late summer is getting toward the end of the wildflower season in the North Cascades. There’s not a whole lot still blooming after the long dry summer except the asters and goldenrod. Last weekend Natalie and I went up to Colonial Creek on Diablo Lake to camp for a couple of nights and have a little relaxed time together in the woods.

While poking around at the edge of Diablo Lake near the campground we found purple asters blooming. At first, they all looked the same. On closer examination we found there were three species. One of these was the Great Northern Aster pictured here.

Great Northern Aster, Canadanthus modestus (formerly known as Aster modestus), is unique among the purple asters with very glandular stems and involucral bracts. That last term, for the uninitiated, means the little leaf-like things at the base of the flower head. On this species, the bracts are fairly long, sharply pointed, curving outward, and purplish in color. That makes them pretty distinctive. The stem and involucre are both noticably sticky to the touch, an easy way to tell if a plant is glandular.

Great Northern Aster grows in moist places. We found it just a few feet back from the edge of Diablo Lake between the woods and the gravel beach. These photos were made at the moist edge of Thunder Lake, which is the pond between Hwy 20 and Thunder Knob just west of Colonial Creek.

I’d often wondered what the shore of Thunder Lake was like, but never had time to stop and hike the short distance down to it until this weekend. There’s no trail around the lake, which was a disappointment. I thought I could walk in the shallow water at lake’s edge, but my feet quickly sank ankle-deep in the muck and I decided that wasn’t a very good idea.

Besides the asters, we found foliage of marsh cinquefoil, yellow pond lily, a nice grass we couldn’t identify in Pojar & Mackinnon’s Plants of the Pacific Northwest Coast, and on a fallen Douglas-fir log extending out into the pond were numerous carniverous sundews. At the south end were some large rushes, but we didn’t get close enough to ID them. The only plant I photographed was the aster, which I hadn’t seen up close for several years.

After getting tired of trying to identify plants I decided the lake was warm enough for a swim, so I stripped off and dived in off the log. The water was a perfect temperature and I swam to the opposite side of the lake and back, returning refreshed and relatively clean for the drive home.

I guess it’s a sign of being a true plant nerd to take off on a day trip halfway across the state to look for one plant that may not even be in bloom.

There’s been a fair amount of chatter recently on the Native Plant Society of Oregon e-mail discussion list about sightings of Orobanche pinorum, pine broomrape. It’s one of the plants I missed finding in bloom while I was working on Wildflowers of the Pacific Northwest so I wanted to find and photograph it. But I didn’t feel like driving down to southern Oregon to the places where this uncommon parasite had been reported. I checked the WTU Herbarium online records and found it reported in Yakima and Klickitat Counties in Wasington. Then I queried the Washington Native Plant Society e-mail list and received a response saying it was just east of the Cascades near Leavenworth. The herbarium records said plants in bud in July and gone to seed in September. The third week of August seemed possible to find it in bloom.

Sunday Natalie and I hopped in the truck and zipped over Stevens Pass to Fish Lake, just up the road from Lake Wenatchee. We parked at the Cove resort and started poking around under every ocean spray (Holodiscus discolor) we could find. That’s the host plant for the misnamed pine broomrape. After about half an hour of searching I found the specimen in the photo. It was just off a small trail along the south side of the lake, about at the drip line of a small ocean spray. There were ponderosa pines towering overhead.

As you can see, we were about three weeks too late to catch it in bloom. It’s still an interesting plant, and now that I know at least one place where it grows I can go back earlier in the season another year.

Since we were already east of the mountains I thought it worthwhile to go looking for another uncommon plant I’d missed in a previous year.
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