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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Here’s one of my favorite true alpine plants from the North Cascades. It’s called Moss Campion, Silene acaulis, and you’ll only find it at high elevations in the mountains. Here it’s growing among the rocks on the shoulder of Mount Larrabee with one of the summits of The Pleides in the background.

Moss Campion grows as a ground-hugging little bun, often appearing as a soft mound among the rocks. Its roots seek out cracks in the rocks, penetrating deep to find pockets of lingering moisture and nutrients. It blooms soon after the snow melts and once the flowers fade all you’ll see is a pale green lump. But when it’s in full bloom it can be spectacular.

Sometimes I’ve seen it high on a cliff, the bright pink flowers calling attention to it and presumably attracting the bees that pollinate the blossoms. In those instances it is so far out of reach as to be impossible to photograph. Even if I were to rappel down to it how would I set up my tripod while dangling in space?

I found this clump, as well as several others that had finished blooming, on a day hike of the High Pass trail Saturday. The weather had cooled off a bit and the bugs weren’t too bad. Starting at Twin Lakes the trail rises a little, then descends a couple hundred feet through moist flower-filled meadows before contouring around the hill and ascending a series of switchbacks to Low Pass. Then it continues climbing to High Pass and a well-worn boot track gains another 500 or so feet to the shoulder of Mount Larrabee. I only met a couple of other people on the trail, and they were on their way back to the lakes from bear hunting. They said it was the first day of bear season but they didn’t see any bears.
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