wildflower season

The last day of the four day Wasatch Wildflower Festival (held annually at the four Cottonwood Canyons ski resorts) was at Alta on Sunday ... so I thought that might be a good day to go to Snowbird to check out the wildflowers.  While H did a road ride, took Milton for a good walk and then basically cleaned the whole house, I got up at 5 a.m., puttered around until the sun came up and then pulled into the main Snowbird lot at 6:30.  It was 59F - a special treat as it was forecasted to get up for 104F in the valley later in the day - and a gorgeous morning.

Paintbrush and horsemint

I went up the Peruvian Gulch trail to the Cirque trail (40 minutes), walked along the ridge between Peruvian Gulch and Gad Valley (30 minutes) , and then dragged myself up the final slog to Hidden Peak (10 minutes but it felt much, much longer).  I pretty much had the place to myself: there was one couple ahead of me who I finally passed along the ridge - I would have passed them sooner, I think, except I kept stopping to take flower photos - and there was one trailrunner descending the ridge as I went up.  The summit was a ghost town (although the lower level bathrooms were open).

Sedge (with its cute square stems)

I descended via the Peruvian Gulch road, then connected with the trail.  It was slow-going on the way down (took me an hour and a half) as it is quite steep and both the road and the trail are really loose in spots.  People had started getting out on the trails by then: I encountered one MTBer (on his way to ride the Big Mountain trail and super-bummed that he had to ride to get to it) and 41 hikers on their ways up.

Columbine, paintbrush and lupine

In my completely inexpert opinion, peak wildflower season is about a week away.  Lots of flowers weren't fully in bloom yet, like the anemones, green gentian, monkeyflowers and coneflowers, and I didn't see any fireweed or scarlet gilia at all.  Still, there's lots going off right now - in addition to all I've posted here, there were a bunch that I didn't get photos of (bluebells, Richardson's geraniums, common yarrow, Western wallflowers and western coneflowers, to name just the ones I recognized).

Elephanthead - so cute and tiny!

Sulphur buckwheat - amazing acid yellow color

Wasatch penstemon

Paintbrush and scorpionweed (?)

Lupine (smaller than Eastern counterpart)

Couldn't identify this one, but that color!!

Green gentian close-up

False forgetmenots and paintbrush

Field o' sunflowers

The only blooming Lewis's monkeyflower I saw