STORY AND PHOTOS BY KAREN BOSSICK
Kristin Fletcher pulled a sprig of silvery gray foliage off mountain big sage, examining its wedge-shaped leaves with its three teeth. Then she turned to a group of two dozen people assembled on Dollar Mountain and tried to make them see this plant, which is often overlooked though everywhere in the Idaho landscape, with new eyes.
It’s hard to believe, she said, but the sagebrush is a member of the sunflower family with tiny pale ray-like yellow flowers. Three hundred species of animals and birds use it for food and shelter and 30 species utterly depend on it, including sage grouse, which nest underneath it.
Settlers used it as an indicator of good mineral soil when deciding where to plant their crops. And it’s highly nutritious—more nutritious than alfalfa but not as readily used because its pungent oils make it unpalatable. Its seeds are so microscopic that you can put 25 on a pinhead.
“Sagebrush is opportunistic,” Fletcher added. “In spring it grows spring leaves, and it drops these leaves as it dries out, much like leaves that fall in fall. It has hairs that also prevent it from drying out. And, if you rub the hairs off, the leaf looks green.”
Fletcher, the education director at the Sawtooth Botanical Garden, was leading one in a series of Wildflower Walks at the ski hill overlooking Sun Valley, along with local naturalists Jeanne Cassell and Lisa Horton and John Shelly, retied U.S. Forest Service plant specialist and president of the Idaho Native Plant Society.
The free walks offered periodically during the summer are designed to help people become acquainted with the plants they encounter on hikes or drives through the Wood River Valley and beyond.
Deb Brunelle was among a few people who ventured from Twin Falls and Rupert to this particular walk, along with walkers from Idaho Falls and Seattle.
“I thought I’d have an adventure!” she said.
The landscape of wildflowers in the Sun Valley area is ever changing from week to week, even from one place to another in any given week.
On this particular day Dollar Mountain was bursting with a variety of yellow flower, including the perennial sunflower with its linear leaves. Like all sunflowers, it tends to turn its face towards the sun.
“Oh it’s so beautiful,” Brunelle said, snapping a picture of it with Sun Valley’s Bald Mountain ski resort in the background.
Yellow mountain dandelions sprinkled the landscape. They’re prized by hikers unlike their counterparts on people’s lawns.
“What is a weed?” asked Cassell. “A weed is something that grows where you don’t want it.”
Lisa Horton pointed to yellow salsify or goatsbeard, a pale yellow flower with spiky looking leaves surrounding the head.
“This is a morning flower that closes up in evening,” she said. “Its common name is Jack Go to Bed at Noon.”
Cassell pointed her hiking stick at an arrowleaf balsamroot, a very common flower with large yellow rayed flowers and leaves that are shaped like an arrow that grow in clumps on south-facing hillsides.
It’s often confused with the yellow wyethia, which also has large showy flowers but is a little deeper yellow and darker green shiny sword-like leaves. Named for fur trader and explorer Nathaniel Wyeth, it prefers wetter places. And its leaves clasp at the stem at ground level, leaving it without the appearance of a stem, noted Horton.
It’s impossible to escape the antelope bitterbrush, which sports tiny yellow flowers and an overpowering sweet smell in late spring and early summer.
You can tell why it’s called bitterbrush, if you put a mature leaf on your tongue, said John Shelley.
The group turned their attention to several flowers with almost-ball like heads that range in color from white to red. The buckwheat, as they are called, is highly prized by domestic sheep.
There are about 50 varieties in the Rocky Mountains, which makes individual varieties difficult to identify, said Fletcher. Some Indian tribes prized them so much for their medicinal properties, said Horton, that a small portion was worth a horse.
“And I just learned that they are distantly related to the buckwheat in pancakes,” Fletcher said.
Shelley pointed out a pink clustered flower named collomia, also known as a mountain trumpet, and rubbed it with his hands.
“You can clean your hands with this as rubbing it produces a little bit of soap,” he said.
Another plant that some believe is worth rubbing is the common yarrow, which consists of white flowers made up of several tiny white flowers. Many people have rubbed its leaves on cuts believing them to have antiseptic and anticoagulant qualities.
“Its generic name ‘Achillea’ came from the belief that Achilles used the yarrow to dress wound during the Trojan War,” said Fletcher.
Lupine with its stalk-like flowers and seven-fingered palmate leaves is named after “lupus,” or wolf, because people used to think the plant robbed the soil of nutrients, said Cassell. In truth, it enhances the soil, providing it with valuable nitrogen.
While among one of the favorite flowers in the valley because of its showy looks, lupine can poison horses that eat it.
“All plants are edible but some only once,” said Fletcher.
WANT TO TAKE A WILDFLOWER HIKE?
June 27: Jeanne Cassell will lead a hike examining wildflowers of the Wood River Valley. 9:30 a.m.
July 14: Wildflower enthusiasts will head to 4th of July Lake, a mostly flat trek of about a mile. 8:30 a.m.
Aug. 11: Botanist Lisa Horton will lead a trip through the meadows of Apollo Creek—a colorful trek. 8:30 a.m.
Sept. 15: John Shelly will take participants to “one heck of a big tree.” 8:30 a.m.
Oct. 6: Jim Rineholt, retired Forest Service forester, will introduce walkers to autumn color. 8:30 a.m.
The walks are free. For information, contact Kristin Fletcher, education director at Sawtooth Botanical Garden at Kristin@sbgarden.org or 208-726-9358.