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End-of-July flowers in the Absaroka-Beartooth
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Mount Maurice is the north-easternmost summit in the Beartooth Mountains. On June 6, 2019, we carried our son up it, and for the first time in 3 1/2 months on earth, he was on top of a mountain.
There was nothing deliberate about our choice of location. The top was covered in trees. I had to maneuver quite a bit to get this view along the Beartooth Front, looking southeast.
Our reason for being in the area, our real destination, was Meeteetse Spires– the limestone crags we were looking straight down on from Maurice, as seen above. It’s an Area of Critical Environmental Concern– one of a couple dozen in Montana.
Meeteetse Spires was brought into the public domain in 2009 by the Conservation Fund in order to protect animal habitat and rare plants. While we were there, I couldn’t find the endemic to the area, Shoshonea pulvinata (known from about ten sites nearby and nowhere else in the world), but I did find a couple flowers that were new to me. Also, one of my all-time favorites: Townsendia condensata.
The forest varied. Some beautiful cottonwood stands in the canyon bottom; doug fir and limber pine on arid, south-facing slopes; and some serious lodgepole tinder boxes.
We were able to make it back in the area last June, walking a big loop out of Line Creek one day.
This year, somebody started a fire in there on June 15th, and it got away from them. In the ensuing weeks it consumed everything from plains to alpine and is now about 30,000 acres. A July 10th press release mentions, “A new plume has popped up on the summit of Mount Maurice this afternoon…”
It is small consolation that the burn slowed when it encountered this other huge recent burn in the forks of Line Creek. Or that it was stopped just short of the trophy homes on Freedom Trail.
more places with baby
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“The hermit contemplates nature, uses what he needs of it, but cherishes no notions to subdue it. …The hermit agrees to be henceforth weightless in the workings of the world, no longer counting as anything in the chain of causality. His thoughts will not influence anyone, or affect the course of events. His actions signify nothing. How light that thought is! And how clearly it foretells the final release: we are never so alive as when we are dead to the world!” –Sylvain Tesson
the tea cannery 